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Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and ... For example, The ...
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
By his own account, Herbert Spencer described a concept similar to "survival of the fittest" in his 1852 "A Theory of Population". [9] He first used the phrase – after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species – in his Principles of Biology of 1864 [10] in which he drew parallels between his economic theories and Darwin's biological, evolutionary ones, writing, "This survival of ...
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[123] Herbert Spencer and the eugenics advocate Francis Galton's interpretation of natural selection as necessarily progressive, leading to supposed advances in intelligence and civilisation, became a justification for colonialism, eugenics, and social Darwinism. For example, in 1940, Konrad Lorenz, in writings that he subsequently disowned ...
Spencer's association with social Darwinism might have its origin in a specific interpretation of his support for competition. Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or ...
Social Darwinism, discussed above, is the most historically influential version of normative evolutionary ethics. As philosopher G. E. Moore famously argued, many early versions of normative evolutionary ethics seemed to commit a logical mistake that Moore dubbed the naturalistic fallacy .
Explore the controversial book "Might Is Right," which delves into social Darwinism and individualist ethics.