Social Darwinists grafted Darwin's basic ideas about biological evolution to human society and economy. To them, progress could only be made by eliminating imperfections from humanity, and this was best done by competition. That competition, neatly summarized by Herbert Spencer's term "survival of the fittest," was taken to mean the competition between individuals.
--Charles Sullivan and Cameron Mcpherson Smith, Getting the Monkey off Darwin's Back: Four Common Myths About Evolution, Skeptical Inquirer magazine, May 2005
Recommended reading:
by Herbert Spencer at
Reading RatCriticism (articles, essays, reviews):
...Hofstadter [Richard Hofstadter in
Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944)], repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of
Origin of Species. But by
fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force.
--Damon W. Root, The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer: How a libertarian individualist was recast as a social Darwinist, Reason, July 29, 2008
Man with a Plan: Herbert Spencer’s theory of everything, by Steven Shapin, The New Yorker, August 13, 2007
The Gospel of Relaxation, by Carl Rollyson, New York Sun, July 25, 2007, review of Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life, by Mark Francis
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