Is Social Darwinism,which emphasizes conflict & competition aspects found in Darwinism,a viable social theory?

Answer 1

Social Darwinism was invalidated after the relationship of evolution to genetic encoding was finally revealed. Humans share something in the neighborhood of 99% commonality in their genetics. The differences are relatively aesthetic and normally related to small regional environmental challenges. Biological growth is always relative to the resources and challenges of the world around it. Your DNA fundamentally tells you what ingredients you need at each point in your life, and if they aren’t available, you may miss that developmental stage. You might be familiar with developmental milestones of babies. These are essentially a list of things doctors expect babies to be doing at particular ages. In fact doctors can use these milestones to test babies to see how old they are if that information is unknown. Development through these stages requires that the stimulus for a milestone to occur must be present at the appropriate stage in life. Unfortunately, we know from experience that perfectly healthy children kept in social isolation through several of the developmental years of their lives may make them “feral.” No matter how people try to teach them to speak or interact as someone appropriate to their age, they can no longer develop the cognitive ability to speak as a normal person.
For the past 30 years an understanding of how the architecture of the brain relates to our actual behavior, and consequently, our ability to “do well” in the modern world has been developing. In the 1950’s Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus MIT, proposed the idea that the brain can be thought of as a set of organs in the body. It must perform and develop the same way as any other organ in the body; it must share similar architecture with the same organ in other humans; and it must respond similarly to the environment. This has more recently been supported by dynamic MRI scans of active brains performing particular functions. His field of study was mainly in linguistics and this concept of the “organs of the brain” meant that not only must our brains function similarly, but they must process information the same way, like the developmental milestones or language. Consider a baby who is just learning to talk. How does that child have any idea that the sounds a human makes have any more relevance than the noise a refrigerator makes? Further, how does that child discern words, or even come to realize that the order of the words (such as they are written on this page) have a different meaning than if they were put in a different order? Finally, how does a child realize that he or she can actually create the same words or come to form a sentence? How can you learn, if you haven’t been taught how to learn? The answer is a fundamental genetic programming which all humans share (unless there is an unfortunate error in their genetics). This has been further studied by others in the fields of Anthropology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Neuroscience. Steven Pinker has written a few books explaining this inherent programming that is essential to the social existence of every human on Earth.
What does this mean for social Darwinism? Darwinism itself was an incomplete theory of evolution once the principal of genetics was truly understood, but we now know, that “good genetics” has little to nothing to do with where you are from or the color of your skin. Social competition is a red herring of Darwinian competition. Human social competition is a short time-span blip on the long genetic timeline. How we align ourselves to survive for multiple generations has little to do with how we look or who we hang out with, and more to do with how we improve the general probability of survival. Think of language, no matter what national origin or what the words sound like, the fundamentals of linguistics are an evolution that is universal to humanity, beyond racial or regional bounds, because they help all humanity survive genetically. The social conflicts of the modern day don’t tell us who actually is better than anyone else, they only tell us that resources and environmental challenges are uneven. True advances in our evolution, the advancement of "superior genes", would more likely occur across the global human population, like the ability to speak a language, because such a change would have a better probability of increasing genetic replication than a small population of "superior genetics" would have in a large and challenging "inferior" population. The reality is that humans have no true understanding of what “superior genetics” are because we are still trying to figure out what role genetics really play in our lives and future.

Answer 2

Depends on your applications. Social darwinism is the concept that the most adaptive patterns of behavior will be replicated into future generations by both genetic predispositions - say to mood or temprements like extroversion (not that introversion is neccisarrily a defect, only a diffrent pattern of expression brought on by a more acute sensory threshold, but that is a rant for another day) because introverts stoink introverts to put it simply. Now give momsy and dadsy the personality quirks, the schema for correctly understanding viable solutions to problems and these problem solving paradigms will be socialized into the childs biological responses over time giving them an advantage or disadvantage.
There was a study that showed a returning effect, if you are raised in a high income family durring the correct developmental years you have a higher probability of landing higher up no matter how many financial chrisis's befall your family in the interum. Much has been said about the "once in poverty trapped in poverty" that allegedly creates generation after generation of welfare atrophied poor folks. This gives some patterned veiws to your question. Here is the ringer from a genetic perspective, who is better evolved a lion or a skunk? both continue to survive, but the skunk is a consumate pest with very little risk of extinction, where the lion is far more noble but a dieing breed due to external forces outside of its control, like say economic colapse for our well to do family.

Where you are going to find huge problems with this theory is that it was snapped up by a large section of the upper class elite in america and germany just before world war 2. Social Darwinism suggested that the proper cure for hemofiliacs was to kill them all so the diease pattern would no longer be a part of the human race, this is a wonderful argument for species "purification" by genoside, not something we go for much these days as the results created no real improvements for the species save the consiquences of uniting against the evil of Hitler's Germany.

So now what do we conclude? Simply what any darwinist biologist would point out, sure social darwinism may be a viable social theory, able to suggest limitations and patterns to aid our thinking of a rediculously complicated and variable human race, as long as we assume that the complexity we find currently is the result of the proper funcioning of that end. We need deversity as a species. The simple fact that there is such wild variation in human talents abilities and ways of thinking allows us to function with such amazing versitility.
Cheers.

Answer 3

I will make mine short, No. I just wrote a paper on this. Social Darwinism was disproved in the early 1900's

Answer 4

Yes, like in the case of the war right now between Israel and Hezbollah. But sometimes we (humanity) has to be "Nice" every now and then. Fore example giving to charity for people in need.

Answer 5

if there is no competition there is no reason for improvement and uncontrollable pricing and no real reason to try at all. there will just be conflict as long as there is more than one human in any one place.

Answer 6

No. Psychobabble from the psuedo intellectual elite-wannabes.

Answer 7

Copy and paste is a wonderful thing.

Answer 8

What'd you say????