What are the causes and effect of social darwinism?
Social Darwinism is a theory that competition between all
individuals, groups, nations or ideas drives social evolution in
human societies. The term is an extension of Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution, where competition between individual organisms
drives biological evolutionary change (speciation) through the
survival of the fittest.
The term was popularized in 1944 by the American historian
Richard Hofstadter, and has generally been used by critics rather
than advocates of what the term is supposed to represent.[1]
While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's
theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand
the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism
commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of On
the Origin of Species. Others whose ideas are given the label
include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's
cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the
19th century.
Some claim that it supports racism on the lines set out by
Arthur de Gobineau before Darwin published his theories, which
directly contradict Darwin's own work. This classification of
social Darwinism constitutes part of the reaction against the Nazi
regime and the Holocaust.
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Despite the fact that social Darwinism bears Darwin's name and
his works were widely read by social Darwinists, the theory also
draws on the work of many authors, including Herbert Spencer,
Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Darwin
himself gave serious consideration to Galton's work, but thought
the ideas of "hereditary improvement" impractical. Aware of
weaknesses in his own family, he was sure that families would
naturally refuse such selection and wreck the scheme. He thought
that even if compulsory registration was the only way to improve
the human race, this illiberal idea would be unacceptable, and it
would be better to publicize the "principle of inheritance" and let
people decide for themselves.[2] In The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex of 1882 he described how medical
advances meant that the weaker were able to survive and have
families, and commented on the effects of this, while cautioning
that hard reason should not override sympathy, and considering how
other factors might reduce the effect -
Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals
will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed,
leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the
case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his
worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly
an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was
originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but
subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more
tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy,
even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the
noblest part of our nature. ... We must therefore bear the
undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their
kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action,
namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry
so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely
increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage,
though this is more to be hoped for than expected