When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best. The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labour for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be over-estimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth.
Darwin Science is always ideological, especially among the figures lauded as objective. Positivism presumes the classically misinterpreted Hegelian maxim “What is real is ration and what is rational is real” as meaning that there is some eternal truth locked within empirical observations, where-as Hegel’s point is precisely that these points play a role in the ever changing movement of historical truths.