Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest'
There are nominally “non religious” people who believe in and preach the religion of a cosmic law. For example you if you do A, you will likely pay a price or a reward B. At the root of the pseudo religions is the same emotion responsible for all the classic religions, namely that the unpredictable random chaos is unbearable and any explanation is better than the suffering without the reward or crime without the punishment. A byproduct of this cult is the belief that the society is gradually moving for the better. Or that the winners deserve to win in some cosmic arrangement. So the “survival of the fittest” is a cruel spin by the survivors, it means the death of the misfortunate follows a cosmic order, it says nothing about the fitness of the survivors.
John Gray reviews the book by Matt Ridley who run the Northern Rock bank before it collapsed on the London Stock Exchange two years ago. John Gray ridicules the author in the New Statesman:
“It was the eccentric Victorian sage Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who coined the expression “survival of the fittest” and promoted the idea that laissez-faire capitalism was the final stage of social evolution. Impressed by Spencer’s work, Sidney and Beatrice Webb adopted his idea that economic systems evolve in competition with one another, but nominated Stalinist collectivism rather than the free market as the final winner. Laissez-faire was reinstated as the winning system towards the end of the 20th century, when Spencer’s ideology was resurrected in the later writings of Friedrich Hayek. Ridley is doing little more than recycle some of the aged Hayek’s dafter ideas.
Whatever political goals it is used to promote, the idea of cultural evolution is not much more than a misleading metaphor. Laissez-faire was not the result of any spontaneous process of social evolution; it was imposed on society through the use of state power. Memes are just a pseudo-scientific way of talking about ideas, not actually existing physical entities. There is nothing in society that resembles the natural selection of random genetic mutations; even if such a mechanism existed, there is nothing to say its workings would be benign. Bad ideas do not evolve into better ones. They tend to recur, as racist memes are doing at present in parts of the world where economic dislocation is reviving hatred of minorities and immigrants. Knowledge advances, but in ethics and politics the same old rubbish keeps on piling up. The idea of social evolution is rubbish of this kind, a virulent meme that continues to reproduce and spread despite having been refuted time and time again.”