Darwin, social Darwinism and eugenics

Abstract

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. That perspective is also reflected in the 2005-6 blockbuster Darwin show curated by the American Museum of Natural History, where the section on 'Social Darwinism', subtitled 'Misusing Darwin's Theory', claims that all uses of Darwin's theory to justify particular social, political, or economic principles 'have one fundamental flaw: they use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so they misrepresent and misappropriate Darwin's original ideas'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are passionately disputed.