Scientific Evolution Is Not Social Darwinism

Of course it is true that certain physical or mental traits will make it easier for a creature to stay alive under specific circumstances.  This is true whether or not one species slowly gives way to another in an evolutionary cycle.  Someone who thinks the idea of physical evolution, whether it is true or false, entails social Darwinism, or the idea that those with the strength or will to survive deserve to survive and are justified in trampling on others for the sake of success, has succumbed to an obvious non sequitur fallacy.  Progression as a creature adapts to or thrives in its environment and morality are two very different things.  Morality, if there are real moral obligations, is about what beings should strive for and carry out no matter their physical, social, or introspective envionments.

Fitness for certain living conditions does not mean a being deserves to exist at all, and the fact that the latter does not follow from the former is the refutation of social Darwinism as a supposedly valid moral system.  For someone to deserve a thing, there must be some obligation they have fulfilled or some value they have by virtue of their existence.  If there are no moral obligations and thus no states of existence morally better than others, nothing at all is deserved by anyone because there is no such thing as any true standard of justice.  There would only be wishes and feelings, both for those who are biologically "fit" to prosper and those who are not.  Whether or not morality exists, which moral obligations are logically possible, and what obligations are even likely are all issues far beyond the philosophical scope of science.

Social Darwinism is thus an extension of a scientific idea into a more specific philosophical category "survival of the fittest" is irrelevant to.  Either there are moral obligations that could make some people more deserving of life than others or there are no obligations and no being deserves anything no matter how much they wish they did.  In either case, fitness of survival is irrelevant to ethics and only a fool would believe otherwise.  Since most people think that the natural world or some other thing besides pure reason is what grounds reality and knowledge of reality, it is hardly surprising that this moral misapplication of evolution is popular in some circles when science is already placed on a philosophically erroneous pedestal.

Epistemologically, almost everything about the past is unknowable even though everyone can realize that only logically possible things could have happened (as opposed to the idea that God or scientific laws deviated from metaphysical logic as they shaped the past).  Evolution is no exception.  In an ultimate sense, even a being trapped in the present moment who thinks they know with absolute certainty what happened only four seconds earlier is foolish.  There is no such thing as a thoroughly intelligent person who goes beyond the mere sensory evidence and insists they have logical proof evolution did or did not happen in the sense of one species evolving into another.  There is, though, such a thing as logical proof that evolution is amoral and neither conflicts with the possibility of moral realism nor conflicts with moral nihilism.