Darwin and Social Darwinism

CHY4UUnit 3

19th Century Scientific Advances

• Science is trendy and practical– Electron– Compound microscope– Pasteurization– Thermodynamics– Periodic table– [Zipper patent, paper clip]

Giraffe

• A LONG LONG time ago there were different kinds of giraffes:– Short necked– Long necked

Evolution and Natural Selection

• Evolution = change over time– Mechanism = natural selection• Those species that are best adapted to their

environment survive, while those that are not adapted to their environment die out.

Challenge To Traditional Thinking

Age of earth according to the Bible

Religious dogma

Change is not desirable

Age of earth is millions of years old

Scientific thinking

Change and progress are possible

Brave New World

• http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/The+Nature+of+Things/Darwin%27s+Brave+New+World/ID/1316757054/

• CBC, The Nature of Things, Darwin’s Brave New World (45.04) [intro is 2:40]

Finches on Galapagos Islands

Darwin:“I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted; but we shall soon see that this is the case.”

Jonathan Clements, Darwin’s Notebook: The Life, Times, and Discoveries of Charles Robert Darwin (London: Quid Publishing, 2009), 50.

“The most curious fact is the perfect gradation in the size of the beaks in the different species of Geospiza, from one as large as that of a hawfinch to that of a chaffinch… there are no less than six species with insensibly graduated beaks… Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

Jonathan Clements, Darwin’s Notebook: The Life, Times, and Discoveries of Charles Robert Darwin (London: Quid Publishing, 2009), 65.

Galapagos Online: Darwin’s Finches. N.d., http://www.galapagosonline.com/Galapagos_Natural_History/Birds_and_Animals/Birds/Darwins_Finches.html (Nov. 10, 2011)

PBS. Evolution Library. Adaptive Radiation – Darwin’s Finches. 2001. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/image_pop/l_016_02.html (Nov. 10, 2011)

Tree of Life

Ian Sample, Evolution: Charles Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life, The Guardian, 2009, Jan. 21, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/21/charles-darwin-evolution-species-tree-life (Nov. 10, 2011).

Social Darwinism

• Misapplication of Darwinian theory of “survival of the fittest” to human races.

• “social Darwinism, the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited, while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak. Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer. “

• “an extension of Darwinism to social phenomena; specifically: a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence.”

Giraffe

• http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/15/giraffe-necks-not-for-sex/