The Formal Darwinism project probes the connections between the dynamics of natural selection and the design of organisms. Here, I explain why this work should be of interest to philosophers, arguing that it is the natural development in a long-running scholarly enquiry into the meaning of life. I then review some of my own work which has applied the tools of Formal Darwinism to address issues ...

How does Darwin’s Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Likemany foes ofDarwinism, past and present, theAmerican populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin’s theory (‘a dogma of darkness and death’) to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding.1 D...

The term “social Darwinism” owes its currency and many of its connotations to Richard Hofstadter’s influential Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (SDAT). The postSDATmeanings of “social Darwinism” are the product of an unresolvedWhiggish tension in SDAT: Hofstadter championed economic reform over free markets, but he also condemned biology in social science, this while many progres...