Evolutionism And Social Darwinism Research Paper

1. Classical Evolutionism: The Nineteenth Century

Evolution in biology first appeared in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794–6), Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (1809), and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Lamarck, the most important of the three, argued that traits acquired during an individual’s lifetime may be passed to future generations through use-inheritance, a view many biologists embraced into the twentieth century. Although Lamarck held other views equally alien to modern biology (for example, that organisms consciously will changes in their bodily structure), Lamarckianism provided the basis for the social evolutionism that emerged after 1850.

1.1 Social Evolutionism

Varieties of social evolutionism emerged separately during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, initially in the work of the Scottish philosophers John Millar and Adam Ferguson and of the French theorists Marquis de Condorcet and A.R.J. Turgot. An anti-Enlightenment reaction after 1815 produced somewhat different versions of evolutionism in the work of Claude Henri St. Simon and Auguste Comte. Georg F. Hegel and Karl Marx contributed a third strain of evolutionism destined to play a major role in shaping events in the twentieth century.

The chief representative of the classical social evolutionism of the late nineteenth century was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer. In Social Statics (1851) and an essay Progress (1857) Spencer described evolution as a redistribution of matter and motion whereby all natural objects (including living organisms) develop from the simple (homogeneous) to the complex (heterogeneous), finally achieving equilibrium with their environment. In First Principles (1862) he launched a multivolume Synthetic Philosophy, surveying all knowledge from the perspective of evolution. In The Principles of Biology (1864–7) he substituted the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ for Darwin’s ‘natural selection,’ thus assuring readers that evolution is progressive.

1.2 Evolutionism In Anthropology

Although Spencer gained little following among British or American university professors, other writers won evolutionism academic respectability in the emerging social sciences. In Ancient Law (1861), the British jurist Sir Henry Maine traced the movement from ‘status’ to ‘contract’ as the legal basis of society from the ancient to the modern era. In The Origin of Civilisation and the Primiti e Condition of Man (1870) the English naturalist and politician Sir John Lubbock presented prehistoric cultures as part of human social development. In Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865) and later works, Edward B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, proposed that certain items of culture are carried as ‘survivals’ into later social stages. In Ancient Society (1877), a study of American Indians, the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan argued that human history proceeds from savagery to barbarism to civilization, each identified by its stage of technology.

The classical evolutionists’ terminology registered their commitment to progress (‘barbarism,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘fittest’) but each insisted that progress was a mixed blessing. Although a champion of laissez faire, Spencer conceded that industrialism was ‘extremely detrimental’ to workers (Peel 1971, p. 216) and criticized the militarism and imperialism of late Victorian England. Tylor stated unequivocally that material progress did not automatically result in moral and political gain. None argued that all societies move without exception through identical stages but only that they develop along roughly similar lines—a loose unilinearism at best.

1.3 Darwinism

In the Origin of Species (1859) Charles Darwin focused on speciation rather than evolution in general, arguing that all species develop through a process of natural selection in a struggle for existence. Since individuals vary within species, the better adapted tend to survive and produce more offspring. New species result from changes in conditions and splits in populations. Selection operates on individuals not groups or races, selecting variations, not varieties. Although small and gradual, selected variations do not disappear due to reversion to an original type as critics contended. Individualism and gradualism remained the hallmarks of twentieth century Darwinism.

Darwin unlike Spencer did not view evolution as an a priori deduction from general laws. But vestiges of an older evolutionism lingered. Darwin’s use of the term evolution and his eventual adoption of Spencer’s phrase survival of the fittest suggested a progressionism alien to his own theory. His doctrine of ‘sexual selection’ echoed Lamarckian agency. Unanswered questions compounded the problem. Physicists argued that the earth was not sufficiently old to allow changes numerous enough to create so many species. Biologists insisted that minor variations in organisms would cancel out. To this last charge Darwin had no reply, being unaware of the genetic theory of mutations formulated by Gregor Mendel in 1869 but unknown in scientific circles until 1900. These vestigial assumptions and unanswered questions left an opening for pseudo-Darwinisns who publicly praised the Origin but ignored or muted natural selection.

1.4 Social Darwinism

The result was doubly ironic. The first irony was that Darwin helped legitimate an older tradition of evolutionism even though the vast majority of scientists, clergy, and laypersons rejected his central doctrine. Widely accepted by the 1870s, this pseudo-Darwinian evolutionism was a teleological developmentalism closer in spirit to Larmarck than to Darwin. The second irony was that Darwin’s name—in the pejorative phrase ‘social Darwinism’—became widely associated with attempts to relate social development to biology or even to ‘natural law,’ whether or not the theory in question owed any debt to Darwin. This epithet first surfaced about 1880 in the writings of socialists in Italy and France, and by the 1890s appeared in political debates in the USA and Britain.

Darwin’s double-edged reputation explains the apparent determination of classical evolutionists to distance themselves from Darwinism. Although Maine, Morgan, and Tylor occasionally used the terms ‘struggle,’ ‘fitness,’ and ‘natural selection’ these passing references showed only that Darwin and his contemporaries shared a common milieu and, in some cases, a common debt to the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was one source of Darwin’s theory. In coining the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ Spencer attempted to reconcile the Origin of Species with his developmentalism. Tylor, in the preface to the second edition of Primiti e Culture, insisted that the study followed ‘on its own lines’ (Sanderson 1990, p. 30) rather than being derived from Darwin or Spencer.

The celebrated opposition of Yale professor William Graham Sumner and the Smithsonian scientist Lester Frank Ward in the 1880s underscored these ironies. A leading advocate of laissez faire, Sumner based his economics on the Malthusian struggle of people against nature. In the early 1880s, he assigned his students Spencer’s Study of Sociology and occasionally stated that the alternative to the survival of the fittest was the ‘survival of the unfittest,’ meaning that economic competition maximized success in the collective struggle against nature. His use of Spencer, still considered subversive at Yale, almost cost him his job, while his rhetoric brought immediate criticism and eventually a reputation as America’s leading ‘social Darwinist.’ The irony was that Sumner distrusted all metaphysics and had little use for Spencer’s evolutionism. In the face of criticism, he quickly dropped references to the ‘unfittest’ and remained ignorant of Darwin’s work until late in his career. Folkways (1906), Sumner’s sociological masterpiece, was neither evolutionist nor social selectionist.

Lester Ward, the founder of American sociology, argued in Dynamic Sociology (1883) and The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893) that, whereas blind struggle and selection are laws of nature, the appearance of the human mind allows conscious direction of previously wasteful forces. A prominent neo-Lamarckian, Ward made use-inheritance the basis of his faith in education and advocated a ‘sociocracy’ in which social scientists direct public policy. Although historians later termed Ward a ‘reform Darwinist,’ in tribute to his evolutionist arguments for positive government, ‘social Lamarckian’ is a more appropriate description.

2. Challenge And Crisis 1890–1920

Renewed interest in natural selection after 1890 altered the discussion. Attempts to demonstrate natural selection statistically, begun by Francis Galton in the 1870s, paid off in William Weldon’s study of crabs (1894), the first demonstration of natural selection in nature. The Austrian biologist August Weismann argued that the egg and sperm are immune from environmental influences, making natural selection the sufficient cause of evolution. Although flawed by later standards, this ‘neo-Darwinism’ (as opponents and then supporters soon labeled it) undermined the tacit compromise many pseudo-Darwinians had effected between Larmarck and Darwin. The rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in about 1900 by Hugo DeVries and others provided a missing key to understanding inheritance.

Ironically, however, these discoveries resulted in a temporary ‘eclipse of Darwinism,’ despite the now well-established belief in evolution. A school of neo-Larmarckians arose to challenge Weismann. Other anti-Darwinians defended orthogenesis, the view that evolution results from internally generated variations that are nonadaptive and immune to selection, the result potentially being the extinction of a species. Mendel’s mutations, although later a building block of modern Darwinism, were seen initially as a sufficient explanation of evolution, not materials for selection. An acrimonious battle between Mendelians and biometricans, a group of statistically minded Darwinians, muddied the waters, the central issue being whether variation was sporadic and discontinuous or gradual and continuous.

2.1 Sociology And Anthropology

In American and British sociology, social and selectionist evolutionism continued to flourish. In The Principles of Sociology (1896), Franklin Giddings of Columbia University (New York) described social evolution as a threefold process of aggregation, association, and selection, a view perpetuated in An Introduction to the Theory of Social Evolution (1913) by a Giddings student, F. Stuart Chapin. In Societal Evolution (1915) and The Science of Society (1927) Sumner’s protege and successor Albert G. Keller argued that folkways and mores (Sumner’s terms) were the result of variation, selection, and cultural transmission. Leonard T. Hobhouse, professor of sociology at London University, explored the evolution of mind in human history in Mind in Evolution (1901), Morals in Evolution (1906), and Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911).

But reaction was already underway. In Europe, the sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in different ways treated societies and cultures as discrete entities not to be evaluated by comparison with others or ranked hierarchically. Giddings himself gradually abandoned evolutionism for a rigorously objective sociology grounded in statistics, a battle led during the 1920s by his students Chapin and William Fielding Ogburn. Since the probabilistic thinking at the heart of this ‘new statistics’ was itself a legacy of Darwinism, evolutionism can be said to have contained the seeds of its own demise.

In anthropology Franz Boas and his disciples meanwhile attacked classical evolutionism for its use of the comparative method, for underestimating the role of cultural diffusion, and for ranking cultures from lower to higher. In the interwar years, Boasian cultural relativism informed such popular classics as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934).

2.2 Evolutionism And Social Reform

Evolutionism also shaped political debate from the 1880s to 1920. In Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), Laurence Gronlund combined Marx and Spencer to advocate socialism. In Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy popularized a tradition of evolutionary Utopianism that later included Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). After 1890, selectionist language shaped discussion of race and gender. Science, wrote Tulane professor William Smith in The Color Line (1905), showed that the heights of civilization had been achieved through the ‘Selection … of favored individuals and favored races’ (Bannister 1979, p. 193). Whereas in Physics and Politics (1872) the British journalist Walter Bagehot described international competition in terms of cultural selectionism, a new breed of militarists and imperialists depicted a physicial and often bloody struggle. After 1900, eugenicists increasingly invoked Darwinian rhetoric of struggle and selection to support measures that ranged from stricter marriage laws to sterilization of the ‘unfit.’

Although these new manifestations of social Darwinism (as it was now widely termed) may appear at odds with the temporary eclipse of Darwinism in biology, the appearance is deceptive and the label inaccurate. Racism and militarism were established traditions in nineteenth century thought and continued to flourish independently of any Darwinian references. Although Darwin himself sometimes echoed the racist views of contemporaries, he insisted that neither Lamarckian adaptation nor natural selection explained racial differences. Prominent racialists and even eugenicists were often outspoken anti-Darwinians, for example Arthur de Gobineau, author of The Inequality of the Human Races (1853–5) and American eugenicist Charles B. Davenport, an early Mendelian. Many self-proclaimed Darwinians opposed racism and militarism. ‘Peace eugenicists’ stressed war’s dysgenic function in killing the ablest of a nation’s male population.

Darwinian metaphors, in fact, typically prefaced proposals to avoid the consequences of uncontrolled natural selection, drawing on long-standing distrust of this aspect of Darwin’s theory. American and British reformers argued for government regulations and welfare measures on the ground that laissez faire was nothing more than a Darwinian struggle. Others called for more extreme forms of order imposed by the state: in colonial policy, sterilization laws, legalized racial segregation, or, for some socialists, in public ownership and an end to private property.

A few prominent social Darwinists were recognized extremists whose Darwinism was barely skin deep, for example Friedrich von Bernhardi author of Germany and the Next War (1914). When war came, the fact that Germanic names such as Ernst Haeckel and Weismann were prominently associated with extremes of Darwinism gave the charge new power. Even Friedrich Nietzche, a philosopher who rejected Darwinism, was included in the ranks of the social Darwinists. In the interwar years, and again during WW II, the phrase social Darwinism proved to be a powerful weapon against evolutionism and selectionism in the social sciences and in popular discourse.

3. 1920s–1990s: Revival And Controversy

In the interwar years, developments in biology paved the way for a revival of evolutionism and selectionism. Combining Mendel, Darwin, and population genetics, biologists viewed evolution as acting less on individual organisms than on gene frequencies within populations, mutations providing the materials for selection rather than being the sole source of evolutionary change. This ‘modern synthesis’ was articulated in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), Julian Huxley’s Evolution, The Modern Synthesis (1942), and George Gaylord Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944). In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick successfully constructed a molecular model of DNA. In works such as Crick’s Of Molecules and Men (1966), Jacques Monod’s From Biology to Ethics (1969) and Francois Jacob’s The Logic of Life (1973), these molecular biologists reduced all life to the impersonal operations of coding, copying, selection, and survival.

The newly professionalized field of ethology, the comparative study of human and animal behavior, furthered the rebiologizing of social theory. Influenced by the earlier work of Konrad Lorenz as summarized in On Aggression (1966), ethologists and anthropologists provided accounts of territoriality and aggression among humans in such best-selling books as Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (1966), Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), and Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups (1969).

Neuropsychologists meanwhile explored the link between physical states of the brain and human behavior, while behavioral geneticists identified mutations that affect behavior. In 1964, William Donald Hamilton coined the terms ‘inclusive fitness’ and ‘kin selection’ to explain patterns of animal behavior that contribute to group genetic fitness (the flocking of birds, for example, or sterile cases of insects) in Darwinian terms without resorting to ‘group selection.’

3.1 Revival In Anthropology

In the social sciences, evolutionism and Darwinian selectionism re-emerged independently. In anthropology, social evolutionism in the ‘classical’ mode first resurfaced in V. Gordon Childe’s, Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942), and in Julian Steward’s Theory of Cultural Change (1955). Unlike their nineteenth century predecessors, these social evolutionists were consistently materialist; eschewed an unfolding model of social change in favor of ordinary causal explanations; stressed exogenous as well as endogenous factors; and employed the comparative method judiciously. After 1960, a younger generation of anthropologists continued to work in this materialist tradition, among them Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service in Evolution and Culture (1960) and Marvin Harris in Cannibals and Kings (1977) and Cultural Materialism (1979).

Other anthropologists called for a return to social selectionism. Writing in 1965, Donald Campbell distinguished theories that explain the ‘mechanism’ of change from those that merely describe its ‘fact and course,’ calling his version of the former the ‘variationand-selective-retention model’ (Sanderson 1990, p. 170). Although cultural variations are random, Campell argued, the cumulative effects are increasingly complex, better-adapted sociocultural forms. In Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981), an ambitious example of cultural group selectionism, L. Luca Cavilli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford proposed that sociocultural variations are often directed and purposeful, making their case with sophisticated mathematical modeling. In both versions, the concept of fitness was purely cultural, not biological as with sociobiology.

3.2 Sociological Neoevolutionism

Evolutionism and selectionism emerged belatedly and more reluctantly in sociology, a bastion of opposition to all forms of biologized social theory since the 1920s. From the 1960s to the 1980s, sociologists Robert Nisbet and Anthony Giddens led the attack against classical and contemporary evolutionist theories (Nisbet 1969, Giddens 1984). However, in Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), Neil Smelser offered an evolutionist explanation of modernity based on a model he developed with Talcott Parsons. Parsons extended the analysis in Societies (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971), the fullest statements of sociological ‘neoevolutionism,’ so labeled because of Parsons’ efforts to distance himself from the classical evolutionism of Spencer. Avoiding all reference to cosmic law, Parsons explained that societies, as goal-oriented systems, adapt to changing environment through ‘structural differentiation’ and ‘adaptive upgrading.’ Although Parsons denied that his system was progressionist, idealist (in the sense of privileging values and ideas as causative factors), or unilinear, critics argued that his theory was teleological and ethnocentric. By the early 1970s, Parsonian neoevolutionism virtually disappeared, although a decade later there were signs of a ‘Parsons revival’ in Jeffrey C. Alexander’s Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1983, Vol. 4) and Niklas Luhmann’s The Differentiation of Society (1982).

Selectionism proved an even harder sell in sociology. Historically, Marxist sociologists rejected selectionist analogies despite the efforts of Friedrich Engels and others to give Marxism a Darwinian twist. Among non-Marxists, Max Weber rejected social selection (soziale Auslese) as having no explanatory value. Methodologically, sociologists could not see how Darwinian theory related to industrialization, stratification, social mobility, and other problems they addressed. In 1998, however, British sociologist Walter G. Runciman, in the wake of the success of sociobiology, called for a sociological rethinking of the ‘selectionist paradigm’ (Runciman 1998).

After the mid-1970s, the best-known and most controversial application of Darwinian selectionism to human society was sociobiology. In Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) Harvard entomologist and population geneticist Edward O. Wilson presented an extreme version of genetic selectionism wherein the organism is, in a widely quoted phrase, ‘only DNA’s way of making more DNA.’ Altruism serves this end, Wilson argued. Although he devoted only one chapter of Sociobiology to human behavior, Wilson expanded the ethical and political implications in his Pulitzer prize-winning On Human Nature (1978). Sociobiology was further popularized in David P. Barash’s Sociobiology and Behavior (1977), Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976), and Richard Alexander’s Darwinism and Human Affairs (1979).

Criticism quickly followed. A Boston-based Sociobiology Study Group, Marxist in orientation, combined some reasonable questions regarding Wilson’s biological reductionism with ad hominem attacks linking him to Nazi racial science and other forms of social Darwinism. In Use and Abuse of Biology (1976), Marshall Sahlins, having repudiated his earlier support of cultural evolutionism, launched a similar attack on the concept of ‘kin selection.’

By the early 1980s, sociobiologists were exploring the interaction of genes and culture, soon termed coevolutionism, the best-known examples being Wilson and Charles J. Lumsden’s Genes, Mind, and Culture (1981) and Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985). Although Wilson argued that culture is important in its own right, one critic characterized coevolutionism as ‘sociobiology in drag’ (Sanderson 1990, p. 175) since the entire process appeared biased toward the biological.

In the 1980s, biologists resumed debate of evolutionism and selectionism. In 1968 the Japanese population geneticist Motoo Kimura launched a ‘neutral theory’ of the evolution of proteins, expanded in The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution (1983). Kimura demonstrated that protein formation and gene function are controlled by a regular, continuous process relatively immune to natural selection. Meanwhile, other biologists argued that entire species might be units of selection rather than outcomes of it and that speciation occurs sporadically and cataclysmically, not continuously and gradually, a theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ first proposed by Harvard professors Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972.

During the 1990s the evolutionist divide deepened. Anti-Darwinians under the banner of ‘intelligent design’ seized upon the debate among biologists to mount a new crusade. In Darwin on Trial (1991) Phillip E. Johnson mounted scientific arguments sufficiently sophisticated to draw a lengthy rebuttal from Gould (1992 Scientific American 267:118–21). In Darwin’s Black Box (1996), Michael J. Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University, argued that gradual, undirected evolution could not explain cellular biochemistry’s ‘irreducibly complex’ adaptive systems.

Darwinians also pushed their arguments to new extremes. Under the banner ‘evolutionary psychology’ academic contributors to John Barkow et al. The Adapted Mind (1992) called for renewed study of the human mind within a Darwinian framework, an argument popularized in Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue (1997) and Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997). British zoologist Richard Dawkins followed The Selfish Gene with The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), in which he explained how natural selection could produce the improbable perfection evidenced in the human eye.

Just as earlier theorists were branded and dismissed as neo-Darwinists and social Darwinists, so these new selectionists were termed ‘ultra-Darwinists’ or ‘ultrasocial Darwinists’ (Wilson Quarterly 1996). Although the Darwinian modern synthesis continued to enjoy widespread support among mainstream biologists, cultural and political opposition to biological and social evolutionism remained almost as strong as a century earlier.

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