Darwin's Theory Of Natural Selection And Social Darwinism

Virtually all people in mid 19th Century Victorian England held the worldview that they inhabited a place that was created by God and that there existed a Deity in place that ordered the perfect adaption of all organisms to one another and to their environment. Moreover, the leading scientists and philosophers of the day operated inside the constraints of this Christian ideology and formulated their ideas on that basis. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand in total conflict with these prevailing ideas. He pointed out that the Bible’s description of creation, was contradicted by almost every aspect of the natural world and that design by a Creator could be explained by “natural selection.” During the latter half of the nineteenth

Malthus believed that population growth would always overpower food supply growth, creating “perpetual states of hunger, disease, and struggle.” From this analysis, Darwin reasoned that those better equipped to survive would be able to pass on their traits while individuals with less desirable characteristics would die out. Through his research, Darwin concluded that this ongoing struggle between those competing for survival would produce a never-ending progression of changes in the organism. Simply stated, this is evolution through natural

Darwin presumed that life naturally occurred from simplistic forms and as random genetic mutations develop within an organism's genetic code, a more complex creature appears over time, and also, that this happens on a scale that goes beyond the boundaries of a single species. The accumulation of beneficial mutations are preserved and passed to the next generation which results in an entirely different organism over immense spans of time. These “infinitely tiny differences between individuals give infinitesimal advantages or disadvantages in their survival.” For Darwin, the selection of these variants over hundreds of thousands of generations was the critical process in macroevolution. Conversely, microevolution which refers to a change within a specific group can be seen as a variety within a certain species with the descendant remaining part of the same species as the ancestor. The variation, or adaptation, are changes that are considered horizontal across a group. Such alterations might be accomplished by natural selection, in which a trait within the present variety is