When Europeans used Social Darwinism as an excuse for racism, did they also accept evolution as a fact?

by ifhyr
restricteddata

I don't know of any examples of non-evolutionary (or anti-evolutionary) Social Darwinists off the top of my head, but it's not impossible they could exist. Creationists generally do not dispute that competition between individuals can lead to local changes in distributions and prevalences; they dispute that it can lead to actual changes in species. Social Darwinism doesn't say much about biological evolution at all (it does not require change of species to work), even if the kinds of people who like it tend to like evolution as well (there are historical and probably thematic reasons for this).

To put it another way, if you're not an evolutionist you aren't going to call yourself a Social Darwinist — you'll use a different explanation or term for essentially a similar concept. There are non-evolutionary ways to explain why certain groups have ended up "on top" of course. "Divine providence" has a much longer history than does Social Darwinism — it has often been a justification for monarchy ("divine right of kings," "mandate of heaven," etc.).