Most people think that the term "Survival of the fittest" was first used in evolutionary biology and then applied to eugenics as a convenient way of explaining why rich, white assholes are inherently superior to everyone else... but it was actually the other way around. First came the smug indifference toward the poor and unprivileged, then the biology.
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| ...then American Gladiators. |
Herbert Spencer, who also invented the paperclip (and by association, that goddamn assistant in Microsoft Word), is known as the father of social darwinism. This is basically the idea that rich people deserve to be rich and poor people deserve to be poor, all thanks to genetics. In other words, it is racism and classism masquerading as science, and it was all brought to you by a rich white dude who was born into a life of privilege (and whose sideburns looked like two parasitic ferrets attached themselves to his face).
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| Pictured: not Neil Young's great grandfather. |
Spencer is also credited with having coined the aforementioned phrase... seven years before the publication of On the Origin of Species.
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