Chapter 6:
Spencer, Darwin,
and an Evolutionary Parable for Our Time
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• In the early 19th century, Herbert Spencer was among the few scholars who
continued to advocate evolutionary theory. His views have become known as
Social Darwinism: as the “natural” order of society, competition results in
progress by eliminating society’s weakest members, leaving superior
representatives of humanity to survive. Spencer opposed any intervention that
violated this “natural law,” including public schools, public hospitals, and
welfare. In his Origin of Species, Darwin extended Spencer’s assumptions
into nature (a “struggle for existence” within “nature, red in tooth and claw”).
• It is often mistakenly assumed that Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Henry
Morgan were directly inspired by Darwin’s Origin. While Darwin viewed
evolution as a branching tree, with each branch diverging into a separate
species, Tylor and Morgan embrace the notion of orthogenesis, or evolution
along a single line leading to greater social progress. Tylor and Morgan
assumed that societies develop this way because of psychic unity: the minds
of people at a given evolutionary stage operate in similar fashion, leading
them to independently invent similar cultural practices. Finally, unlike
Darwin, competition plays no role in evolutionary progress as understood by
Tylor and Morgan.
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Tylor and Morgan identified the stages of evolution as “savagery, barbarism,
and civilization,” a scheme originating with Ferguson in the 18th century.
Societies were positioned on this evolutionary line according to their level of
social and technological progress; both schemes were ethnocentric in
claiming that the US and England represented the pinnacle of civilization.
• Tylor and Morgan differed in their applications of evolutionary theory. Tylor
suggested that the first religious impulses arose from speculation about death
and dreaming, leading people to conceive of the soul as a force that animates
the body and departs from it upon death. He conceded some degree of
rational thought to people at the lower stages of development, while Morgan
dismissed all primitive religions as “grotesque and unintelligible”! Yet,
Morgan’s discovery that all societies follow one of six kinship terminology
systems still stands as an axiom within anthropology.
• Both scholars were confounded by the side-by-side existence of traits
belonging to different evolutionary stages (e.g. a farmer in modern Europe
who nails a horseshoe above a door as a talisman for “good luck”). They
explained such discrepancies as “survivals,” or cultural traits that persist from
habit into a higher stage of evolutionary development.
© 2014 Mark Moberg