As you may have been able to tell from recent posts here, I've been exploring various aspects of, and opinions on, social Darwinism. In digging around in this area, I came across -- among many other books -- Disseminating Darwinism : The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender. There are two reasons I wouldn't have normally mentioned this book here. The first is that Amazon has just brought up a whole new interface design, and this book is perhaps the worst pick for showing how cool it looks -- the reproduction quality of the cover illustration truly sucks (unlike my tasteful rendering at the left). And second, while I'm interested in social Darwinism for its reinforcement of racialist attitudes already prevalent before The Origin of Species was published in 1859, I have no wish to get into the whole morass of anti-evolutionary creationist or pseudoscientific "intelligent design" theories. That said, the reason I am mentioning it here is an A9 search I ran on the book title, which additionally turned up a review.

I don't know when this started, but I recently noticed that Amazon is now selling single articles, formatted as plain HTML -- i.e., not some maddeningly crippled PDF format -- for $5.95 a pop. This particular review runs to three pages (as stated on the Amazon page; in fact, it's just a bit over 700 words) and is titled Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender: an article from Church History -- Church History being the publication in which it originally appeared.

And that wouldn't have been worth mentioning either, by itself. However, I serendipitously ran across the self-same article on HighBeam this morning. So... a) if you care the least bit (it could  happen) about Darwinism's relationship to place, race, religion, and gender; and b) if you click on the link below: you can save yourself six bucks.

from: Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender a book review by Seymour Mauskopf
source: Church History, 1 June 2001
via: HighBeam™ Research

Here's a clip from the article...

What was especially interesting to me about the case studies "down under" was how receptive the local communities were to Darwinism. This was particularly true for New Zealand where, John Stenhouse asserts, "New Zealanders responded to Darwin with more ease, greater enthusiasm, and less social division than the inhabitants of any other region in the Englishspeaking world." One of the local circumstances here that fostered positive reception on the part of some was the employment of Darwinian arguments by settlers against the Maoris.

And -- without any brief, pro or con, re evolutionary theory per se -- that's the part I'm interested in: how the concepts of natural selection and "survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin) were used to reinforce the concept of white supremacy. By the 20th century, this kind of thinking had helped to shape (via de Gobineau and others) the rationale for mass genocide -- and also informed (via Madame Blavatsky and her ilk) the "occultist" racism that still survives in contemporary New Age thought (if it deserves to be called such).