Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory

People are appalled at the suggestion that we have innate tendencies toward aggression, for example, because it clashes with narratives about all social ills being caused by culture, and if you suffer from utopian notions of humanity in its natural state, it seems like endorsement of violence to acknowledge that it is an evolved behaviour, as opposed to a brute fact which we can use to better understand and combat the problem.

"Social Darwinism" is a misleading label, because it refers to the idea that we should allow the weak to perish because it improves the quality of people in society, but this principle does not follow from the fact of human evolution. It is deriving a highly questionable "ought" from an "is", and it's a line of thought which long predates the discovery of evolution. Socrates argued against Callicles' belief that the strong dominating the weak was the justice of nature more than two millennia before Darwin was born.