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Definition
The application of Darwinian biology and evolutionary principles to human social theory.
Introduction
In the broadest sense, the term social Darwinism has been used to refer to any effort made toward applying concepts from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to social theory, political systems, economics, and other domains of human social life (Dickens 2000). However, social Darwinism is likely best known for its infamous association with early twentieth century political ideologies targeted at “improving the human race.” Darwin’s ideas were used to justify eugenics (Nourse 2016), race war (Barondess 1998), imperialism (Leonard 2009), and a variety of economic political ideologies (Hawkins 1997). However, these ideas were often based on misinterpretations of Darwin’s original ideas and the process of natural selection. Some have argued that early academics who have since become associated with nefarious...
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References
Barondess, J. A. (1998). Care of the medical ethos: Reflections on social Darwinism, racial hygiene, and the Holocaust. Annals of Internal Medicine, 129, 891–898.
Dickens, P. (2000). Social Darwinism: Linking evolutionary thought to social theory. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Fodor, J., & Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (2011). What Darwin got wrong. London: Profile Books.
Hawkins, M. (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American thought, 1860–1945: Nature as model and nature as threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hodgson, G. M. (2001). Is social evolution lamarckian or darwinian? darwinism and evolutionary economics, 120, 87–120.
Hodgson, G. M. (2004). Social Darwinism in Anglophone academic journals: A contribution to the history of the term. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17, 428–463.
Hodgson, G. M., & Knudsen, T. (2010). Darwin's conjecture: The search for general principles of social and economic evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leonard, T. C. (2009). Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter's social Darwinism in American thought. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 71, 37–51.
Nourse, V. (2016). History of science: When eugenics became law. Nature, 530, 418–418.
Schubert, C. (2009). Is novelty always a good thing? Towards an evolutionary welfare economics. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 22, 585–619.
Schubert, C. (2012). “Generalized Darwinism” and the quest for an evolutionary theory of policy-making. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 24, 479–513.
Shackelford, T. K., & Hansen, R. D. (2016). The evolution of morality. New York: Springer.
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Mogilski, J.K. (2016). Social Darwinism. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_448-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_448-1
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