Social Darwinism: Naturalist Approach or Fallacy?

Each organic being is striving to increase a geometric ratio…each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction…The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1)�

The emergence of evolutionary theory in the early nineteenth century quaked political and societal realms. Today, the aftershocks continue as terms such as "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are both applied and exploited. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace's Origin of Species (1859) became a seminal work in Western history, launching many biologists and social scientists on a quest to explain human behavior through natural selection. In adapting natural selection to social behavior, it is the best groups, or the most superior groups, that are more likely to survive in society than others. Herbert Spencer originated this school of thought, often coined social Darwinism, but misguided are those who believe Spencer derived his evolutionary ethics from Darwin, for Spencer published his ideas on the evolutionary origins of the inequality of classes eight years before Darwin's Origins. (2) Hence, what we have labeled social Darwinism may more accurately be described as social Spencerism. (3)