(History nerd aside:
In the early 19th Century, Malthusian ideas about exponential population growth & natural overshoot took hold, haunting people with the reality that nature was not "designed" for all to thrive.
Darwin was a sentimentalist about this, too - he hated what evolutionary theory suggested about natural cruelty, saw zero sign of a benevolent creator in nature's torturous ways, and suggested that readers try to imagine that death usually came quickly and the "happiest" survived.)
"Social Darwinism" (the policy of 19th & 20th C eugenicists) never did grasp the fundamental fact of natural selection: that what makes one the "fittest" is contextual.
20th-century research built more accurately on this concept by illustrating the evolutionary benefit of so-called altruism, & other facets of herd species life. Discovering the acculturated difference between bonobos & chimps solidified this understanding: we are evolutionarily better together, in many contexts.
Also: We shan't mention how TERRIBLY the Star Trek franchise depicts evolutionary theory the vast majority of the time. ๐
@MLClark And most of those episodes were written or at least edited by a certain writer infamous for his weird crap scripts. ๐
@MLClark @WordsmithFL Yes! Theorists who believe that competition and cooperation exist exclusively as an either/or polarity have missed a key component of reality.
The cold, calculating imperviousness of their scientific theories disregards nurture which coexists with struggle.
This to be seems driven by prioritising rationality over emotion, a project that goes back 1,000s of years. Many scientists have been swept up in this project without even realising the arbitrary choices they've made.
๐๐ปHistorically, it comes from reading data through one's cultural moment. The junk science of evo-psych (not to be confused with the better work of behavioural studies) starts with preconceptions & works backward. Arguments for competitive evolution rise & fall with the researcher's culture: its fixation on specific demographics & views of masculinity.
Scientific method will correct for error over time, but individual scientists are *always* vulnerable to cultural subjectivity.
@MLClark The death of the one makes the many stronger. Without such struggles, life for the whole ceases to grow and entropy drags it toward extinction.
@MLClark I have sometimes contemplated that the true test of a species' evolved sentience is its ability to leap beyond Darwinism by helping along the weaker in its species.