Darwinian

American  

[dahr-win-ee-uhn] / dɑrˈwɪn i ən /

adjective

1. (sometimes lowercase) pertaining to Charles Darwin or his doctrines.

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noun

1. a follower of Charles Darwin; a person who accepts or advocates Darwinism.

Darwinian British  

/ dɑːˈwɪnɪən /

adjective

1. of or relating to Charles Darwin or his theory of evolution by natural selection

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noun

1. a person who accepts, supports, or uses this theory

Other Word Forms

• anti-Darwinian
  noun
• non-Darwinian
  adjective
• post-Darwinian
  adjective
• pre-Darwinian
  adjective
• pro-Darwinian
  adjective

Etymology

Origin of Darwinian

First recorded in 1855–60; Darwin + -ian

Example Sentences

“And we’ll now, in my judgment, go through a Darwinian moment,” Golub said.

From Barron's • Feb. 6, 2026

What I've noticed this week is there's a Darwinian selection about the people who have come to the conference in Manchester.

From BBC • Oct. 8, 2025

Omri Yoffe, CEO of Vi, a roughly 115-person AI company that focuses on healthcare, recently told employees they need to think of the current moment in almost Darwinian terms.

From The Wall Street Journal • Sep. 27, 2025

This year, researchers took a second look at Darwinian selection and proposed a bold new idea about how *gestures around* all this evolves, calling it the “law of increasing functional information.”

From Salon • Dec. 29, 2023

As Kuhn rightly put it, ‘Scientific development is like Darwinian evolution, a process driven from behind rather than pulled toward some fixed goal towards which it grows ever closer.’

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton