This is how charles darwin includes The Origin of Species (1859):

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that those elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction… lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one: and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Does Darwin here justify wars of aggression? Colonel Prouty reports that Darwin has done just that for shapers of U.S. military and foreign policy. So in this prewriting you are implicitly agreeing or disagreeing with that elite interpretation. You need not mention what Prouty and others in that elite reveal. Just keep them in mind.
And keep in mind that Darwin never uses the term “survival of the fittest.” That phrase was invented by Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer to apply Darwin’s theories to economics and human relations. But do Darwin’s words above nonetheless justify wars of aggression?

*** I will upload the information needed to complete the essay.

Category: Essays