Survival of the Fittest Doesn't Apply to Animals in a Social Group
Such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest,' whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society ... The life of a man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis ... the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa ... Social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination ... Judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and ... there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good.
Notes:
Where all members rely on all other members.
Folksonomies: society social darwinism
Taxonomies:
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/science/biology/breeding (0.195242)
/technology and computing (0.190451)
Keywords:
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Concepts:
Natural selection (0.953685): dbpedia | freebase
Sociology (0.907857): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Life (0.898737): dbpedia | freebase
Nature (0.887867): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Science (0.781880): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Biology (0.629504): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Natural science (0.601411): dbpedia | freebase
Morality (0.501488): dbpedia | freebase
Social Darwinism in American thought