Word: darwinistic
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...this reasoning, which the sociobiologists have nurtured, is that an explication of the biological determinants of human social behavior will guide us in molding society. Thus, arguing from this line of thinking, Wilson states that: "We already know...that the worlds of William Graham Sumner, the absolute social Darwinist, and Mikhail Bakumn, the anarchist, are biologically impossible." (On Human Nature) This is nothing more than scientific rubbish being used to justify and reinforce popular prejudice...
...door. We don't discover, until too late, that the definitions of the crisis have been posed in terms of interest to the elite groups. The possibility exists further, that the developed world may simply decide to forget countries that cannot be helped, according to the new Social Darwinist criterion...
...warning cry for peace has been heard alongside those of the Berrigans and the Quakers and the various experts on Communism who could see that the most damaging and unwelcome intrusion in Southeast Asia was that of Western colonialism. If one looks for the origins of the smug social-Darwinist philosophy held by the LBJ's and the Nixons who perpetrated this war "to save us from the evils of socialism," one finds none other than the Ivy League's (well, Yale's) William Graham Sumner, who probably did as much to push positivistic social science at the expense...
...article implies that if by natural law or genetic selection a group of people are unfit to advance ("intellectually or otherwise"), then why should a society waste resources to aid them. Herrnstein mirrors the Social Darwinist conclusion made two years ago by Arthur Jensen in the "Harvard Educational Review". Jensen argued that compensatory education had failed to remove the "achievement gap" because I.Q. is predominantly inherited. Such views taken out of context hardly seem worth criticizing, but when placed within the framework of today's politically reactionary climate, they become ideological justifications for such policies as the "benign neglect" advocated...
...Mesnard's unfaithfulness to his talent that really concerns Pluche. The two have it out in a climactic scene-a Magic Molehill sort of confrontation on the crisis of art in the second half of the 20th century. Mesnard emerges as a Darwinist who excuses his bad, profitable painting as an adaptation to an age in which Art is Dead and the future belongs to electricians. He misses the intellectual upheavals of the 18th century and the naive optimism of the 19th, but one must keep up with the times...