Social Darwinism is a pejorative term used in criticism of ideologies or ideas concerning their exploitation of concepts in biology and social sciences to artificially create political change that reduces the fertility of certain individuals, races, and subcultures having certain "undesired" qualities. It has very rarely been used as a self description.[1]
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877[2] and was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter. Before Hofstadter's work the use of the term in English academic journals was quite rare.[3] The term "social darwinism" has rarely been used by advocates of the supposed ideologies or ideas; instead it has almost always been used (pejoratively) by its opponents.[4][5]
The term draws upon the common use of the term Darwinism, which has been used to describe a range of evolutionary views, but in the late 19th century was applied more specifically to natural selection as first advanced by Charles Darwin to explain speciation in populations of organisms. The process includes competition between individuals for limited resources, popularly known as "survival of the fittest", a term coined by anthropologist Herbert Spencer.
While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century.
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