Social Darwin's Tenets Of Evolution

During the latter half the of the 19th century, a revolution of thought, similar in nature to and perhaps a continuation of the Enlightenment occurred first in Britain and then later in the United States. From this period arose key ideas in both life science and social science, which included Darwinian Evolution and its supposed cousin, Social Darwinism. The Theory of Evolution, created in 1859 by Charles Darwin, a British naturalist, detailed exactly how species evolve biologically and how new species evolve. Darwin’s theory rested on a few key tenets: environmental determinism, adaptation, and mutation, which all caused species to evolve. First, the concept of environmental determinism states that the environment in which an organism develops

Perverting Darwin’s principles and initially using Malthus’ definition of fitness, early Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer, who most claim to have founded the movement, claimed that those being unproductive in society, i.e. those who were unfit, would die off inevitably, leaving only the fit behind. Simply put, the world had only limited resources, but the human population grows exponentially. Thus, the unproductive, the unfit, would have to die off so that the fit could use the world’s resources, according to the principles of Darwinian Evolution. When phrased as such, the theory of Social Darwinism sounds ludicrous. First, the “inevitability” of this outcome becomes questionable when one realizes that both in the 19th century and today, the human population has thus far not surpassed Earth’s ability to sustain us. Therefore, the inevitable reduction in the unfit population becomes completely hypothetical, a tool that industrial capitalists used to justify their wealth and superiority. Furthermore, this philosophy clearly rests on underlying assumptions concerning race, religion, and pre-existing class. Because of the foundation of Social Darwinism, which states that human society follows similar laws to that of nature, individuals who these thinkers considered unfit were essentially born unfit. Using this

First, he assumes (vocally) that inevitably a handful of individuals carry a disproportionate share of the wealth in society. Furthermore, he contends that this system in which a wealth gap must be present provides the greatest net benefit for society. One can disprove both of these assumptions by exaggeration, which, despite the absurd scale, still applies to Carnegie’s argument. A system in which fewer than ten individuals held 99% of a society’s wealth clearly would not benefit the society as a whole. Moreover, because of sociopolitical factors and the possibility of rapid populist revolution, this extreme system could not function for very long. Admittedly, this situation has never occurred in history, but for the same reasons that model fails, so eventually must the environment that Carnegie