El darwinismo social puede ser útil

El darwinismo social tiene muy mala fama. Es un término que se emplea generalmente de forma peyorativa. Sin embargo, Eric M. Johnson, autor del blog The Primate Diaries, opina que el término puede significar muchas cosas. Para Gloria McConnaughey, por ejemplo:

If by Social Darwinism we merely mean the application of natural selection to ethical and social problems, the answer is obviously yes. If, however, Social Darwinism is taken to refer to the strongly imperialistic, racist and anti-social-reform uses of natural selection, the answer is just as clearly no.

Según Johnson, "lo que hace falta es buena ciencia", "utilizar la mejor información disponible". Para el caso, un darwinismo social basado en la evidencia, no en la ideología:

In this way social Darwinism can be useful (...) today to study how human evolved characteristics continue to affect our social lives. Not all of these approaches have been or are useful. Some of them have been racist and imperialist, others have been overly utopian. However, dismissing the possibility that evolution has something to teach us for our own lives is a tremendous disservice. What it requires is good science, not a rejection of the very idea because of the junk science that came before.
This is currently being done. In publications such as the Journal of Evolutionary Economics or in books ranging from Paul Rubin's Darwinian Politics, Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left, Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market or Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy authors are showing how evolutionary principles can be used to consider how best to organize our social system given our fragile planet with its finite resources. This is ultimately an ecosystems question and biologists have many of the skills it will take to find a solution. Previous social planners have come from the assumption that humans were different from all other creatures in the natural world. When they constructed our modern civilizations, what I often refer to as the human zoo, they assumed that understanding how humans interact in their "natural habitat" wasn't important. They made decisions based on economics and utility, not smart science. Some theorists in the past may have borrowed terms from the hottest science of the day to justify their own malevolent goals. That should be a warning for us, but it shouldn't discourage us from using the best information available to construct a world that we all want to live in. (*)

Por otro lado, como nos ha recordado el antropólogo Marvin Harris [1], el nombre de "darwinismo social"

expresa y refuerza la idea errónea de que después de 1859 los científicos sociales, encabezados por Herbert Spencer, "aplicaron los conceptos desarrollados por Darwin a la interpretación de la naturaleza y el funcionamiento de la sociedad" (Montagu, 1952, pp. 22-23). Lo que aquí hay que dejar claro es el hecho de que los principios de Darwin eran una aplicación a la biología de conceptos de las ciencias sociales. Fue el análisis y el estudio del progreso y la evolución sociocultural por teóricos sociales, tales como Monboddo, Turgot, Condorcet, Millar, Ferguson, Helvetius y d'Holbach, el que facilitó el marco dentro del que se desarrolló el estudio de la evolución biológica por Geoffrey Saint Hillaire, Erasmus Darwin (el abuelo de Charles) y Lamarck. (...) Con palabras de Darwin: "Esta es la doctrina de Malthus aplicada a todo el reino animal y vegetal".

(*) La negrita es mía. Los enlaces también.
[1] Marvin Harris, El desarrollo de la teoría antropológica, Siglo XXI Editores, Madrid, 1979, p. 105.