A Tale of Two Worksites

Natural History, Oct, 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould

Secondly, human cultural change runs by the powerful mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. Anything useful (or, alas, destructive) that our generation invents can be passed directly to our offspring by direct education. Change in this rapid Lamarckian mode easily overwhelms the much slower process of Darwinian natural selection, which requires a Mendelian form of inheritance based on small-scale, undirected variation that can then be sifted and sorted through a struggle for existence. Genetic variation is Mendelian, so Darwinism rules biological evolution. But cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies.

Nonetheless, the first blush of high Victorian enthusiasm for Darwinism inspired a rush of attempted extensions to other fields, at least by analogy. Some proved fruitful, including the decision of James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary first volume published in 1884, but under way for twenty years before then), to work strictly by historical principles and treat the changing definitions of words not by current preferences in use (as in a truly normative dictionary) but by the chronology and branching evolution of recorded meanings (making the text more an encyclopedia about the history of words than a true dictionary).

But other extensions were both invalid in theory and (or so most of us would judge by modern moral sensibilities) harmful, if not tragic, in application. As the chief offender in this category, we must cite a highly influential theory that acquired the inappropriate name of social Darwinism. (As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called social Spencerism since Herbert Spencer, chief Victorian pundit of nearly eveything, laid out all the basic postulates nearly a decade before the Origin of Species in his Social Statics of 1851. Darwinism did add the mechanism of natural selection as a harsher version of the struggle for existence that Spencer had long recognized. Moreover, Darwin himself maintained a most ambivalent relationship to this movement that came to bear his name. He took the pride of any creator in useful extensions of his theory -- and he did hope for an evolutionary account of human origins and historical patterns. But he also understood only too well why the mechanism of natural selection applied poorly to the causes of social change in humans.)

Social Darwinism often serves as a blanket term for any genetic or biological claim made about the inevitability (or at least the "naturalness") of social inequalities among classes and sexes or military conquests of one group by another. But this usage is far too broad -- although pseudo-Darwinian arguments were prominently advanced to cover all these sins. Social Darwinism, rather, usually operated as a more specific theory about the nature and origin of social classes in the modern industrial world. The short Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject correctly emphasizes this restriction by first citing the broadest range of potential meaning and then properly narrowing the scope of actual usage: