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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 ...
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution is a book by British primatologist Richard Wrangham. [1] [2] [3]Wrangham argues that humans have domesticated themselves by a process of self-selection similar to the selective breeding of foxes described by Dmitry Belyayev, a theory first proposed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the early 1800s. [4]
According to David Copp, for example, evolution would favor moral responses that promote social peace, harmony, and cooperation. But such qualities are precisely those that lie at the core of any plausible theory of objective moral truth. So Street's alleged "dilemma"—deny evolution or embrace moral skepticism—is a false choice. [13]
In evolutionary terms, the best strategy to use for the prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat, where an individual should cooperate as long others are cooperating, and not defect until another individual defects against them. At their core, complex social interactions are driven by the need to distinguish sincere cooperation and defection.
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 ...
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1] Cultural evolution is the change of this information ...
Before its use to describe biological evolution, the term "evolution" was originally used to refer to any orderly sequence of events with the outcome somehow contained at the start. [7] The first five editions of Darwin's in Origin of Species used the word "evolved", but the word "evolution" was only used in its sixth edition in 1872. [8]
The word theory in "the theory of evolution" does not imply scientific doubt regarding its validity; the concepts of theory and hypothesis have specific meanings in a scientific context. While theory in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles that explains an observable phenomenon in natural ...