Few things are more powerful than a head and a heart aligned. When a scientific theory is in perfect sync with the dominant ideology of an era, the result can be world-shaking. Though, not necessarily in a good way. The “social Darwinism” of the 18th and 20th centuries is probably the most famous example of such an alliance between ideology and science, and it culminated in the eugenics movement and Hitler’s atrocities. 

At the time of this writing, however, social Darwinism is largely a thing of history. Obviously, there are still ruthless struggles for domination. But the mental climate or “zeitgeist” has shifted since the days of Adolf Hitler. And — unsurprisingly — the science is being re-written to fit: leading biologists are making a new model of evolution, carefully crafted to match the spirit and ideology of our era. 

It’s probably safe to assume that this new biology/ideology will be as consequential for the 21st century as social Darwinism was for the 20th. Whether for good or for ill… time will tell. 

The New Model 

You can tell the winds have changed when, all of a sudden, it seems inexplicable that people in the old paradigm could have been so stupid. 

That was the situation in 1860, just after the publication of The Origin of Species, when the evolutionary biologist Herbert Spencer marveled that political theorists of the past had somehow missed the fact that human societies evolve.¹

It’s the case again in 2025, but this time in a manner not so favorable to Darwin: biologists are scratching their heads at why past generations were so obsessed with Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”²

For example, British ecologist Alan Rayner calls this modern obsession “pathological.” He argues that recent genome research has shown that “there can be no such thing as an independent life because life itself originates in the mutually inclusive relationship between an organism and its natural neighbourhood.” If there are no distinct organisms, then “survival of the fittest” makes no sense. Instead, life evolves “through the receptive natural inclusion of what’s possible in changing circumstances, not the competitive elimination of what’s impossible in a fixed arena.”³

Not everyone would go as far as Rayner, but quite a few theoretical biologists are trying to replace the neo-Darwinian paradigm with a neo-neo-Darwinism based on principles of cooperation and symbiosis. Denis Noble, Stuart Kauffman, and Peter Corning are a few we’ve covered frequently here. 

These are sages from the oldest living generation of scientists who are finding a highly sympathetic audience in the youngest generation. Rayner, for one, seems to have something of a cult following of young intellectuals. Likewise, the “Third Way” ideas of Noble and his group are influencing a new generation of scientists — for instance Joana Xavier, a former student of both Noble and Kauffman who is known as rising star in origin-of-life research. A 2024 Forbes interview piece reports:

Xavier has identified another form of intention at the cellular level of emergent systems: cooperation. She doesn’t understand why it’s acceptable to think of evolution as competitive but evidence of cooperation is considered taboo. “I think to solve life’s origins, we’ll need to look much more at cooperation. And emergence really brings cooperation into the scene, whether you want it or not,” says Xavier…

Xavier is not an isolated case. The piece quotes Denis Noble: “I meet young people [nowadays] doing research in my university and in other universities who are working within a paradigm that is totally different from the neo-Darwinist paradigm.” As early as 2017, Corning was noting (rather triumphantly) that “cooperation” had become a buzzword in the evolutionary biology literature.⁴

It’s almost like everyone was asleep, and have now woken up:

“Cooperation is the key! Why didn’t we see it before?”

Why, indeed?  

Nature in the Image of Society …

“It is not impossible that our own Model [of Nature] will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts — unprovoked as the [super]nova of 1572,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image. “But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should.” 

What Lewis was saying is that, just as the scientific consensus of his day was created by the social and intellectual climate of the age and not by “mere facts” alone, it was also destined to be overthrown not by mere facts alone, but rather by a shift in the social and intellectual fashions of the age. When the intellectual fashion of the age clicks into place with an appealing scientific theory, it creates a self-perpetuating closed loop that seems almost invincible — until imperceptible shifts in society cross a mysterious threshold, and the whole thing collapses.

That day has arrived for Darwinism. The old “social Darwinism” is dead. We are living under a new “social Darwinism,” if one can call it that, and it is not aligned with the old reductionist neo-Darwinian model of random mutation and natural selection. 

It is not the first time this has happened. The first “social Darwinism,” so to speak, was the optimistic progressivism of the 18th century, brough about by the scientific, industrial, and political revolutions of that age, and it prompted prominent thinkers such as Goethe, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin to craft an evolutionary model of Nature in the image of their society. The grimmer mood of Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century led Charles Darwin to invent a modified model of evolution based on scarcity and competition: the second “social Darwinism.” In the decadent and prosperous decades of the late 19th century, that model was largely sidelined in favor of theories like mutationism and orthogenesis. Then, in the first half of the 20th century — a (second) social Darwinist period of global eugenics movements, economic crisis, and world war — the theory of natural selection rallied and emerged triumphant with the formation of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Always, the initial social/intellectual change has come first, and the scientific paradigm shift has followed after. 

And society just keeps changing. Just as the second social Darwinism reached its peak, it collapsed. As the dust settled from the Second World War, the world was horrified and disgusted by what came to light about Hitler’s eugenics program. As a result, eugenics fell out of favor in the West. People were also quite rightly disturbed by the scale of destruction in the war, made possible by new technology (like nuclear weapons). How could “survival of the fittest” survive in a world where any party could simply annihilate its opponents, fit and unfit alike? 

A quote often attributed to Albert Einstein shortly after World War II sums up the prevailing wisdom: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” A few years later, Einstein signed a declaration with the philosopher Bertrand Russell and others, admonishing the world, “if you can, to set aside such [political] feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” This will “demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty,” of course — but the alternative is extinction. “If you can do so,” they wrote, “the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

Russell reiterated this message in a famous 1959 interview: 

Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way — and if we are to live together and not die together — we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Russell’s sentiment has been very well received. “In today’s interconnected world,” says the statement for the UN’s International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace, “the values of multilateralism and diplomacy are more crucial than ever.” UNESCO’s website states: “In our increasingly interconnected world, communication across and between cultures has become more important than ever.”  A 2020 World Economic Forum article in response to the COVID-19 crisis advised that “[g]lobal cooperation is more vital than ever” because “the world is even more intertwined than it was 12 years ago [at the time of the 2008 financial crisis].”  

This kind of vaguely-AI-generated-sounding statement containing some variant of the phrase “our increasingly interconnected world” is pretty ubiquitous these days. And the message is always the same: Unity, which leads to Paradise — or Death. 

An alternative analysis sees this messaging campaign as the carrot-and-stick of an increasingly interconnected global technocratic elite who seek to subvert the will of the people and solidify power. 

For instance, the social commentator N. S. Lyons describes the shift as a product of socio-technological developments starting in the industrial revolution that have naturally elevated a “managerial class.” As early as the 1880s, he writes, future president Woodrow Wilson was arguing that society had become too complex for every issue to be settled democratically — the masses getting a say in all the “new things which the state ought to do,” he wrote, would be like “a rustic handling delicate machinery.” These ideas were championed in the next century by the American philosopher John Dewey — who was also extremely influential in China during the Cultural Revolution. 

Lyons writes:

Progressive Americans of the early 20th century like Dewey and Wilson had developed a habit of referring to China and the Chinese people as marvelously “plastic,” particularly suitable to be shaped at will by the hands of “strong and capable Westerners,” as Wilson mused in 1914. The country could, they thought, serve as an ideal laboratory for social experimentation. Mao agreed.

The result, according to Lyons, was that in China the technocratic managerial regime was implemented by a bloody revolution, while America has been transformed more incrementally — but with the same ultimate destination.  

In a similar vein, the philosopher Antón Barba-Kay characterizes the People’s Republic of China as “something without precedent: the first fully developed digitocracy, a totalitarian regime based on technical control and panoptical transparency.” He argues that emerging digital technology is naturally conducive to such a managerial technocracy, rather than to true democracy — in our increasingly interconnected world, there’s just too much information, and too many decisions, for the “people” to really remain in control.⁵

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that scientist-led mandatory global cooperation is the spirit of our age. In other words, the theorists of the new biological paradigm did not pull their epiphany out of thin air. It arose naturally from the prevailing mental climate in their intellectual circles. 

…And Society in the Image of Nature

Now, having crafted a theory of biology to fit what people see in society, the theorists proceed to use their model of biology to argue for their preferred vision of society. 

Alan Rayner laments the toxic results of neo-Darwinism:

This neo-Darwinian assumption featured prominently in the emergence of eugenic principles as a means of genetic betterment of the human race during the twentieth century, as well as in the rise of “Sociobiology” during the 1970s, and its most celebrated and notorious idea or “meme,” the “Selfish Gene,” advocated by Richard Dawkins. It also contributed significantly to the emergence of monetarist policy during the 1980s and global advance of materialistic consumerism that continues unabated. Whilst some people, even its proponents, have lamented the unpleasant implications of this belief as a source of profound intolerance, conflict, distress, exploitation, oppression and waste, its underlying logic has seemed impossible to refute. [Internal citations removed.]

Seemingly “impossible to refute” … but no more. In its place, Rayner offers his concept of “natural inclusion” in biology as an alternative model for society. 

Similarly, Stuart Kauffman sees his own theory of evolution as a potential inspiration for a worldview that can save the world. He warns that “we need to reinvent our spirituality now because, with the degradation of natural resources, humanity has only one decade to do it.” 

Denis Noble, likewise, presents the scientific question as having consequences for the very survival of the human species.⁶ He has also co-written a paper proposing a new theory of economics, inspired by biology, that takes into account the possibility of “irreversible” commitments to cooperation (joining the EU is an example he gives), and is less focused on individual actors.⁷

Peter Corning is perhaps the most persistent advocate of applying the new Darwinism to society, having advanced his views on the subject in his book The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice(2011), and again in Superorganism: Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species (2023), and most recently in the Cambridge Elements monograph Evolution and the Fate of Humankind (2025).

Using his biological Synergism Hypothesis as a model, Corning argues that we need to empower the UN and create a world government that will have the power to address climate change, prevent wars, and guarantee that everyone’s basic survival needs are met. Beyond basic needs, Corning thinks that people should be rewarded according to how they contribute to the system, as summed up in Karl Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Corning does acknowledge that Marxism has not always worked; he says that Lenin’s attempt to suddenly implement it by force was a disaster. Instead, he recommends following an “incremental reform model,” gradually leading to a world where everyone “must do his/her part for the collective survival enterprise — the superorganism.”⁸

Corning points out that in fact, the formation of the League of Nations and then the UN have already been incremental steps in that direction. He wants to go further. 

A Dawning Era

As one reads these eminent thinkers, it becomes increasingly clear that we have reached the point C. S. Lewis predicted: thanks to subtle shifts in the mental climate of our society, the old neo-Darwinian framework no longer satisfies. It’s not an absolute paradigm shift — we are still in a broadly progressive era, so the basic premise of the first Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin is still aligned with the zeitgeist. But the second Darwinism of Charles Darwin is no longer quite so well aligned, and thus, with almost comical predictability, a third “Darwinism” has emerged. (Sadly, without anyone in the Darwin family to actually give their name to it — though Noble argues that his view is more aligned with what Charles Darwin actually wrote than neo-Darwinism is, and therefore deserves the label “Darwinist.”) 

It should also be clear that the most important thing about these new scientific theories is not whether they actually explain the complexity of life in a precise mathematical or philosophical sense. They don’t; they never have. But that’s okay — what really matters is that they seem to be “relevant to the present moment.” 

As C. S. Lewis wisely pointed out, that does not mean these theories are entirely false. After all: evolution, in some form or other, is real. Natural selection and survival of the fittest are real. Cooperation and synergy in nature are real, too. The trouble comes when we take whichever part of Nature is most aligned with the spirit of our times and elevate it to something like godhood. That kind of idolatry leads to delusion. On the technical side, it can cause us to overestimate how much our new favorite piece of Nature can explain. (So, for example, just as Charles Darwin overstepped in thinking that random variation and natural selection could explain the coordinated complexity of living organisms, someone like Peter Corning might overstep in imagining that his “synergy” can somehow explain it.) On the sociological side, it tends to lead to hubristic attempts to refashion human society in the image of that one aspect of nature, with generally dire consequences. 

As long as society is under the spell of this new social Darwinism, any number of sacrifices in the name of cooperation will seem worth it. But the spell won’t last forever — it never does. Someday in the future, for reasons that now cannot possibly be guessed, the mental climate will shift again and large-scale enforced cooperation will no longer seem like the solution to all our ills. We will enter a new social age. And Nature, once again, will be re-made in the image of Man. People will wake up, once again, and wonder what the past generation can have been thinking.

By that point, the harm will — once again — have already been done.  

Notes

1. Spencer, Herbert. “The Social Organism” [1860]. In Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, D. Appleton and Company, 1892.
2. A term actually coined by Spencer.
3. Rayner, Alan. The Origin of Life Patterns: In the Natural Inclusion of Space in Flux. Springer Briefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science. Springer, 2017. 
4. Corning, Peter. Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind (page 10). World Scientific Publishing, 2017. 
5. Barba-Kay, Antón. A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 
6. Noble, Denis. “The Illusion of the Modern Synthesis.” Biosemiotics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09405-3
7. Hee Lee, Yun, Colin Mayers, Denis Noble, David Vines. “Against the Microfoundation Hegemony: Cooperation in Biology, Business, and Economics.” Theoretical Biology Forum, 112, 1/2, 2019. https://doi.org/10.19272/201911402005.  
8. Corning, Peter. Evolution and the Fate of Humankind. Cambridge University Press, 2025.