1 Published in: The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, 5 volumes, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Editor), Chang Kyung-Sup (Editor), Cynthia F. Epstein (Editor), Peter Kivisto (Editor), J. Michael Ryan (Editor), William Outhwaite (Editor), Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Darwinism Arran Gare, Swinburne University, agare@swin.edu.au Abstract Darwin’s theory was an explanation of evolution with social, ethical and political implications. To portray Darwinism as respectable objective science and social Darwinism as a pernicious political doctrine, only illicitly based on Darwinism is wrong; Darwinism is social Darwinism. The influence of this doctrine has been pervasive, and because of this, beset with controversy. This entry is simultaneously a history of the development of Darwinism, of controversies over its validity, and of efforts to free social theory from distortions of Darwin’s predictive evolutionary theory. Darwin defended competition for survival of races and individuals, and valorized ‘the winners’. However, Darwinists have sanitized his ideas, and disguised the imposition of ‘survivalist’ norms and values onto scientific and social theories. However, freed from such historical distortions, important debates are revealed. It is shown how Darwinism and social Darwinism have been superseded by post-Darwinist evolutionary theory, integrating Darwin’s core insights into more complex theories. These imply a very different view of life, humanity and society, with very different social, ethical and political implications. Main Text At the core of Darwinism is the claim put forward in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) that evolution can be understood as the effect of inheritance of characteristics, with some random variation between progeny, and differential survival rates among these variations, whatever these might be. It is usually connected to the notion that evolutionary progress is the outcome of the ‘survival of the fittest’. The origin of these ideas lie in Darwin’s work, but Darwinism should not be identified with this. The notion that progress occurs through the survival of the fittest was initially put forward by social philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), before being embraced by Darwin himself. Indeed, Darwin (1809-1882) struggled to complete his theory and it was later theorists who produced the definitive version of what would come to be known as Darwinism. Darwinism is really a synthesis of ideas, some of which were inspired by Darwin, others, such as mutation theory and Mendel’s theory of genetics, were developed independently of it. At the end of the nineteenth century mutationism was seen as having superseded Darwinism, but this view was subsequently rejected and mutationism was absorbed into Darwinism. The resultant synthetic ‘theory of evolution’ emerged between 1936 and 1949