You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)

WHAT IS SOCIAL DARWINISM?

Social Darwinism is the notion that the same principle of natural selection that applies to biological evolution extends to individual and group behaviour—even though no evidence supports any such extension.

Political and social thinkers of the late 19th Century concocted the idea of social Darwinism: superior social and racial classes and systems succeed and survive, while inferior social and racial classes and systems fail and ought to die out. So, for example, you should not help sick or disabled people because if you did, you would interfere with the natural process of evolution. Social Darwinism was used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics, and genocide.

Darwin himself never made any claims that natural selection applied to anything other than biological evolution. Nor do today’s evolutionary biologists.

< Previous   Next >