Darwinism

Darwinism, Social Darwinism

Darwinism is the belief in the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, developed separately by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and subsequently popularized in Darwin's two great works on evolution: the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871). The original version of the theory proposed that, since population numbers remained stable whilst reproduction occurred at a higher than replacement rate, there must be some systematic selective mechanism involved in the process, by which certain individuals perished, while others survived. The mechanism advanced was that of ‘natural selection’, whereby those individuals better suited to their environment survived, whilst others who were less well adapted died. Over time this process would result in species formation. It was not until thirty or so years later that the actual mechanism of heredity-the individual gene -was widely recognized and incorporated into existing theory to inaugurate modern neo-Darwinism.

At the time of its writing, Darwin and Wallace's theory formed just one thread in an existing discourse about evolution more generally, which included the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer . Many writers on society, influenced by Spencer, eagerly absorbed Darwin's ‘scientific’ theory into their own writings, and it was Spencer himself who coined the phrase (commonly attributed to Darwin) ‘the survival of the fittest’, to explain the historical development of societies. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the United States and Britain, there arose a movement based upon the incorporation of notions of survival of the fittest into social theory. The most well-known manifestation of this Social Darwinist movement was eugenics . In its most extreme manifestation, members of the Eugenic Society wrote pamphlets variously advocating the compulsory sterilization or incarceration of large subgroups of the population and selective breeding among the rest, in order to improve the genetic quality of the population as a whole. More recently, Darwinian theory has been a focus of controversy, for certain scientists are now convinced that the slow process of natural selection as Darwin proposed it is insufficient to account for species formation, which (they claim) must arise from some process that operates more rapidly. It is still the case, however, that the vast majority of practising biologists and genetic scientists remain committed neo-Darwinists. See also Gumplowicz, Ludwig; military and militarism.