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TASK 4: GOD NATURE AND TIME ((Evolutionairy theory -> comparative…

- - - - • Interest in diversity and
      - • Correspondence between species,
      - • Discovery of fossils,
      - • Cultivation of new flower types
    - - EXAMPLE OF DARWIN’S INFLUENCE: GALTON
      - • Galton tried to find evidence for the heredity of animal and human features
      - • Was not very successful, but inspired subsequent generations to address the issue of intelligence testing
- - - - o Was one of Darwin’s strongest supporters
      - o But still had some issues with many details of the theory
      - o Agnostic: when limits of reason are reached, an open mind about the unanswered question is the best approach
    - - o No difficulties with Darwin’s theory as it was tight to the variety of life that could still accommodate a creator
      - o Conway Morris:
        
         No opposition between science and religion
        
         Because E.T. says nothing about the first appearance of life or about the origins of the universe
        
         That’s why it is plausible to uphold a scientific approach of how natural laws allowed the universe, to develop and believe that a god created those laws
- - - - o Co-discover of the principle of natural selection and one of the very few British naturalists from a non-elite family, was among the first to discuss its social applications
      - o Argued that selection would cause rationality and altruism to spread
        
         resulting in one race and the need for government or restricted laws would vanish
        
        Darwin was thus receptive to Wallace’s argument that selection guaranteed the extinction of all the primitive peoples with whom Europeans came into contact
      - o He focused on the struggle among societies
        o 1868 Wallace announced an about-face, denying that natural selection could account for humans’ higher mental or moral qualities, and crediting their evolution to guidance by forces from a higher world of the spirit.
    - - o Darwin’s Cousin
      - o The first to sound an alarm about the “differential birth-rate”
      - o Argued that human intellectual, moral and personality traits – especially those making for success in life – were transmitted from parents to offspring
      - o He insisted that most social advantages were open to talent
      - William Greg
        o Largely agreed with Galton and insisted that, unlike the lower order, it is the middle classes who delay marriage until they can support family
    - - o Argued that human history, at least in its early stages, was a bloody and brutal affair.
      - o The origins of civilisation lay in the forming in intertribal warfare of the more cohesive tribes. But this progress ends unless a state can go beyond coherence and tameness, to the variability that ‘oriental’ despotism crushes
    - - o Arguing that tribes which included the largest proportion of men endowed with superior intellectual qualities, sympathy, altruism, courage, fidelity and obedience would increase in number and eventually displace the other tribes.
      - o Since morality is an important element in their success, both the standard of morality and number of moral men will ‘tend everywhere to rise and increase’
      - sympathetic instincts that lead us to aid the helpless are themselves the product of natural selection.
         Moreover, we could not suppress these instincts without damaging the ‘noblest part of our nature’
      - Darwin had expressed gloomy views about the future because ‘in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive’. Those winning wealth are not ‘the best or the most intelligent’ and ‘our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes’.
        
        At the close of the Descent, Darwin considers the contemporary implications of this principle:
        
        On the one hand, he reasons, those who are unable to avoid abject poverty for their children should not reproduce. - On the other, if only those who are prudent refrain from marriage, the inferior members of society will supplant the superior. Malthusian ‘moral restraint’ is thus a counter-selective factor
        
        **Heinrich Fick** o Law professor at the University of Zurich
        o Sent Darwin an essay urging restrictions on marriage for men ineligible for military service and opposing egalitarian social politicises  but Darwin never published such sentiments, because partly of caution and with Darwin there was always an “on the other hand”
        
        Darwin concluded that, although they should be educated, women cannot compete successfully with men, and are, by nature, best suited to domestic life
        
        Like Galton, he was left to hope that education would produce a change in mores.
        
        reading of Darwinism – as a biolistic justification for laissez-faire and colonialism – is what is generally implied by the term ‘social Darwinism’
        
        James Moore has noted:
        o ‘“Darwinismus” in Germany and “Darwinism” in the English-speaking world quite sufficed to express Darwin’s intentions, all his allies’ hopes, and all his critics’ fears.
        
        Richard Hofstadter’s target was laissez-faire conservatism.
        o In his historical account, social Darwinism was an essentially conservative ideology and social movement, which appropriated the theory of evolution by natural selection to support unrestricted laissez-faire at home and colonialism abroad
        
        Socialists found in Darwinism support for religious scepticism and belief in the inevitability of change
        
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        Arthur Keith: “Nature keeps her human orchard healthy by pruning; war is her pruning-hook”  if life is warfare, the discipline and obedience are cardinal virtues
        
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        darwinism, lamarckism and society
        
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