
Social Darwinism Didn’t Die, It Just Evolved
Nazism has been characterized, rightly, as a form of Social Darwinism, and Social Darwinism can be described as the political application of the Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest.” Darwin himself denied (publicly at least) that this meant, or should mean, the elimination of the “unfit” in human society. Nonetheless, in the Darwinian system, Natural Selection was indubitably the driving force behind evolution and the development, ultimately, of intelligent human beings – and it achieved this by eliminating the unfit. Some years after the publication of the Origin of Species Darwin was to write: