Traditionally, the notion of evolution is closely identified with Charles Darwin's theories about how living beings have changed during the millions of years in which they have populated the earth. In other contexts it has been associated rather vaguely with progress, on the assumption that it refers simply to the changes experienced by a given society, with each phase in human history always being better than what had gone before. Moreover, the belief that some societies are more evolved than others has created the situation whereby the theory of evolution has been also closely related to racism and its perverse consequences. Herbert Spencer, in particular, has been strongly criticised for his supposed social model – so-called Social Darwinism – because he compared the changes in living organisms from conception until death with those of society as a whole, with the idea that everything in the universe, including humanity, is inexorably advancing from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. Moreover, he has been blamed for his supposed justification of the horrible crimes and atrocities committed by dictatorial regimes throughout the world in the name of racial superiority. This idea has created a smokescreen obscuring Spencer's philosophy, resulting in his works, or, to be more precise, the real meaning of his ideas being almost forgotten. Spencer was able to join together scientific knowledge and philosophy in order to explain the world in time and space. For Spencer, evolution was the universal law through which he was able to explain the world as a unified entity in which living beings and inert things harmonically relate to each other, always advancing towards a superior stage. Thus, his understanding and interpretation of Victorian society and the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution gave philosophical support to one of the most important theories in the history of humanity, which, ultimately, threw light upon the origins of life, questioning, however indirectly, any divine intervention: in other words, Darwin's theory on the origins of the species. Nearly two centuries since its emergence, this theory still provokes the most varied debates, the expenditure of vast sums of money, and the attention of some of the brightest intellects in the hope of discovering more and more proof of its veracity or falsity.