THE INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CLASSICAL ECONOMIC THEORY AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY

Industrialization has failed to respond to the socio-economic expectations of the large masses of people in developing geographies of the period, especially in Europe and America. 19th century capitalism has used industrialization as means of exploitation, and has paved the way for national and international exploitation without limiting the cheap labor and natural resource demands of factory owners. The main idea of early economists such as Turgot, Smith, Ricardo and Malthus that could be summarized as “the economically weak and poor are to go extinct and only the strong continues the living” was turned into the base of evolution theory which was supported by biological feeds and named as “natural selection” by Darwin. In this study, the reasons that the evolutionary theory proposed by Darwin as an unchanging law, and the attempt to legitimize evolutionary thought in society have been analyzed. The population theory of the classical economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who predicted that the population would increase in a geometric manner, and that the supply of food would increase arithmetically and this would lead to mass starvation; his contemporary biologist has responded to Darwin as the theory of evolution. As Malthus' theory involved; it means that those who are poor, incompetent and powerless because of the lack of available food resources cannot reach these resources as successfully as others, thus the strong will survive and the weak will be destroyed by natural selection. In this study, 19th century capitalist approach was found in Darwin's theory of evolution