Word: spencerian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...political climate in the nation changed from one of conservatism to one of relative liberalism, Spencerian theory rapidly lost its credence. Educators and policy-makers began to see it for what it was, a self-serving, scientifically-bankrupt explanation for maintaining the status...
WILSON'S SYNTHESIS has itself run into opposition, some of it from within the Harvard faculty. His detractors say that culture and not biology is the chief determinant for human behavior and type Wilson's Sociobiology as simply the latest manifestation of the Spencerian notion. An explanation for the persistence of these theories, a group of Boston scientists wrote late last year in the New York Review of Books, is that such theories "consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race...
...Sociobiology is accepted outside the biology labs in social science, as Spencerian logic was, and if the government sees fit to write off present social inequalities as extensions of genetic determinance, all of Wilson's afterthoughts about political neutrality won't change minds. Late apologetics will not serve as a barrier to political misuse of his hypothesis. Like it or not, the new synthesis may be the twentieth century's excuse for radical laissez faire and rigid status...
...that the fish were a little too considerately shrouded in nostalgic midnight. The denizens were separated in numerous small tanks, in dramatic contrast to the Florida occanariums I had visited in which large and small, carnivorous and vegetarian, hostile and affable fish were promiscuously mixed in huge tanks with Spencerian vengeance. It enforced a certain startling realization of the multitudinousness of the sea: but fish which are not agitated by the threat of imminent engorgement are much more tractable to observation...