ABSTRACT
During the late-nineteenth century Spencer’s ideas on evolution were often confused with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Even John Lubbock, a scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Society, made such a mistake; quoting from Spencer on the subject of progress, he arrived at the conclusion that Darwin off ered hope that man would soon be in harmony with nature. Lubbock’s confl ation made Darwin appear in Spencer’s garb. However, the opposite was also possible. When W. G. Sumner taught the fi rst sociology course in the United States he gave it a social Darwinist bias towards struggle and competition, even though his textbook was Spencer’s short Th e Study of Sociology, which actually emphasized that the human future was one of peace and benevolence. Sumner achieved his desired eff ect by omitting the last chapter of Spencer’s Th e Study of Sociology, which contained the theories about altruism.
It is important to examine the basis of the confusion of Spencer with Darwin. Seven years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species () Spencer had used the development hypothesis to claim that, because of environmental changes, any existing species “immediately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fi tting it for new conditions”. is claim could indeed be used to prove that Spencer, like Darwin, had focused on the way environmental changes had caused variation in species. However, as Spencer himself knew, it was a mistake to see his early work as generating the same theory as Darwin’s. Spencer’s theory, as stated in “ e Filiation of Ideas”, stipulated that a benefi cial process caused inferior animals and human beings to disappear while leaving superior specimens to continue the race, but insisted that “there was no recognition of the consequences seen by Mr Darwin”.
Spencer was not modestly denying originality or admitting that his ideas lacked priority in the search for the origins of life. He would not have been humble enough to make such confessions and, in any case, they were unnecessary. He was not pursuing the same goals as Darwin. It was therefore painless for him to admit that he and Darwin had used evolution in diff erent ways. During the s, Spencer did not consider sexual reproduction as more signifi cant than parthenogenesis. is meant that, unlike Darwin, he did not see biological evolution as a theory
whose function was to explain natural variation in species. Spencer was a man “on a crusade against the notion of ‘species’”. However, later, during the s, when he wrote Th e Principles of Biology, Spencer did employ Darwin’s natural selection theories. In fact, Darwin’s work on natural selection then became Spencer’s most frequently cited source on the subjects of genesis and variation. Nevertheless, Spencer’s focus remained diff erent from Darwin’s because he believed that biological science was not suffi ciently advanced to provide an explanation of development based on heredity. Although Spencer thought it important to work towards establishing a science of development, all that his contemporaries were able to accomplish was the promotion of speculative hypotheses on the role of genetic change and on the emergence or persistence of organic characteristics. It should nonetheless be emphasized that the object of Spencer’s speculation in Th e Principles of Biology was not usually based on heredity, nor on embryology. Spencer was pursuing the facts, rather than the origins, of organic structure. His focus was on the shape and function of mature organisms. He was not signifi cantly interested in the question of whether species were permanent or modifi cations of earlier species. Nor did Spencer share Darwin’s view that long periods of time were required to account for signifi cant evolutionary changes.
