Dan McMillan — Charles Darwin’s tragic error: Hitler, evolution, racism and the Holocaust

Darwin gets the rap for a specious theory similar to his propounded by Herbert Spencer, who has been largely forgotten today but in his time his writings were as famous as Darwin and Spencer made his living from book sales. "Social Darwinism" is actually Herbert Spencer's creation, through the influence of Malthus, Galton, and Lamarck as much as Darwin, although the term was not applied to Spencer until much later. Spencer published his evolutionary theory three years prior to the publication of Darwin's The Origin of the Species.

... propagandists who are opposed to evolution often try to blame Darwin for the policies later known as social Darwinism. However, these views were primarily associated with the English sociologist Herbert Spencer. In his 1851 bestseller Social Statics, Spencer developed most of the ideas attributed to social Darwinism when he argued that the poor should not be helped through government programs, but should be allowed to die for the betterment of society: — Deconstructing Social Darwinism (for an alternative view see Damon Root, The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer: How a libertarian individualist was recast as a social Darwinist)

It was Spencer for example that connected evolution with social progress, not Darwin, and his notion is different from Darwin's natural selection. Moreover, the idea that evolution toward progress is driven by "survival of the fittest" is Spencer's, and Spencer coined that phrase, not Darwin. Spencer's use of the notion is a misstatement of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin did use "survival of the fittest" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species after it had become well-known after Spencer, but he gives a different meaning there from Spencer's usage with respect to social progress. 

Darwin did not connect his theory of natural selection with social progress. That idea was Herbert Spencer's.

But the claim that Spencer's notion of evolution and social progress bastardized Darwin's theory of natural selection and that Spencer was the progenitor of "social Darwinism" does't fully capture the story either, since there is much more to the history. See Deconstructing Social Darwinism, parts 1-4.

It's important to understand this since what developed into "social Darwinism" from the POV of the left lies at the foundation of much social, political and economic thinking on the right, as well as underlying neoliberalism as a social and political ideology. Moreover, Libertarians claim Spencer as a forerunner and early Libertarian:  "Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, praised Social Statics as 'the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written'.” — Matt Zwolinski, A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer.

Lionized on the right, and demonized on the left. Given the shift of the universe of discourse to inequality, we are probably going to be hearing a lot about this, at least implicit in the discussion if not explicitly.

Salon
Charles Darwin’s tragic error: Hitler, evolution, racism and the Holocaust

Dan McMillan