7.4 Darwinism, Social Darwinism

Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, gathered evidence on the voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–1836), including the varied finches and tortoises of the Galápagos Islands. After decades of work, and prompted by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea independently, he published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

The theory in plain terms: living things produce more offspring than can survive. Individuals vary, and some variations help them survive and reproduce in their environment. Those helpful traits are passed on more often, so over many generations species change and new species form. Darwin called this natural selection. In The Descent of Man (1871) he applied evolution to humans.

Evolution contradicted a literal reading of the creation story in Genesis and suggested that humans shared ancestors with apes. It also implied that nature worked through chance and struggle rather than a visible divine plan. Clergy and scientists debated it publicly, most famously in an 1860 Oxford debate between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, who earned the nickname “Darwin's bulldog.” Some Christians rejected evolution, while others reconciled it with faith. Overall, Darwin strengthened the prestige of science as the source of truth about nature, part of the positivist outlook (7.5), and added to a gradual secularization of European thought.

Social Darwinism applied ideas of struggle and survival to human societies, nations and races. It was not Darwin's theory, and it was not science, but it borrowed science's authority. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864, argued that competition improves society and that the state should not help the poor, because that would preserve the “unfit.” Social Darwinist ideas were used to support:

• Laissez-faire economics: wealthy industrialists were seen as winners of a natural competition.
• Imperialism: conquest was presented as proof that Europeans were the “fittest” peoples (7.6).
• Racism: pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies ranked peoples, placing white Europeans at the top.
• Militarism and nationalism: nations were imagined as locked in a struggle in which war tested strength.
• Eugenics: Francis Galton, Darwin's half-cousin, coined the term eugenics in 1883 for the idea of improving the human population by encouraging the “fit” to have children and discouraging the “unfit.”

Eugenics movements gained respectability in many countries in the early 1900s, and some governments later passed forced sterilization laws. Nazi Germany took racial and eugenic thinking to its most extreme form, sterilizing hundreds of thousands of people and murdering disabled people and millions of Jews (8.9). Recognizing this line of influence, without claiming Darwin intended it, is a good way to show complexity.