Kauffman, Bill. "Darwin in the New World." WALL STREET JOURNAL January 9, 2009.

Werth, Barry. Banquet at Delmonico's. New York: Random House, 2008. Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British philosopher, is remembered today as the forbidding -- almost forbidden -- father of "Social Darwinism," a school of thought declaring that the fittest prosper in a free marketplace and the human race is gradually improved because only the strong survive. In Barry Werth's satisfying "Banquet at Delmonico's," Spencer is also a querulous 62-year-old celibate whose 1882 American tour culminates in a feast to which are invited the "mostly Republican men of science, religion, business, and government" who shared and spread the Spencerian creed. Applying Darwinian insights about evolution to political, economic and social life -- though he did not himself use the term "Social Darwinism" -- Spencer concluded that vigorous competition and unfettered capitalism conduced to the betterment of society. He predicted that the American, raised in liberty, would evolve into "a finer type of man than has hitherto existed," dazzling the world with "the highest form of government" and "a civilization grander than any the world has known." Somehow I don't think he had Rod Blagojevich and Justin Timberlake in mind. Though as Henry Adams commented at the time: "The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin." . . . Read the rest here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146367064466617.html.