Cooperation and Fairness are Driving Forces of Human Social Evolution

Social Darwinism is a philosophy, developed in the late 1800s, that applied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human society. If it’s true that competition is the mechanism of physical evolution and that today’s species are the winners of earlier struggles to survive, wouldn’t the same principles be true for societies and their structures? By applying this thinking to politics and economics Social Darwinists concluded that the reason white European societies were dominant in the Victorian era was because white Europeans were superior; they had won out in the dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest contest and come out on top. Subjugation of the lesser races was just and right.

Social Darwinism argued that biology was destiny and that a broad spectrum of socially undesirable traits, ranging from ‘pauperism’ to mental illness, resulted from heredity. Rich people were successful because they were superior. Poor people were failures because they were inferior. Thus social policies to help the poor were a waste of time.

This philosophy naturally gave rise to the "science" of eugenics, which was devoted to improving the human race by getting rid of the “unfit.” It was just a short step to Hitler and the Holocaust.

Social Darwinism isn’t talked about much today, yet it still underlies many people’s thinking: it justifies laissez-faire economic policies, for example. Modern-day conservatives love the idea that science proves that the rich and powerful deserve to be rich and powerful because they are inherently more “fit” in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. Look at the success of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that racial differences in intelligence could be genetically based.

How much of our thinking about our interactions with each other, both in our individual relationships and in the larger societal sphere of economics and politics, has been warped by this pseudo-scientific thinking that competition is the sole basis for life?