"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Wilkins gives short shrift, I think, to Darwin's skill as a writer. Reading the Origin, I was astounded by the persuasive organization of the text. (But then I haven't read too many 19thC works of science.)

[SEK]

This is where the speculation turns into mush, because I would say that Huxley produced similarly forceful prose, but he likely wouldn't have without Darwin's more staid and workmanlike prose. But yes, certainly, the fact that his theory was compelling and intelligible to non-scientists is a large part of the reason that Darwin became as widely vilified as was.

[Ahistoricality]

Would it be more accurate, then, to refer to that school of thoughts we call "Social Darwinism" as "Social Lamarckism"? Either way, the concept of nation/race was well on its way by the time of Darwin, and the nation-state system wasn't going to get any less competitive or self-destructive anytime soon.

[SEK]

Would it be more accurate, then, to refer to that school of thoughts we call "Social Darwinism" as "Social Lamarckism"?

Or "social Spencerianism," with the note that Spencer was, unbeknownst to himself, a Lamarckian. (As I argued here, way back when.)

[Ahistoricality]

Would "social Spencerianism" be redundant, like "biological Darwinism"?

[SEK]

It's a necessary distinction because he also wrote books like this, and the work in there subtended his sociological theories.

[Ahistoricality]

Ah, got it. The great age of generalists....