Darwinism

The term Darwinism refers most generally to the principles of organic evolution presented by the British biologist Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and more specifically to the popularization of Darwin's concepts and the application of his ideas to theories of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Darwinism directly challenged theological arguments for a distinct act of creation of humans—locating them, like other organisms, within the natural world. It also provided new justifications for gender and racial inequalities—suggesting that late-Victorian white masculinity was the most advanced product of evolution—and was used to define normative American manhood as economically competitive and (hetero)sexually active.

Darwin argued that species were not divinely created, static forms, but instead changed over time through the process of natural selection, in which random genetic traits that benefit an organism are passed on to offspring. Darwin's account of organic evolution by natural selection challenged prevalent religious and philosophical conceptions of humanity and masculinity, suggesting that human bodies arose from the same processes as other animals, that humans were originally less complex, and that women are neither derived from nor closer to nature than men. This contradicted Biblical accounts of the creation of Eve from Adam and of the Fall from Eden, as well as views of humans as stewards of the natural world.

Despite the paradigm shift of these perspectives, some advocates used Darwinism to legitimate the unequal race and gender relations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attempting to ground white male dominance in natural law. Darwinism suggested to some the possibility that different racial groups represented different evolutionary stages or branches, and was thus used to assert that whites were more evolved and more intelligent, while blacks and other races were more animalistic. In the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these assertions were used to justify measures such as racial segregation, antimiscegenation laws targeting African Americans, and anti-immigration legislation excluding immigrants from Asia and eastern and southern Europe. Some Darwinists also contended that men were more advanced intellectually than women and that men and women had evolved for different roles—men for competition and work outside the home, women for child care and homemaking. Such arguments were used to support the “cult of domesticity” for women, limiting women's rights outside the home and justifying men's sexual needs and pleasures as more vigorous and natural. (In response, female Darwinian theorists tended to emphasize complementarity between the sexes and the possibility of equivalence with difference.) With definitions of Victorian manhood linked to sexual reproduction, Darwinism was also used to argue that homosexuality was unnatural because it did not produce offspring.

Social Darwinism, in particular, influenced views of men as competitive, aggressive individuals and provided arguments for a natural basis for growing class inequalities. Social Darwinism represented the world as inherently competitive (epitomized by British social theorist Herbert Spencer's phrase “survival of the fittest”), suggesting that normative masculinity should embody competition to eliminate the less socially and economically fit. This focus on economic competition between individuals helped rationalize the spread of capitalism and imperialism during the Gilded Age—a position taken by Benjamin Kidd in The Control of the Tropics (1898). However, recent historical work suggests that Social Darwinism may explain little of American entrepreneurialism, which instead was rooted in Christian and Enlightenment ideals of self-improvement through work and accumulation. Eugenics in the United States, which received increasing support amid growing immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drew on Darwinian concepts of evolutionary progress to argue against racial intermixing and for the limitation of reproduction by groups deemed biologically and morally degenerate.

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