Social D arwinism

The major proponent of social Darwinism is the British sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who held that the upper classes are more fit, physically and morally, than lower classes in society. His thinking developed in an intellectual milieu shared with Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution in the natural world and demonstrates a reduction of social explanations of human variability to biology. As an academic position, social Darwinism has been largely discredited although it survives as a folk model to the present. Associated with eugenics, the social Darwinist position, as the basis of policy, has largely lost the acceptance it enjoyed prior to World War II.