ABSTRACT
DARWINIAN BIOLOGY RAISED AS MANY QUESTIONS FOR VICTORIAN SOCIAL theorists as it appeared to settle. In particular it left unclear the significance of sex-differences in the evolution of higher forms of life. When we realize that it was not until 1901 that sex-linked characteristics were understood to be tied to the sex chromosomes, and not until 1903 that the working of hormones in human physiology was understood we began to see why for some forty years the exact nature of sex-differentiation and its psychic accompaniment was a subject of intense, though inconclusive, debate. 1 These biological questions were of significance in many areas of scientific enquiry but they loomed largest in the developing study of sociology, a study for which the groundwork was laid in the same forty-year period between the publication of The Origin of Species and the development of modern genetics. Early sociologists working in England or North America derived their ideas from Comte or Spencer, the two pioneers of the discipline who, whatever their differences, were agreed in deriving the principles of social organization from biological models.
