The "Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social Darwinism

Southern Anthropology - a History of Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai

“…31 Spencer first used the term in an article in 1852. Claeys, 2000, '"The Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social Darwinism', p. 227. 32 Spencer, [1864] 1871, The Principles of Biology, Vol.…”

Does acceptance of corporate wrongdoing begin on the “training ground” of professional managers?

“…Proponents of social Darwinists projected Darwin's evolutionary natural selection onto the social arena, equating free markets to unrestricted competition between the "fit" and "unfit." In this account of capitalism, individuals who prosper were the "fittest" in the cutthroat competition; efforts to aid the "unfit" or losers would only interfere with the work of nature and obstruct development (see Claeys, 2000).…”

On the problem of scale: a general theory of morphogenesis and normative policy signals for economic evolution

“…On the hands of Adam Smith, this became the idea of perfection through competition. To be precise, it was the ideas first formulated by Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus that had a lasting impact on Charles Darwin (Claeys 2000;Coase 1998;Gordon 1989). The Darwinist analogy in evolutionary economics limits evolution to combinatorial novelty that reduces the process of evolution to statistical probabilities within a closed system, hardly able to exhibit any signs of life.…”