When it comes to Nietzsche’s views on Darwin the far more honest enterprise is to let the man speak for himself. First though, a few caveats need to be put in place. It is highly unlikely that Nietzsche actually read any of Darwin’s work. We know that Nietzsche showed little interest in the natural sciences until relatively late in his life when his eyesight was failing and his ability to read attenuated. We also know that he was unable to read fluently any language other than German (Leiter, 2002). This is an important point because, even if Nietzsche did read Darwin’s work, there were significant scientific differences between Darwin’s original ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859) and the most popular German translation.

Darwin’s seminal book was translated into German within six months of its November publication in Britain by the German palaeontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn. Bronn was a strange choice as translator because he was known to be highly sceptical of the very notion of speciation. Hence, it was not as faithful a translation as it could have been, with numerous added footnotes and an added (highly critical) final chapter authored by Bronn. The German evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer (2009) summarises why he did this:

“Bronn's liberal translation of Darwin altered the precise meanings of Victorian English words to fit a contemporaneous German sensibility.”

That German sensibility, Bronn felt, was not ready for the scientific materialism he thought Darwin was espousing. Darwin was especially unhappy with Bronn’s translation of the phrase ‘struggle for existence’ as ‘Kampf ums Dasein’. This German phrase has an ambiguous meaning and often employed when discussing the overtly philosophical notion of ‘struggle for being’. This was undoubtedly intentional on Bronn’s part as he attempted to steer the first German edition of ‘On the Origin of Species’ in the direction of his own view of a teleological interpretation of biology. Bronn’s intention is even evident in the title of the first German edition. The complete English title is: ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. Bronn’s German version was ‘Über die Entstehung der Arten im Thier-und Pflanzen-Reich durch natürliche Züchtung, oder Erhaltung der vervollkommnen Rassen im Kampfe ums Dasein’, which translates as ‘On the Origin of Species in the Animal and Plant Kingdom by Natural Breeding, or Preservation of the Perfect Races in the Struggle for Being’. Thus, Bronn had not only substituted the biological word ‘life’ for the philosophical term ‘being’ he had also substituted the original word ‘favoured’ with ‘vervollkommnen’ which translates as ‘perfect’. Bronn’s own additional final chapter was therefore an argument for evolution’s progressive development toward this ‘perfection’.

Darwin encountered a similar, deliberate, problem in the first French edition of the book, translated and edited by Clémence Royer. In this case, she had, unbeknown to Darwin, written her own preface in which she had suggested the benefits of applying the mechanisms of natural selection to human beings. As natural selection is non-teleological, what she meant, of course, was the application of artificial selection (and specifically, in her case, negative eugenics). We know from his personal correspondence that Darwin was both perplexed and livid.
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In the fifth (of the six) English editions of ‘On the Origin of Species’ (published in 1869) the phrase ‘struggle for existence’ was changed to ‘survival of the fittest’ and it is this now infamous phrase that comes to the mind of most people with a cursory knowledge of modern evolutionary theory. It is widely (though erroneously) believed that the concept and term originated with Darwin. It is sometimes claimed that it was championed by Nietzsche, and expropriated by Hitler via Darwin and Nietzsche. However, it is neither a Darwinian nor a Nietzchean term, having been coined by the British polymath Herbert Spencer in his book ‘Principles of Biology’ (1863). Spencer certainly appears to have intended the term to be synonymous with his own (albeit idiosyncratic) view of Darwinian natural selection, writing:

"This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection.’”

It probably would not have mattered to Nietzsche which one of these Englishmen had invented the phrase because he considered both Darwin and Spencer to be second-rate intellectuals, with "doltish mechanistic English ideas about the world" as he explains in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ (1886):

“There are truths best perceived by mediocre minds, because they are most suited to them; there are truths that have charms and seductive powers only for mediocre spirits: we are being forced just now to embrace this perhaps unpleasant tenet, ever since the spirit of respectable, but mediocre Englishmen (I am thinking of Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer) has begun to gain the upper hand in the middle region of European taste.”

Nietzsche is not simply targeting specific Englishmen here. Rather, he had a disdain for British philosophers and natural-law theorists in general because of their growing reliance on empiricism and methodological naturalism and their related lack of interest in metaphysics (Johnson, 2010). Nevertheless, despite sharing “mechanistic English ideas” Darwin and Spencer were definitely not the intellectual stablemates Nietzsche seems to think they were.
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Darwin’s attitude to Spencer’s phrase is far less accommodating than is commonly believed. Darwin never viewed either his own ‘struggle for existence’ nor Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ in anything like the adversarial or combative sense that Spencer intended or that many fundamentalist Christian authors like to claim (e.g., “involving the triumph of the strong and the subjugation of the weak”, as defined by Bergman, 2001). From the original edition of ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859):

“I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in time of death, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get the food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture.”

The key to Darwin’s thinking, of course, lies in his final sentence. Spencer was certainly no Darwinian and he famously disagreed with the metaphorical and diluted manner in which Darwin had used his phrase. Indeed, Spencer was one of Britain's then-leading exponents of Lamarckianism and, more in common with Nietzsche, emphasised the possibility of a species’ self-improvement from conscious, planned actions rather than non-teleological variations in heritability that acted on entire populations. Spencer's support for Lamarck's ideas proved so strong that even after August Weismann's watershed experiments on mice which had demonstrated that acquired characteristics were not inherited (1889; thereby boosting Darwin's ideas on heredity at the expense of Lamarck's reputation), Spencer resolutely refused to accept the findings. He later wrote an extended two-part paper attempting to refute Darwin entitled 'The Inadequacy of Natural Selection' (1893). It is surely more accurate, therefore, to refer to the ‘Spencerian’, rather than the Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’.

Although it appeared in a text on biology, Spencer originally employed his phrase in a distinctly non-biological context, arguing in support of the laissez-faire economic system, ironically, the very economic system beloved by the majority of today’s American fundamentalist Christians. Political historian David Crook (2007) has described Spencer as the "uncaring apostle of cut-throat capitalism" and this is not simply the case of a ‘liberal’ academic’s ‘left-wing bias’. The then richest American and devout Christian John D. Rockefeller fully concurred with Spencer’s original meaning (cited in Hofstadter, 1944):

"The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest.......This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God."

Rockefeller’s comment, referencing “a law of nature and a law of God” is certainly not a sentiment that would have emanated from Darwin. Nor Nietzsche, as the latter makes plain (1882):

“Take, for example, that pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer.......a human race that adopted such Spencerian perspectives as its ultimate perspectives would seem to us worthy of contempt, of annihilation! But the mere fact that he had to experience as his highest hope something that to others appears and may appear only as a disgusting possibility poses a question mark that Spencer would have been incapable of foreseeing.......Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this – reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians?”

Nietzsche never seemed to appreciate what Darwin’s metaphorical meaning of ‘struggle for existence’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ meant, or to have even been aware of Spencer’s disagreement with Darwin. On the contrary, he views Spencer as being a representative of Darwin’s theory. In ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (1887), for example, he erroneously credits Spencer with Darwin’s hypothesis of a population’s adaptation to external circumstances, apparently unaware that Spencer was a Lamarckian who considered adaptation to occur at the level of the individual organism, not at the level of populations.

On Bronn’s death in 1862, the German publisher agreed with Darwin to re-translate ‘On the Origin of Species’ and Bronn’s translation was superseded by a more faithful version from Julius Carus. But the damage was done. Bronn’s translation had become the standard work, read by all leading German biologists and this first edition remained the most cited version in the German language until the twentieth century (Meyer, 2009). Although Nietzsche never mentions reading ‘On the Origin of Species’ he reports lengthy discussions with a number of anti-Darwinian academics including the zoologist Ludwig Rutimeyer and anatomist Wilhelm His at the University of Basel, then a hotbed of anti-Darwinian ideology (Johnson, 2001). Thus, as philosopher Charles Pence (2011) points out:

“.......we can say with some confidence that Nietzsche was exposed to Darwin via what was roughly the mainstream tradition of Darwinian critique and commentary in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s.”

Nietzsche also discusses the strong influence of a now obscure book ‘Biologische Probleme’ (‘Biological Problems’; Rolph, 1882). Here, the fervently anti-Darwinian biologist William Rolph denies the existence of any biological drive for self-preservation whatsoever, and proceeds to mischaracterise another of Darwin’s phrases, ‘will to preservation’, in terms of a teleological notion of a ‘will to increase’ (in terms of function and faculty). This ‘will to increase’ looks suspiciously like a precursor to Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘will to power’, which he considered responsible for all change, at least in the biological domain. Indeed, in ‘The Gay Science’ (1882) Nietzsche appears to directly mirror Rolph’s thoughts:

“The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation.”
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As with the übermensch, it is not surprising that Nietzsche would reject Darwinian ideas when conceptualising his ‘will to power’. Nietzsche’s will to power manifests in two distinct ways. There is a ‘more sophisticated’ internal drive toward personal autonomy. This internal drive cannot be Darwinian as it would not be subject to any selection effects. But Nietzsche also envisions a less sophisticated drive aimed externally, in order to impose this will on others and society and thus maximise an individual’s personal influence and power. Obviously, the behaviours manifested by an externally-directed ‘will to power’ could be subject to cultural selection effects and so play some part in the institution and maintenance of social contracts. Examples abound in the non-human animal kingdom such as the hierarchical nature inherent in primate groupings. However, this process is more accurately described as epi-Darwinian because the unit of selection is behaviour and although the physiological basis for behaviours is biologically heritable, they are fragile precisely because they exist only so long as the social contracts that enable and tolerate them.

Although Nietzsche readily acknowledges that Darwin was responsible for the dominant naturalistic paradigm in the biological sciences, his own writings on Darwin are relatively sparse. Of what does exist, there are several threads and they are, without exception, critical. There is an initial strong denunciation of Darwin’s reliance on the work of Thomas Malthus, in particular his famous mathematical law regarding population growth (echoing Marx and Engels’ considerable disapproval). Briefly, Malthus stated that while populations tend to grow at an exponential rate, food supply usually grows at a linear rate, therefore predicting inevitable shortages of food (Malthus, 1798). Darwin theorised that such a state of affairs was ubiquitous in the natural world and, if such a distressed population of organisms was not driven to extinction, it would have been because of the effects of natural selection favouring (not perfecting) those individual organisms which e.g., either required less food physiologically or were better at procuring food. Nietzsche was not convinced of this at all.

The critique via Malthus is a trivial matter, however, compared to Nietzsche’s other views on Darwin. He commented negatively on a number of claims that were pivotal to Darwin’s theory. The earliest mention is from ‘Human, All Too Human’ (1878) where he merely displays doubt about Darwin’s theory:

“.......the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.”
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By ‘The Gay Science’ (1882) not only had his doubts about Darwin grown, he was beginning to substitute metaphysical for biological concepts:

“.......in nature, it is not distress which rules, but rather abundance, squandering - even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life.”

“.......one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering, and formative forces, upon whose effect the “adaptation” first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving.”

By ‘Götzen-Dämmerung’ (‘Twilight of the Gods’; 1888) Nietzsche’s refutation of Darwinian evolution is more robust:

As for the famous “struggle for existence,” so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering — and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power. One should not mistake Malthus for nature. Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence — and, indeed, it occurs — its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them — namely, in favour of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions.

The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent. Darwin forgot the spirit (that is English!); the weak have more spirit. One must need spirit to acquire spirit; one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (“Let it go!” they think in Germany today; “the Reich must still remain to us”). It will be noted that by “spirit” I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).

In the same book, Nietzsche also explicitly refutes Darwin’s (1871) theory of sexual selection as the sister driving force to natural selection:

“We almost always see males and females take advantage of any chance encounter, exhibiting no selectivity whatsoever.”

Evolutionary theory is also mentioned in the book compiled posthumously from Nietzsche’s notebooks, 'Der Wille zur Macht' (English: ‘Will to Power’; 1906). It is pertinent to mention here that a number of leading Nietzsche scholars, including Mazzino Montinari and Brian Leiter, are convinced that this book is a forgery. They consider it a contrivance of Nietzsche’s sister (then named Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche), assembled by stitching disparate sentences together from Nietzsche’s notebooks and adding her own negative views of the Nietzsche family (Montinari & d’lorio, 1996; see also Diethe, 2003 and Leiter, 2002). That said, we do find numerous straightforward denials of biological evolution and even speciation. For example:

“There are no transitional forms.  Every type has its limits; beyond these there is no evolution. Up to this point, absolute regularity.......Primitive creatures are said to be the ancestors of those now existing. But a look at the fauna and flora of the Tertiary merely permits us to think of an as yet unexplored country that harbors types that do not exist elsewhere, while those existing elsewhere are missing.”

“The utility of an organ does not explain its origin; on the contrary! For most of the time during which a property is forming it does not preserve the individual and is of no use to him, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies.”

Finally, there is an anti-Darwinian paragraph in Nietzsche’s posthumous ‘Writings from the Late Notebooks’ (2003):

“What surprises me most when surveying the great destinies of man is always seeing before me the opposite of what Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, in favor of those who have come off better, the progress of the species. The very opposite is quite palpably the case: the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the better-constituted types, the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types“

Whether or not Montinari and Leiter are correct, it appears that Förster-Nietzsche must have been happy with continuing her brother’s progressive anti-Darwinian stance. All of the above quotes, from across the last 20 years of Nietzsche’s life, directly contradict what the likes of William Jennings Bryan, William Bell Riley, Henry Morris, Benjamin Wiker or Max Andrews are telling us. Indeed, rather than Darwin having “heavily influenced Nietzsche’s biological basis for truth and Nietzsche being “the greatest exponent of evolution known to the age” and “an ardent evolutionist”, much of Nietzsche’s writing on Darwin and evolution reads like the kind of assertions found in any young earth creationist article or website. Scientifically, then, Nietzsche was profoundly off-target.

Ironically, he does accidentally agree with Darwin on one point, though he appears not to appreciate it. This is his view of the “the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types”. If he is referring to the enormity of the abundance of viruses, bacteria and insects relative to other kinds of organisms then he is completely misunderstanding what a Darwinian might label as “average”. If he is referring to ‘average’ individuals within a population or species then, yes, they certainly do succeed, but this is because evolutionary change is observed not in individuals but across populations over time. It is much less the case that the ‘struggle for existence’ involves a 'survival of the fittest' (as per the popularly known phrase) than the more accurate Darwinian notion of 'survival of the just good enough to survive under the circumstances they find themselves in'. Returning to ‘Will to Power’ (1906):

“I see all philosophers and the whole of science on their knees before a reality which is the reverse of the struggle for life as Darwin and his school understood it - that is to say, wherever I look, I see those prevailing and surviving, who throw doubt and suspicion upon life and the value of life. The error of the Darwinian school became a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to make this mistake?.......the school of Darwin has everywhere deceived itself. ”