And I hope no one is interpreting this to mean I think social Darwinism is good. Previous thinkers on the subject seemed to think that it would be good for society if natural selection played out and the “strongest society emerged”. I think that, while true, social Darwinism is BAD. Our only hope is to fight it, because without any intervention, natural selection will produce a society that is miserable to live in.
Indeed. We should combat parasites as much as possible.
-Jon
after doing some further reading it seems that Social Darwinism is not as broad a description as I thought. To use the idea of social darwinism in a useful way we have to include Lamarckian selection (because ideologies don’t iterate discontinuously like organisms) and Sexual selection (because which modes of power are pursued are partially dependent upon which ones confer more status).
At this point it may be that the hypothesis of social selection in general would at this point be too broad to be useful for making predictions. with so many analogies to choose from one can probably come up with a reasonable sounding explanation for anything.
Of course this is a problem that has plagued evolution as well; reasonable solutions being proposed and subsequently accepted with no vigorous academic underpinning.