His writings have passages that can be interpreted as opposing aggressive individualism, while other passages appear to promote it. Scholars debate the extent to which the various social Darwinist ideologies reflect Charles Darwin's own views on human social and economic issues. Social Darwinism is generally accepted to be a pseudoscience. While most scholars recognize some historical links between the popularisation of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, they also maintain that social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution. Academics such as Steven Pinker have argued this is a fallacy of appeal to nature as natural selection is a description of a biological phenomenon and does not imply that this phenomenon is morally desirable in human society. Some groups, including creationists such as William Jennings Bryan, argued that social Darwinism is a logical consequence of Darwinism. Later reference to social Darwinism was usually pejorative. Social Darwinism declined in popularity as a purportedly scientific concept following the First World War, and was largely discredited by the end of the Second World War-partially due to its association with Nazism and partially due to a growing scientific consensus that eugenics and scientific racism were groundless. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others, emphasizing struggle between national or racial groups, support eugenics, racism, imperialism and/or fascism. Social Darwinist definitions of the strong and the weak vary, and also differ on the precise mechanisms that reward strength and punish weakness. Social Darwinism holds that the strong see their wealth and power increase while the weak see their wealth and power decrease. Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in Western Europe and North America in the 1870s.
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