1.In what ways has social, political, and economic Darwinism been used in today’s world?
Answer:
In the 19th-century context in which Darwin's Origin of Species was first received, "Darwinism" came to stand for an entire range of evolutionary (and often revolutionary) philosophies about both biology and society. One of the more prominent approaches was that summed in the phrase "survival of the fittest" by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, which was later taken to be emblematic of Darwinism even though Spencer's own understanding of evolution was more Lamarckian than Darwinian, and predated the publication of Darwin's theory. What we now call "Social Darwinism" was, in its day, synonymous with "Darwinism" — the application of Darwinian principles of "struggle" to society, usually in support of anti-philanthropic political agendas. Another interpretation, one notably favored by Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton, was that Darwinism implied that because natural selection was apparently no longer working on "civilized" people it was possible for "inferior" strains of people (who would normally be filtered out of the gene pool) to overwhelm the "superior" strains, and corrective measures would have to be undertaken — the foundation of eugenics.
In Darwin's day there was no rigid definition of the term "Darwinism", and it was used by opponents and proponents of Darwin's biological theory alike to mean whatever they wanted it to in a larger context. The ideas had international influence, and Ernst Haeckel developed what was known as Darwinismus in Germany, although, like Spencer, Haeckel's "Darwinism" had only a rough resemblance to the theory of Charles Darwin, and was not centered around natural selection at all.
While the reaction against Darwin's ideas is nowadays often thought to have been widespread immediately, in 1886 Wallace went on a lecture tour across the United States, starting in New York and going via Boston, Washington, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska to California, lecturing on what he called Darwinism without any problems.[
Social Darwinism in the most basic form is the idea that biological ideas can be extended and applied to the social realm. However, the term has generally been used by critics rather than advocates of what the term is supposed to represent (Bannister, 1979; Hodgson, 2004). It has been applied to the claim that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection or by "survival of the fittest" can be used to understand the evolution of society: just as competition between individual organisms drives biological evolutionary change (speciation), competition between individuals or groups in human societies drives social evolution.
Several social theorists influenced by Darwin including Petr Kropotkin, David Ritchie, Thorstein Veblen and Lester Frank Ward proposed that the course of evolution could be consciously directed by human beings. Accordingly, governments can implement policies that would guide human evolution in a positive direction. One might here include proponents of eugenics, who argued for selective breeding of people or a human guided "artificial selection" to replace the "blind" or ineffective processes of "natural selection" in the human realm. However, a number of social scientists influenced by Darwin, including Veblen and Ward, were opponents of eugenics.
Several authors drew such parallels between competition and conflict in the biological and social spheres, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such ideologies did not necessarily reflect Darwin's views, and though he did introduce Spencer's term of "survival of the fittest" as an alternative phrase for "natural selection" in the 5th edition of The Origin of Species, he subsequently rejected it in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Modern social science usually distinguishes between the ideology of Social Darwinism from the scientific theory of evolution developed in The Origin of Species (1859).
The term "Social Darwinism" first appeared in an 1879 article in "Popular Science" by Oscar Schmidt, followed by an anarchist tract published in Paris in 1880 entitled "Le darwinisme social" by Émile Gautier. However, the use of the term was very rare - at least in the English-speaking world (Hodgson, 2004) - until the American historian Richard Hofstadter published his influential Social Darwinism in American Thought(1944) during the World War II.
Try this link for Social Darwinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_darw...
More Questions and Answers: