<< BTW, a major generally forgotten figure in all this is
the execrable Herbert Spencer. It was he who coined the
term "survival of the fittest" and who also was very
influential in tying biological and economic concepts
together in Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century. >>
We should not take this point without notice that it was "Social Darwinism" (which Darwin rejected, but for an agnostic comment to his cousin Sir Francis Galton (("hope not, hard to say" in so many words), father of "phrenology"), who later gears up with the Brithish matematician Pearson (statistics) to help foster theories of race and racism under the guise of "Social Darwinism." Social Darwinism finds friendly soil in the U.S. among various racial theorists, we'll recall, who of course provide intellectual grounding for the Robber Barrons and such. Noteworthy, German "scientists" also pursue ground familiar to Social Darwinism---Spenser, of course, gave a process philosophy to the notion of Social Darwinism's "survival of the fittist." Pearson gave scientific respectibility in mathematics to theories of race, and Galton gave us phrenology, or the science of measuring somatic differences, which later becomes important to American Sociologists studying juvenile delinquency. I guess the point is that Darwin's work becomes part of the racism of the late nineteenth century as well as the twentieth century, nearly world-wide. Ideology has power, and I suppose we can trace this thread back to Malthus' conjectures. So it goes. Ed Evans