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A frequency table describes category counts and their relative frequencies. The full-sample percentage uses every listed case as denominator; a valid percentage excludes missing data for that variable. A cumulative percentage adds the valid percentages up to an ordered category. The denominator matters as much as the number: a statement about respondents with recorded use need not describe every respondent.

Employment is a binary categorical variable: 1216 cases are employed and 837 are not, or about $59.23\%$ and $40.77\%$. Neither employment category is missing in this output. Employment labels have no intrinsic numerical spacing; codes zero and one identify the two categories under a chosen ordering convention. Cumulative percentages for a nominal categorical variable depend on the arbitrary display order and add little to this two-category description.

Age groups are an ordinal categorical variable because their intervals have a natural ordering, although the grouped representation loses exact ages. Among the five visible age rows, ages 25–44 form the largest group, with $562/1730\approx 32.49\%$, and ages 14–24 the smallest, with $182/1730\approx 10.52\%$. The other visible groups account for $20.98\%$, $16.42\%$ and $19.60\%$ on that denominator. About $43.01\%$ of the visible five-row count is below 45. These percentages should not be silently applied to the stated total $2053$: for example, the same $562$ cases are only $27.37\%$ of $2053$.

The age variable key advertises six categories, whereas only five appear. Their counts sum to $1730$, leaving a difference of $323$ against the printed total; the table nevertheless prints zero missing values. This is an internal source discrepancy, not permission to label those $323$ cases as a particular unseen age group or as recorded missing data. The oldest row is labelled 65+ here but 65–74 in Figure 2. Even the age percentage total has a small display discrepancy: the five rounded percentages sum to $100.01\%$, while the printed valid total and last cumulative percentage say $99.99\%$. The much larger count inconsistency remains after allowing ordinary rounding.

Social media use is also an ordinal categorical variable. Its six ordered categories express increasing frequency, not equally spaced measurements: averaging category labels or claiming a one-unit change has a constant time meaning would require an additional scoring convention. Among the $1424$ observed responses, the mode is never, at $459/1424\approx 32.23\%$, followed by daily, at $28.37\%$. Weekly use accounts for $18.19\%$, use more than once a day for $11.38\%$, less-than-monthly use for $6.39\%$, and monthly use for $3.44\%$. The first three categories together comprise about $42.06\%$ of valid responses. Consequently the middle ordered response lies in the weekly category: cumulative frequency first passes one half there.

Combining the two daily categories gives $566/1424\approx 39.75\%$ of valid responses using social media at least daily. The same recorded responses are $566/2053\approx 27.57\%$ of all listed cases. The second percentage is the fraction recorded as daily users, not an estimate that classifies all missing responses as nonusers. Missing social media responses make up $629/2053\approx 30.64\%$. The directly calculated valid fraction is $69.36\%$; summing the individually rounded full-sample percentages produces the printed $69.37\%$, a minor rounding difference. With no account of the missing-data mechanism, the observed valid distribution should not automatically be generalized to those with missing use. Employment being fully observed does not make social media missingness ignorable. The substantive distributional summary must retain both the valid-response denominator and the missing-data qualification.

Charles Darwin's theory was political in its sources, conditions of production, implications and uses, but natural selection did not logically prescribe a unique political programme. An adequate answer should distinguish those senses. Otherwise the presence of a social analogy becomes an alleged refutation of evolution, or a description of differential reproduction becomes an unwarranted moral command.

The clearest connection is with Thomas Robert Malthus. In his retrospective Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin recalled reading the population argument in 1838 and recognizing how a struggle under limited resources could preserve favorable variations. Thomas Robert Malthus's argument belonged to a debate about human subsistence and social provision, not originally to an experimentally established law of all species. Moving it into natural history was a creative transfer: if more offspring are produced than can persist, then small heritable differences can affect whose offspring contribute to later generations.^[ref][ref]

The transfer was not simply an assertion that nature is a competitive market. Chapter III of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin explains the struggle for existence broadly, including dependence between organisms and difficulty surviving physical conditions. A plant at the edge of its range can struggle against drought without fighting another plant. Chapter IV makes the explanatory connection: inherited differences that affect survival and reproduction change what is represented in later generations. Competition is one possible relation within the explanation, not its only mechanism.^[ref]

The distinction can be stated precisely without pretending that Charles Darwin possessed modern population genetics. Suppose a heritable type initially has relative frequency $p$ and contributes an average of $w_A$ descendants, while the alternative contributes $w_B$. Under a simple faithful-inheritance mathematical model,Thus, when the denominator is positive and $0<p<1$,This modern reconstruction identifies a conditional relation between heredity, reproductive success and changing relative frequency. It contains no statement that a successful type is morally superior, that it is physically strongest, or that governments ought to remove aid. Those conclusions would require additional premises that are absent from the mathematical model.

The production of the theory nevertheless had social conditions. Charles Darwin's natural history drew on travel, collections, correspondence and the expertise of practical breeders. His voyage was part of a naval surveying expedition, so the geography of observation depended partly on the state's maritime resources and access to distant places. That helps explain the production of his evidence without implying that a naval expedition could dictate the eventual theory.^[ref] Artificial selection in pigeons and domestic plants provided concrete evidence that inherited variation could accumulate, making an initially unfamiliar mechanism intelligible through familiar practices. A breeder's deliberate choice, however, was an analogy for some consequences of differential reproduction, not proof that natural selection has foresight or a public-policy goal. The evidence and its presentation were historically situated even when the resulting claim concerned processes outside Victorian society.^[ref]

Human applications created more direct political stakes. Common descent challenged rigid accounts of human separation from other animals, while The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin extended evolutionary explanations to human mental, social and moral capacities. It also contained hierarchical judgments about peoples that must be recognized as historical assertions, not adopted as scientific facts. An account of universal ancestry could be used to contest fixed human divisions, while assumptions about unequal advancement could support their reconstruction in evolutionary language. The same broad theory therefore entered arguments pulling in different directions.^[ref]

Charles Darwin's discussion of sympathy illustrates why a simple laissez-faire label is inadequate. He worried that medicine and assistance might affect processes of selection, yet argued that suppressing sympathy would damage a noble part of human nature. This passage neither removes the troubling assumptions surrounding it nor supports the claim that he straightforwardly prescribed abandoning vulnerable people. It shows a tension within his own reasoning between evolutionary speculation and moral commitments. A historically responsible reading must retain both.^[ref]

Later social Darwinism and eugenics therefore require separate histories of selection and transformation of claims. Invoking natural selection does not establish that a policy follows from the biological theory; equally, calling an application a misuse should not hide how readily some contemporary language of hierarchy encouraged it. Historical explanation needs both the available scientific vocabulary and the institutions and interests that put it to work. A political genealogy alone does not settle whether the biological mechanism operates: that issue must also be assessed through evidence about genetic variation, heredity, adaptation and reproduction.

The theory was politically situated and politically consequential, but politically underdeterminate. Its Malthusian stimulus, its practical evidential resources and its human applications belong inside its history. The direction of a social policy cannot be read straight off the fact that inherited differences sometimes produce differential reproductive success.

For a sample or finite biological population of positive size $n$, the relative frequency of a category represented $n_i$ times is $n_i/n$. It is a proportion and differs from an oscillation frequency.