Analysing the works of social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russell Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and Alfred Schäffle, as well as Darwin’s own work, Dr Hermans concludes that, although not a homogeneous ideology, different versions of social Darwinism all centred around the general notion that modern society could not, in the long run, disrupt natural selection without grave consequences.

The historian Cor Hermans wrote a bulky, but highly readable and interesting thesis on social Darwinism, in which he paid most attention to what connected the social Darwinists. This was, most of all, the high value they set on the concepts of selection and, joined to it, elimination: the disposal of the socially weak.