What is the relationship between Social Darwinism and eugenics?
After Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and pretty much convinced the scientific community that competition was the cause of diversity in the animal and plant world, the question was, “Well, was this similar to what went on in the social world?” And a very heterogeneous movement called Social Darwinism – which appropriated the label of Darwin because it had scientific cache – arose, which sought to justify economic and social inequalities by recourse to natural patterns of variation. That is to say, the people at the top deserve to be at the top, because their natural abilities are being brought out, and the people at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom, because they suck. The political implications of this were that if we were to develop child labor laws, welfare to aid the poor, etc. that would be a subversion of the natural order, because the natural order is the cause of the social hierarchy. The people at the top deserve to be at the top, the people at the bottom deserve to be
