Darwinism

Darwinism and Society

Introduction

Thesis Statement

“Even though "the bigger the better" idealism may sound good for economic development, society is being greatly affected in a negative way and by the notion that people operate in mechanistic ways”.

Development of Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism originated in Britain during the second half of the 19th century. Darwin did not address human evolution in his most famous study, On the Origin of Species (1859), which focused on the evolution of plants and animals. In his other book The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin directed his theory explicitly to the single species Homo sapiens. Much of the book is devoted to developing the evolutionary significance of sexual selection—that is, the preferential choice of reproductive partner. Apart from that, the argument follows two main lines. The first is physical: The immediate evolutionary forebears of mankind are unknown. Darwin never represented man as deriving from apes. He did establish that man must in all probability be descendant from species that are classified among primates, and further that man and the higher apes resemble each other anatomically more closely than the latter resemble the lower primates. The second line of argument is behaviorist. It maintains that intellectual and social faculties are themselves adaptive and in their variations make for the greater or lesser survival of the creatures that possess them. Other species besides man subsist with the aid of rudimentary or developed forms of social organization and communication, and Darwin could see only differences of degree between these and the characteristics of human community and moral awareness (Laveleye, 1885).

The last of Darwin's expressly evolutionary treatises carries behaviorist comparisons even further. Probably The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals (1872) is the most dated of Darwin's writings. Nevertheless, in comparing phenomena like the physical manifestation of hostility in dog and master—the similarity of the snarling jaw to the drawn lips—and many other states of temper, Darwin did carry biology into treatment of faculties traditionally reserved for moral studies. The application of Darwin's theory of natural selection specifically to human behavior was interpreted as justifying cruel social policies at home and imperialism abroad. The Englishman most associated with early social Darwinism, however, was sociologist Herbert Spencer, a social philosopher, often regarded as one of the first sociologists. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe the outcome of competition between social groups. In Social Statics (1850) and other works, Spencer argued that through competition, social evolution would automatically produce prosperity and personal liberty unparalleled in human history. In the United States, Spencer gained considerable support among intellectuals and some businessmen, including steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie, who served as Spencer's host during his visit to the United States in 1883. The most prominent American social Darwinist of the 1880s was William Graham Sumner, who on several occasions told audiences that there was no alternative to the “survival of the fittest” theory. Critics of social Darwinism seized on these comments to argue that a “dog-eat-dog” philosophy of human behavior that ...