"I believe the power to make money is a gift of God . . . to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow men according to the dictate of my conscience."

- John D. Rockefeller

As this statement clearly demonstrates, the people called the captains of industry felt that their success in the acquiring of money was due to the hand of God being on their shoulders and that their own morals would dictate to what good use that money would go to their fellow man. This was the beginning of a philosophy first coined by Charles Darwin, in a purely biological form, called The Theory of Natural Selection or Darwinism, later to be used by Herbert Spencer in a more social form for human applications in society, hence the name Social Darwinism. Industrialists who had gone from being captains of industry to Robber Barons wanted a philosophy to justify their means of acquiring wealth. Social Darwinism was one such philosophy. These Robber Barons used Social Darwinism as a justification and, even worse, as a moral to sanction their own actions, not considering that their own actions could be wrong. As time progressed, a change had come to the industrialists and their philosophy. Just as Social Darwinism changed, so did industrialists. They changed in reflection, from acquiring the means to support their fellow man, to acquiring the means to support themselves at the expense of their fellow man. Such was the influence of Social Darwinism on the Robber Barons and their methods in the late nineteenth century America. To see what influences Social Darwinism had and how its fundamentals could only lead to such influences, one must take a look at Social Darwinism's basic outlining premises (Angeles 63).

To begin with, Social Darwinism's infancy, in its biological form, was The Theory of Natural Selection, and its father was Charles Robert Darwin. Born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1809, educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, and died in 1882, Charles Darwin developed the biological theory of natural selection (Angeles 63). This theory explains that natural selection is the process that brings about the survival of the strong and adaptable, and apparently, the destruction or devitalization of the weak and less adaptable. The theory of natural selection depends greatly on the variability of life over a long period, which will gradually result in structural changes called adaptions. Charles Darwin held that all living organisms adapt in different degrees and have a different number of random variations. There are variations that increase and there are variations that decrease the chances of survival for any living organism. The variations that increase the chances of survival or the rate of reproduction persist in existence. The variations that increase the chances of survival are preserved in the parent generation of a variant population of organisms, and are then transmitted to future generations. The variations that decrease the chances of survival in any given organism decrease or die out with the organism that they affect. Evolution had been in the realm of science before Darwin. The Theory of Natural Selection was Darwin's concept of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin said natural selection was natures way of choosing the ablest biological organisms to survive (Angeles 199-200). Charles Darwin's definition for natural selection was that the strong (those with variations that increase survival probability) survive and that the weak (those with variations that decrease survival probability) die or devitalize. Never in his life did he say "survival of the fittest", and never did he mean for his theory to be used in a social form. Herbert Spencer, with a few others, however, decided that was what Darwin meant and that it should be applied in social terms.