Discuss critically AT LEAST TWO Social Darwinist authors who took opposing positions on the relationship between the sexes [3]
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关键词:Social Darwinist authorsSocial InfluencesDarwinian Thoughtfundamental tensionsEvolutionary Psychology
摘要:This article hasrightly generated a storm of controversy and criticism but what it demonstratesmore than anything is the enduring capability of evolutionary theory to be usedin explanations of social events, the teleological aspect of the Theory of Evolutionas such remains strong.
owards women of Darwin'ssocial and cultural environments. In The Origin of the Species it isclear that men are the active ones, engaged in competitionamongstthemselves to have the right to mate with the female of their choosing,(Darwin, 1901). Females in this sense come across as the passive receptors ofmale attention with little function other than to care for offspring andprovide the eggs necessary for fertilisation to produce offspring, (Richards,1983).
Though Darwin wasloathe to generalise from his observations to wider trends within society it isalso clear however that these wider trends even if he did not comment on themspecifically within his work influenced the structure of his ideas. Criticallythis can be said to be true of the interpretations he made of the animalbehaviours and actions which he observed during his expeditions and recountedin his works, (Banton, 1961). As such then Darwin in a sense was a subtleSocial Darwinist as while he may not have overtly applied his ideas to societyit is clear from The Descent of Man that implicit assumptions are madeas to the relevance of evolutionary theory to an understanding of society. ThusDarwin's observations and interpretations of animal behaviour in terms ofrelationships between the sexes can be clearly linked to other more prevalentviews in the society around him, (Oldroyd and Langham, 1983). Darwin however itmust be acknowledged was not as explicit as others who took the mantle of hisideas.
Herbert Spencer asmentioned has been identified as one of the originators of Social Darwinismalthough when examining his work it is clear that Spencer was forming anevolutionary theory of society before Darwin by drawing primarily on the workof the French biologist Lamarck, (Mayr and Provine, 1980). Lamarckianinheritance in contrast to Darwinian inheritance proposed that characteristicsof parents could be passed onto their immediate off spring in a fully developedsense, or as a crude example a blacksmith's offspring would have the strongarms of their progenitor. Darwinian inheritance instead holds that randommutations which successively and gradually change an organism is the key to understandingthe process of evolution, (Desmond, 1989). Spencer however quickly becameenamoured of Darwin's ideas even if Darwin's was relatively cool towards thesweeping generalisations which Spencer made concerning the application of histheory.
Indeed Spencer'sterm 'survival of the fittest' which he used to describe his sociologicalunderstanding of the dynamics of society has become synonymous with Darwiniantheory itself, (Dickens, 2001). At the core of Spencer's ideas is that societyis a form of 'super organism' subject to the same laws and dynamics ofevolution as the smaller organisms of which it was composed. The criticalelements to remember here was that Spencer considered the laws of evolutionwhich affected the outcomes and development of society as natural ones,(Spencer, 1857). As natural laws then Spencer was continuously concerned withthe detrimental effects he foresaw for intervention and tinkering with theselaws through in particular the practices associated with modern governmentalinstitutions, (Spencer, 1893). This is the reason Spencer was associated withthe 'laissez faire'
Politics of his day and while Spencerian Social Darwinismbecame such a popular ideology in the US at the beginning of the 20thcentury. Simply put for Spencer nature at
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