The Social Darwinist/Trivia

Note that Social Darwinism is usually actively disavowed by biologists, including Darwin himself. Actual Darwinian natural selection states that organisms possessing properties that are better suited for survival in the environment tend to pass on their genes more often than ones that are less fit for the environment. Take for example a population hit by a disease. If 90% of that population dies due to that disease while the remaining organisms were resistant against it, the remaining organisms will reproduce and the race as a whole will be resilient against the disease in the future. This is something seen all the time in bacteria and insects, which reproduce in greater quantities and more quickly than mammals. In addition, random mutations occur and will either spread throughout the population or die out. This usually occurs slowly over the course of several generations. It is not necessarily the strongest/most ruthless/etc. who are the fittest, but it can be (and often is) that which can band together in groups for mutual benefit which turn out to be the fittest. It's easier to remember if you consider the context is "survival of those most likely/able to have children."

"The survival of the fittest" is also something of a Beam Me Up Scotty, as it was coined not by Darwin himself but Herbert Spencer (though Darwin added the phrase to the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species). Due to lack of research, Spencer occasionally gets accused of being a Social Darwinist himself; the accusation comes from the fact that historian Richard Hofstadter presented the following quote from Spencer's Social Statics; "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." Hofstadter took the quote out of context; the very next paragraph begins with the sentence "Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated."

Darwin's "natural selection" was not the brute-force winner-take-all contest some have characterized the process as. Natural selection isn't limited to a competition between different individuals or even species as to which is the most powerful. If predators became efficient enough to hunt their prey to extinction, they would not be "fit", as they would die out too. All parts of entire ecosystems must fit together in a balance that could almost be likened to cooperation in human terms -- the opposite of what the Social Darwinist believes. This also means that, to really emulate the principles of evolution, a conscious agent would have to weigh the consequences of their actions on everyone and everything else rather than fostering an individual or group that is capable of surviving at the expense of others. In fact, sociologists use the term "social Darwinism" not to refer to the improvement of one entire society over another via "survival of the fittest," but rather, that aspects within a society that are popular or useful will continue to exist, whereas the aspects which are unpopular or useless will be phased out. It's more like Memetic Mutation, as Richard Dawkins originally coined it: memes that are more influential/likeable/popular/easily imitated spread from person to person, while memes that are old/forced/maladaptive get phased out. Quite ironically, social Darwinism is responsible for the growth of human and individual rights -- exactly the opposite of what fiction implies it is for.

Additionally, since actual Darwinian natural selection can adapt only to your current situation, the greedy "only the most physically fit survive" version embodied by the villains of this trope is actually a poor long-term survival strategy -- you would end up with a large number of almost-identical, seemingly-optimal "perfect" specimens that are then promptly slaughtered en masse once something else evolves (or some other change to their environment occurs) that preys on one of their shared weaknesses (or just kill each other off in the endless rounds of infighting they think is so important). It works out well, then, that evolution appears to be in many ways slow and conservative, frequently retaining seemingly "non-optimal" or currently useless genes through recessive traits and other mechanisms that can become useful in the future; for a species, diversity is more valuable than individual strength.

In fact, social darwinism predated the Origin of Species by nearly a decade and for decades its proponents actually rejected Darwin's theory until they figured out using Darwin's name was good PR.