The theory is that individuals, groups, and peoples have the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform.
“Social Darwinism” is a name given to various theories emerging in the United Kingdom, North America, and western Europe in the 1870s that claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. … Burgess helped shape American social Darwinism. They used social Darwinism as a justification for American imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, like many adherents of imperialism, argued that it was the duty of white Americans to bring civilization to “backward” peoples.
They rooted eugenics in the social Darwinism of the late 19th century, a period in which notions of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were popular. A growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian analogies of survival of the fittest into a social argument.
It formed the American eugenics movement during the late nineteenth century and continued as late as the 1940s. The American eugenics movement embraced negative eugenics, with the goal of eliminating undesirable genetic traits in humanity through selective breeding.
The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwin‘s theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable. Social..coordinate a circa 1927 publication released by the ERO, the goal of eugenics was “to improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family. Regrettably, this sentiment manifested itself to prevent individuals who were considered being unfit from havingchildren.
