Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

Critical Thinking is the how we handle and think about projects that we are assigned. It is about how we use logic to find out the answers we need for the final result. It shows how we go about finding the answers and the process we go though to solve whatever problems we may have.

Whenever we do a large group project, we get assigned a mini-project. This part we do ourselves. It ususally consists of doing an essay with some internet research involved. The following is an example of one of these mini-essays. I recieved an overall score of 36 out of 40 on it, and a score of 10 out of 10 on the critical thinking part of it.

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is a theory that originated from Charles Darwin. He wrote the book The Origin of Species, and greatly publicized the idea that things evolve. During evolution, only the strongest survive. In the 1870’s, a man by the name of Herbert Spencer took these ideas of evolution and survival of the fittest and applied them to society, as a result, creating Social Darwinism, the belief that the fittest survive in our society.
The idea of Social Darwinism has been used as a justification of many acts that were committed in the past, events such as slavery here in the U.S. Social Darwinism was used originally as a reason for the corporations in the 1800’s to create monopolies, and it was used by Hitler to justify the killing of Jews during the Holocaust. It is even used nowadays, like in The Bell Curve, to support Caucasians getting better test scores an more successful careers, that they are dominant because it is survival of the fittest and they have “survived” in our society better than any other race.
In the Southern U.S., in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, when slavery was at its high, Social Darwinism fit in perfectly. It allowed all the people who owned slaves to have a reason for owning slaves while being able to call themselves “good” Christians. If ever the slave owners were asked about how they treated their slaves, they could always point out Social Darwinism as an excuse. The slave owners said that they were the dominant race and that if blacks were not supposed to be slaves, then they wouldn’t have been weak enough to let themselves be taken in against their own will.
The Nazi party and Adolf Hitler used Social Darwinism as a reason to kill the Jews. Actually, Hitler’s idea of the “ideal race” had been discussed long before he had put it into effect. Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, was the founder of the Eugenics Movement, which is a movement based on the pseudoscience that by selectively breeding the right humans, you will get the “ultimate” human race. This is where Hitler is said to have drawn his idea of killing the “inferior” Jews, that they were not suitable to the creation of the “pure Aryan race.”
I personally believe in Social Darwinism, that only the fittest survive, but I do not believe in some of the ideas it was founded upon. It is said that Charles Darwin said that the theory of evolution would eventually make it so that gorillas and Negroes would eventually become the weak and not survive. I do not support this racist view, but I do believe that the fittest are the ones who live and they are the ones whose genes get passed down from generation to generation.
When it comes to The Bell Curve, where the authors said that certain races are inferior to others because of them being genetically less intelligent than the other, I do not believe this. The concept of the survival of the fittest cannot be applied to entire races, but to individuals it can. I am an example to prove what the authors of The Bell Curve were wrong in their assumption. The last time I took an IQ test, I scored 152. When I left Vintage High School, I had a 4.5 GPA and I am the son of 100% Mexican parents, so theoretically, I have “inferior genes,” yet I still do very well. The concept of inferiority can be applied at an individual level but not at such a large scale due to the example just stated above. A race as a whole isn’t inferior, just certain people.
The concept of Social Darwinism has been turned around to justify many people’s outstanding views, which is unfortunate because the concept is a strong one that is true when applied correctly to situations, instead of using it to justify atrocious acts like the Holocaust and slavery.