Bree

Wow, my nose is bleeding - I think this is the highest up on the fora I've ever been .

I'm interested in learning more about Darwinism as a social construct [edited to add: Morpho and Celsus tell me it's called social Darwinism]. I know that, particularly in the Victorian era, people were quick to label others (usually lower social classes and other races) as "less evolved" than they. I also know (particularly from reading Victorian era literature) that people used physical traits, such as a high forehead or "craggy brows" (as Conan Doyle once said), to determine personality traits.

Can anyone recommend any books on this subject? I'm also interested in the presence of Darwinism in literature - for example, I remember hearing about an obscure thesis (can't find the damn thing now) on the idea that Dracula was actually a commentary on xenophobia and other less evolved beings. If anyone can think of any other examples, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks, in advance.

Toto

You might start with Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man .

Secular Pinoy

I think social darwinism and Darwinism as a social construct are two different things. The first one refers to what you have pointed out, on using survival of the fittest (a term invented by the most well known Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer) to human individuals and society. The second one refers to postmodernist attacks on science in general, and evolution in particular (where they've been called the New Creationism).

beausoleil

To be kinder, thinking of science as a social construct allows one to look at the ways a theory spreads and becomes accepted that are independent of whether it is correct or not. There is an extreme fringe, but I find some of it fascinating.

Vorkosigan

It's extremely fascinating, in science it may be extreme, in technology, it's mundane. Bree, you might want to read....

The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Collins and Pynch)
Theories of Science in Society Cozzens and Geiryn
Explaining Science by Giere
The Pastuerization of France Latour
Laboratory Life Bloor
Primate Visions Harraway
Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Studies of Science ed. Knorr and Cetina
Science: the Very Idea Woolgar
Science as Practice and Culture ed. Pickering
Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics Traweek
Leviathan and the Air-pump Shapin

Michael Ruse's recent book on evolution comes highly recommended, but I forgot its name.

and the antidote: Higher Superstition

I highly recommend exploring this field. It can really help you think about science in new and interesting ways, and strengthen your own understanding of the epistemological basis for science and scientific thinking.

Vorkosigan

Celsus

Monad to Man

Tom Ames

Fashionable Nonsense Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, Noretta Koertge (ed.)
Biology as Ideology, Richard Lewontin

Collins and Pinch are, in my opinion, not particularly worth reading. They show little understanding of the concepts they criticize, and they think that their Frankenstein portrayal of scientists is somehow novel and interesting.

gcameron

Some friends gave me a book called "Darwin's Plots" which is a sort of literary critique of Darwin's writing. The author doesn't suggest that Darwinism is merely a figment of Darwin's imagination, but does suggest that his modes of thinking and of verbalizing his thoughts were influenced (overdetermined?) by the social environment he lived in, etc., etc. I haven't read very far into it. Seems interesting, though ultimately tangential, perhaps, to the science of it all.

Of course scientific expression is limited by language and culture same as anything else. It's been commented that in Newton's time, physics was thought of in terms of "clockwork" because that was what people could understand, etc. Though science attempts to model something beyond human culture, no doubt human culture will inevitably darken the glass.

gcameron

You will no doubt find many treatments of Darwinism/evolution in science fiction literature. In more mainstream literature, I suppose the influences are liable to be subtler. To take one classic of sci-fi, H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" is intriguing in the way it merges Darwinism and Marxism: the division of class between proletariat and bourgeoisie becomes the engine of a biological split, a division of the human species into Morlock and Eloi. Now if only Wells had worked Freudianism in there, he would have combined all three Evil Atheistic Lies of the Victorian Age. But, I believe "The Interpretation of Dreams" was published a couple of years later.

"The Time Machine" also offers a brilliant vision of Apocalypse as seen through the scientific beliefs of the time.