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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 survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Hofstadter earned his PhD in 1942. In 1944, he published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915. It was a commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late-19th-century American capitalism and its ruthless "dog-eat-dog" economic competition and Social Darwinian self-justification.
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 ...
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 ...
John Charmley wrote that Churchill viewed British domination around the globe, such as the British Empire, as a natural consequence of social Darwinism.Charmley argued that similar to many of Churchill's contemporaries, he held a hierarchical perspective on race, believing white Protestant Christians to be at the top of this hierarchy, and white Catholics beneath them, while Indians were ...
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The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the naturalistic fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly ...