late Victorian intellectuals seized the language and imagery of Darwin's biology with enthusiasm, and hitched them to various continuing movements such as liberalism, individualism and collectivism, debates about heredity, race, and class, and questions of the rationality or irrationality of the human animal. Social Darwinism therefore became ubiquitous, pervading the entire range of social sci...

This paper uses a realistic problem taken from the telecommunication world as the basis for comparing di.erent combinatorial optimization algorithms. The problem recalls the minimum hitting set problem, and is solved with greedy-like, Darwinism and genetic algorithms. These three paradigms are described and analyzed with emphasis on the Darwinism approach, which is based on the computation of -...

‘Selfish gene’ Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapters, therefore, Darwinism in its modern, socially...