"Social darwinism" is an ill-defined slur, usually coming from the left, to describe situations where people advocate for regressive tax cuts and other things t

"Social darwinism" is an ill-defined slur, usually coming from the left, to describe situations where people advocate for regressive tax cuts and other things that reward societies' "winners". The analogous right wing slur would be "social engineering", whenever people on the left adopt various utopian projects to transform society, such as the eugenics movement, or wealth transfers, etc. Neither have much to do with long run evolutionary processes, they are all temporary short run things. To really be an evolutionary process you would need to control the success function, but you can't just create whatever success function you want, you need to feed that state back to the next generation in a stable way over many generations, but the exact same thing that makes a real success function stable is what prevents the ideologue from changing it. If every generation could make their own success function, then no evolutionary process would be at work. So it's important to tease out what is meant, and when there really are pre-conditions for evolutionary processes, then these must be recognized as operating, but when these do not exist, using the name of Darwin isn't going to make them exist.