In In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Carl N. Degler tells the story of how social scientists “made the momentous shift from believing that biology explained some human actions to seeing culture or human experience – history, if you will – as the primary if not the sole source of the differential behavior of human beings” (pg. vii). His work draws upon various publications in the social sciences – psychology, sociology, political science – in the years following Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Degler’s work responds directly to Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, disagreeing with Gould’s assessment of H.H. Goddard, though generally supporting his other conclusions (pg. 39, 267, etc.).
Degler writes, “Whether called social Darwinism, or social Spencerism, the defense of the social and economic hierarchy of nineteenth-century America that the doctrine was intended to accomplish held little appeal for the men and women who were shaping the emerging fields of sociology, psychology, economics, and anthropology at the end of the century. The aim of social Darwinism was frankly conservative; the rising social scientists were not” (pg. 13). He continues, “The point here is not that social scientists at the opening of the twentieth century were as hereditarian or racist as Americans in general. Instead, it is that they more or less viewed race as a contributory but not necessarily as the primary explanation for human behavior” (pg. 16). According to Degler, Franz Boas’ “introduction of history or culture as the cause of differences among peoples might be said to have been the sword that cut asunder evolution’s Gordian knot in which nurture was tightly tied to nature. It also constructed a single human nature in place of one divided by biology into superior and inferior peoples” (pg. 62-63). From there, “once the theory of acquired characters ceased to be acceptable, those reform-minded social scientists were confronted by a choice between biology – which no longer could be seen as experimentally cumulative – and culture, which was” (pg. 86).
In moving his discussion from race to gender, Degler recalls Foucault when he writes, “All human relations involve power to some degree” (pg. 106). According to Degler, “The ideological roots as well as the radical nature of the social or environmental explanation for sex differences become especially clear when we recognize that not all women social reformers subscribed to it” (pg. 123). Many women continued to use the separate spheres ideology as justification for their lobbying and reform work. Degler then examines class, writing, “Increasing numbers of [social scientists] were finding biology inadequate in helping them to understand or ameliorate social problems. Many, therefore, came to see biology as no longer relevant to social inquiry” (pg. 147). Social scientists were at first hesitant to examine class, to the effect that “few studies of the relation between class and intelligence appeared in scholarly journals during the 1920s. Class, after all, has never been a very live source of conflict among Americans, but race and ethnicity have a long history of controversy and conflict, and few periods of that history were more turbulent that [sic] the years between the First World War and the onset of the Great Depression” (pg. 172). This lead social scientists to examine how class differences could impact intellectual development for the better or worse. This also helped shift the outlook on race (pg. 202).
Darwinsim returned in other models. In 1968, Albert Somit of SUNY Buffalo used biological models to map political science. “Two years later, Thomas Thorson broadened the connection between biology and politics by suggesting that Darwinian evolutionary theory would be valuable in arriving at a theory of political and social change. Human affairs, he believed, were much more likely to be correctly understood from the perspective of evolutionary theory than from physics, which had long been the model, although a hardly appropriate one, for political science” (pg. 225). Finally, Darwinian models emphasized “the continuity between animals and human beings,” leading social scientists to examine the behaviors of animals for clues to human behavior (pg. 237). ( )