Editing Social Darwinism (section)

==Hypotheses relating social change and evolution==
{{Further|Sociocultural evolution}}
One of the earliest uses of the term "social Darwinism" was by [[Eduard Oscar Schmidt]] of the [[University of Strasbourg]], when reporting at a scientific and medical conference held in Munich in 1877. He noted how socialists, although opponents of Darwin's theory, used it to add force to their political arguments. Schmidt's essay first appeared in English in ''[[Popular Science]]'' in March 1879.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Schmidt|first=Oscar|translator-first=J. |translator-last=Fitzgerald |date=March 1879|title=Science and Socialism|journal=Popular Science Monthly|volume=14|pages=577–591|issn=0161-7370|quote=Darwinism is the scientific establishment of inequality}}</ref> There followed an anarchist tract published in Paris in 1880 entitled "Le darwinisme social" by [[Émile Gautier]]. However, the use of the term was very rare—at least in the English-speaking world {{sfn|Hodgson|2004}}<ref>but see {{cite journal |last=Wells |first=D. Collin |year=1907 |title=Social Darwinism |journal=[[American Journal of Sociology]] |volume=12 |issue=5 |pages=695–716 |jstor=2762378 |doi=10.1086/211544|url=https://zenodo.org/record/1431285 |doi-access=free }}</ref>—until the American historian Richard Hofstadter published his influential ''Social Darwinism in American Thought'' (1944) during [[World War II]].

Hypotheses of social evolution and [[Sociocultural evolution|cultural evolution]] were common in Europe. The [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] thinkers who preceded Darwin, such as [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]], often argued that societies progressed through stages of increasing development. Earlier thinkers also emphasized conflict as an inherent feature of social life. [[Thomas Hobbes]]'s 17th-century portrayal of the [[state of nature]] seems analogous to the competition for natural resources described by Darwin. Social Darwinism is distinct from other theories of social change because of the way it draws Darwin's distinctive ideas from the field of biology into social studies.

Darwin, unlike Hobbes, believed that this struggle for natural resources allowed individuals with certain physical and mental traits to succeed more frequently than others, and that these traits accumulated in the population over time, which under certain conditions could lead to the descendants being so different that they would be defined as a new species.

However, Darwin felt that "social [[instinct]]s" such as "sympathy" and "[[moral philosophy|moral sentiments]]" also evolved through natural selection, and that these resulted in the strengthening of societies in which they occurred, so much so that he wrote about it in ''Descent of Man'':
<blockquote>The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.<ref>[[s:Descent of Man/Chapter IV|Descent of Man, chapter 4]] {{ISBN|1573921769}}</ref></blockquote>