Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism:

Social Darwinism is an ideological worldview, which applies Darwin’s biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics, and politics.

Darwin’s evolutionary thinking was often misused by non-biologists such as Herbert Spencer. “Spencer […] [argues that] individuals were free to compete for survival and only the fittest survived, as the natural order of things. Government intervention to protect the weak, aid the needy, or the like amounted to interfering with the laws of nature and was doomed to fail” (McCarthy, 2009).