Tentative Response -- Darwin and the Socio-political World

Darwin’s theories, when translated into the socio-political world (which he didn’t) were said to inspire some of the most racist and ethnocentric ideologies. How is that possible? Can evolution be used for social questions at all?

Darwin’s theory of natural selection argues that organisms better adapted to their environment will survive more than other organisms, and therefore reproduce more offspring. In essence, natural selection is the idea that variations in organisms that lend them to better survive in their environment pave the way for the creation of new species, and that some organisms therefore have variations that make them more fit than others. As the question states, Darwin does not translate his theory to the socio-political world. However, many people use and have used the basic premise of his theory—that some organisms are more fit than others—to justify racist ideologies regarding the aptitude of different racial and ethnic groups. For example, many people believe that white people are the result of evolutionary processes that originated with black people, and therefore that white people are “perfected” versions of human beings while black people are primitive. Others argue that indigenous groups and societies are less sophisticated than those of Europe in the same manner. While I think that studying the evolution of the natural world can aid us in answering some questions about human behavior, I don’t think that the type of thinking outlined above will ever have any reason behind it.