the march of progress, relics of the Paleolithic still lingering on into the present.” Classical social evolutionism is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings of Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer (coiner of the phrase "survival of the fittest"). In many ways, Spencer's theory of "cosmic evolution" has much more in common with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Auguste Comte than with contemporary works of Charles Darwin. Spencer also developed and published his theories several years earlier than Darwin. In regard to social institutions, however, there is a good case that Spencer's writings might be classified as social evolutionism. Although he wrote that societies over time progressedand that progress was accomplished through competitionhe stressed that the individual rather than the collectivity is the unit of analysis that evolves; that, in other words, evolution takes place through natural selection and that it affects social as well as biological phenomenon. Nonetheless, the publication of Darwin's works proved a boon to the proponents of sociocultural evolution, who saw the ideas of biological evolution as an attractive explanation for many questions about the development of society. Both Spencer and Comte view society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from flexibility to organisation. They agree that the process of societal growth can be divided into certain stages, have their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress: each newer, more-evolved society is "better". Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying the theory of sociocultural evolutionism. However, Spencer's theories were more complex than just a romp up the great chain of being. Spencer based his arguments on an analogy between the evolution of societies and the ontogeny of an animal. Accordingly, he searched for “general principles of development and structure” or “fundamental principles of organization”, rather than being content simply ascribing progress between social stages to the direct intervention of some beneficent deity. Moreover, he accepted that these conditions are “far less specific, far more modifiable, far more dependent on conditions that are variable”: in short, that they are a messy biological process. Though Spencer's theories transcended the label of ‘stagism’ and appreciate biological complexity, they still accepted a strongly fixed direction and morality to natural development. For Spencer, interference with the natural process of evolution was dangerous and had to