1.1 The Darwin Snafu: Social Darwinism
Last modified 07/05/2008
| One of the most unfortunate outcomes of the sudden triumph of the idea of evolution, in its Darwinian form, was the emergence of so-called Social Darwinism. Darwin is repeatedly exonerated here, but the whitewash is unconvincing. It was unclear from the beginning just how the theory should be taken, and the blending of biological and social theory was present from the beginning. We can see this in the parallel influence of Herbert Spencer whose mixture of theoretical and ideological thinking was an often unspoken influence on Darwin and Darwinists. Spencer, at least, was an explicit social theorist. And he was critical of selectionist Darwinism. It was the theory of natural selection that was the ticking time-bomb in the public perception of the reality of evolution. The rubric of 'survival of the fittest' soon overflowed from the domain of evolving organisms in deep time to the competition between persons, classes, nations, and ideologies. If you make natural selection the driving force of evolution, and make that sound like a law of nature, then it seems to those who respond to this idea that this mechanism will also prove true of the future, and that one should apply its truth as a principle of current and future action. But this is an invalid form of reasoning, which the statements of biological theory don't seem to disallow in principle, because, if it happened that way in the past, then it should happen that way in the future. Something fallacious has entered the whole scheme. The resolution is not complex: evolution didn't happen that way in the past. | ||
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