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Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903.
The Victorian biologist and early social
philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great rival of
Charles Darwin's. His theory of evolution
preceded Darwin's own, but was soon overshadowed because of the absence of an effective
theory of natural selection - although it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who popularized the
term "evolution" itself and coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "survival of
the fittest". Although no longer influential in biology, his extension of his theory
of evolution to psychology and sociology remains important. His "Social
Darwinism" was particularly influential on early evolutionary
economists such as Thorstein Veblen, but, more contemporaneously,
it was adopted with gusto by American apologists
such as William Graham Sumner and Simon
Nelson Patten.
Spencer's own thinking was derived in part from the socio-philosophical counterpart of English Romanticist thought - perhaps best exemplified in the work of William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Lamarck and von Baer. From the Romanticists, Spencer borrowed the concept of the interrelationship between an "evolving" aggregate and its constituent parts. As an aggregate history progresses, greater specialization and hence diversity is "created" by the Lamarckian adaptation of individual physical and behavioral characteristics to environmental circumstances. Thus, although diversity increases, not all diversity survives in that characteristics and habits that were poorly adapted to the circumstances will disappear. In Spencer's view, evolution is actually a progressive movement towards an "equilibrium" where individual beings change their characteristics and habits until they are perfectly adapted to circumstances and no more change is called for. Thus, Spencer's evolutionary mechanism is not only ultimately cumulant (i.e. it ends), but he also draped it in utilitarian teleological glitter, i.e. the idea that it is "progressive" in an ethical or moral sense - an adequately Victorian notion!
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca