Social Darwinsim History

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their enormous wealth. Even though the need for reform was overwhelming, for the majority of Americans, nothing was being done. The big bosses were able to buy off the politicians and persuade them to vote in their favor. While the rich were getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, the politicians watched. The need for a justification of the enormous wealth of a few and an unimaginable poverty of millions was, as many tended to believe, fulfilled by the emergence of a theory called Social Darwinism, which on one hand was regarded as a primary defense of business activities, and on the other, was nothing more than a myth. Social Darwinism, the experts say, "was a short-lived theory of social evolution, vigorously discussed in America, which rationalized and justified the harsh facts of social stratification in an attempt to reconcile them with the prevalent ideology of equalitarianism. The emergence of Social Darwinism was perhaps the most visible effect on the social ...

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Any organism that is able to obtain the necessary resources, often at the expense of other organisms, will survive, reproduce and pass on the "favored" qualities onto it's offspring (the "principle of inheritance"). In short, the weak, "unfit" will die, and the strong, will continue its existence. This whole theory was summarized in one laconic phrase - "survival of the fittest." For almost a decade before Darwin's The Origin of Species was the first published in 1859, a well educated Englishman named Herbert Spencer had been writing about the doctrine of evolution. He was first ever to use the popular phrase "survival of the fittest" and was among the first to apply the doctrine of ...

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