Friday, 23 May 2008

"survival of the fittest" sucks!

Darwin never said "survival of the fittest" - except to complain about it.

That phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer who wanted to use Darwin's theories to
promote his "Social Darwinism" - a dangerous idea that the Nazis used to justify
murdering millions.
Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that they were influenced by "Social Darwinism" and this had a major influence upon Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains. In the formulation of their racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily upon the theories of Herbert Spencer. As a result, a central policy of Hitler’s administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the ‘superior race’. This required at the very least preventing the ‘inferior races’ from mixing with those judged superior, in order to reduce contamination of the latter’s gene pool. The ‘superior race’ belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Spencer's ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. This philosophy culminated in the ‘final solution’, the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged as ‘inferior races’.
In contrast Darwin hinself noted that compassion and cooperation were those qualities that distinguished advanced civilizations. That is the reason why some societies and
species survived and others did not.
Darwin never said "survival of the fittest"

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