The article analyses the polemic about Darwinism in the Russian press of the second half of the 19th century. This controversy made the problems of natural science part of the worldview and political debate between liberals and conservatives. In the 1880s, two journals, the liberal Russkaya Mysl and the conservative Russkiy Vestnik, discussed N. Ya. Danilevsky’s book “Darwinism: the Critical Analysis”. For the authors of the former publication (K. A. Timiryazev, N. G. Chernyshevsky), the affirmation of the natural origin of the Earth and the human being was the basis for the struggle against clericalism. But some of them, the followers of socialist views, denied the struggle for existence as a factor in evolution, believing that this factor was not competition but cooperation. In Russkiy Vestnik, the conservatives (N. N. Strakhov) criticized Darwinism, defending the idea of creationism and development of nature in accordance with the divine plan of the Creator. The analysis of this polemic, as compared with up-to-date realities, makes it possible to assert that the involvement of scientific popularization in political discourse is one of the characteristic features of the Russian press throughout its existence.