Evolution of Cooperation - Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

The popularity of the evolution of cooperation – the reason it is not an obscure technical issue of interest to only a small number of specialists – is in part because it mirrors a larger issue where the realms of political philosophy, ethics, and biology intersect: the ancient issue of individual interests versus group interests. On one hand, the so-called "Social Darwinians" (roughly, those who would use the "survival of the fittest" of Darwinian evolution to justify the cutthroat competitiveness of laissez-faire capitalism) declaim that the world is an inherently competitive "dog eat dog" jungle, where every individual has to look out for himself. The philosopher Ayn Rand damned "altruism" and declared selfishness a virtue. The Social Darwinists' view is derived from Charles Darwin's interpretation of evolution by natural selection, which is explicitly competitive ("survival of the fittest"), Malthusian ("struggle for existence"), even gladiatorial ("red in tooth and claw"), and permeated by the Victorian laissez-faire ethos of Darwin and his disciples (such as T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer). What they read into the theory was then read out by Social Darwinians as scientific justification for their social and economic views (such as poverty being a natural condition and social reform an unnatural meddling).

Such views of evolution, competition, and the survival of the fittest are explicit in the ethos of modern capitalism, as epitomized by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in The Gospel of Wealth:

hile the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race. (Carnegie 1900)

While the validity of extrapolating moral and political views from science is questionable, the significance of such views in modern society is undoubtable.