Did Social Darwinism discourage government regulation?
Please note that in Social Darwinist thought, there is an awareness that human beings in society need to live by somewhat different rules from human being in nature, in the wild. They certainly did not equate “fit” with “brawny”; they stressed, for example, the role of intelligence as a form of fitness, and Francis Galton and others played a part in the development of the psychometric intelligence theory. Many were intellectuals and had a horror of rule by thuggery. The early Social Darwinists usually claimed that their theories had an ethical dimension.
