Herbert Spencer.

Elliot, Hugh

doi:10.1037/13864-000

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…"An Extremely Intricate Subject" (Darwin 1859) In the Enlightenment spirit, Darwin recognized that "all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition" (Darwin 1859). His contemporary Herbert Spencer, the polymath responsible for the phrase "survival of the fittest," believed that the universe followed one set of laws of matter and energy, which he extended to life and, using thermodynamic principles, even to the mind (Elliot 1917;Weiss 2010). In that sense, we are all just the Krebs cycle writ large (Morowitz et al 2000;Smith and Morowitz 2004).…”

Section: "Unless Profitable Variations Do Occur" (Darwin 1859): Life mentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Life Law-Like?

Weiss

Buchanan

2011

Genetics

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Genes are generally assumed to be primary biological causes of biological phenotypes and their evolution. In just over a century, a research agenda that has built on Mendel's experiments and on Darwin's theory of natural selection as a law of nature has had unprecedented scientific success in isolating and characterizing many aspects of genetic causation. We revel in these successes, and yet the story is not quite so simple. The complex cooperative nature of genetic architecture and its evolution include teasingly tractable components, but much remains elusive. The proliferation of data generated in our "omics" age raises the question of whether we even have (or need) a unified theory or "law" of life, or even clear standards of inference by which to answer the question. If not, this not only has implications for the widely promulgated belief that we will soon be able to predict phenotypes like disease risk from genes, but also speaks to the limitations in the underlying science itself. Much of life seems to be characterized by ad hoc, ephemeral, contextual probabilism without proper underlying distributions. To the extent that this is true, causal effects are not asymptotically predictable, and new ways of understanding life may be required.Perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject would be to look at the inheritance of every character whatever as the rule, and the non-inheritance as the anomaly.Charles Darwin (1859)

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Section: "Unless Profitable Variations Do Occur" (Darwin 1859): Life mentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Life Law-Like?

Weiss

Buchanan

2011

Genetics

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“…He attempted to connect the physical laws of energy and thermodynamics to organisms and, via the role of energy in mental states, to society. 1 In 1851, before Darwin's Origin of Species, he was echoing Malthus about the futility of protecting the weak: The ''decrees'' of nature's ''far-seeing benevolence'' are ''pitiless in the working out of good'' via the ''harsh fatalities'' among the inferior members of society, all in the ''interests of universal humanity'' if we but have ''the nerve to look this matter fairly in the face.'' 2:150 Darwin developed his law of natural selection to explain organic evolution, but in Descent of Man 3 he praised Spencer and suggested how behaviors such as cooperation would have been favored by natural selection as human cultures morphed from primitive bands into modern civilization.…”

Section: Surprisingly Convergent Paths To Poles Apartmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 But ultimately Marx's evolutionary law was about resolution against rather than acquiescence to inequity. Spencer had predictably negative views of socialism 1 and referred to it only briefly and unflatteringly in his Principles of Sociology.…”

Section: Surprisingly Convergent Paths To Poles Apartmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shopping for answers from Marx and Spencer

Weiss

2010

Evolutionary Anthropology

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“…Given the era in which Spencer was writing, it is perhaps unfair for him to be pilloried for enthusiastically endorsing the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, this criticism started very early and is presented by Elliot (1917). Ellis (1919) commends Elliot's views to us:…”

Section: ____________________________________________________________mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(pp. [105][106] The redoubtable Elliot (1917) certainly expresses strong views about Spencer: ''...all the best of him will be found in his philosophy. His personality, outside his works, was meagre and petty'' (p. 9).…”

Section: ____________________________________________________________mentioning

confidence: 99%

HERBERT SPENCER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW OF PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

Leslie

2006

J Exper Analysis Behavior

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Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855, first edition) was regarded by his contemporaries, including William James and John Dewey, as a major contribution to what was then a very new discipline. In this book he first expounded his ideas about both evolution of species and how behavior of the individual organism adapts through interaction with the environment. His formulation of the principle that behavior changes in adaptation to the environment is closely related to the version of the law of effect propounded some years later by Thorndike. He can thus be seen as the first proponent of selectionism, a key tenet of behavior analysis. He also explicitly attacked the then prevailing view of free will as being incompatible with the biologically grounded view of psychological processes that he was advocating, and thus put forward ideas that were precursors of B. F. Skinner's in this important area of debate.

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Herbert Spencer.

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Is Life Law-Like?

Is Life Law-Like?

Shopping for answers from Marx and Spencer

HERBERT SPENCER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW OF PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

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