In 1859 Charles Darwin’s timely insight was that, over geological lengths of time, all life on Earth descends from a singular shared ancestry. He suggested as well that the continuing process of descent is subject to the modifications of natural (happening in nature) selection influenced by reproductive fitness, as opposed to artificial breeding choices made by design. In his widely tested and accepted scientific model, any creature with traits better suited to successful reproduction randomly passes on traits that make for greater reproductive fitness, making for more creatures with those traits, and so on.
Many of Darwin's colleagues, friends, and relatives adopted his themes, interpreted his scientific conclusions in terms of more general and already popular evolutionary themes, and expanded the lot beyond the realm of science in several speculative directions which immediately provided reminders of the ways in which evolutionary ideas are problematic. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, created what became the much-lauded eugenics that made mass murder and sterilizations seem sensible to some. Herbert Spencer, a colleague who wrote about evolution before Darwin, and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin later adopted, decided that the principles of evolution applied just as well over much shorter periods of time to social systems. Thanks to Spencer the phrase “social Darwinism” has become a part of evolutionary mythology. The embrace of Spencer’s economic god reveals Evolution, Industry, Progress, and Profit in the same metaphorical bed in a way that undergirds the creation of the system and mythology of eternal Corporations.[i] A more compassionate interpreter of Darwin’s themes, Thomas Huxley, decided that Darwin's findings supported and justified atheistic materialism and advocated the replacement of existing institutional religions by making a religion of humanism. Each theorist used ideas associated with biological evolution to make progress toward their idea of an improved human race, all the while laying more groundwork for the future continually built by the industrial mind.
[i] The myth of corporate personhood is itself an extensive topic with its own literature but, at least legally, it’s origin is traceable to a Supreme Court decision. “Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution.” “Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. V. Pennsylvania - 125 U.S. 181 (1888).” Justia US Supreme Court Center, n.d. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/case.html. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. speaks with voice of Spencer’s god, making economic abstractions (corporations) in its own image: human-seeming, because they contain persons, but less humane in complete devotion to the growth of economic profit and also immortal ("without dissolution").