2 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



Origin of Species, in 1859, not only laid the foundations of 

 modern biology, but was the dominant impulse of many of the 

 fruitful and important researches which marked the last forty 

 years of the nineteenth century as the great era of scientific 

 progress. 



Despite the revolution efiected by Darwin, not only in the 

 special sphere of biology, but also in our whole conception of the 

 world, there has been little or no application of Darwinian 

 doctrine to sociology until within quite recent years. It is true 

 that Herbert Spencer had already applied the theory of the 

 survival of the fittest to the life of human societies, before Darwin 

 had applied it to the life of species in general ; but while Spencer's 

 conception of the part played by natural law in sociology was 

 luminous and fruitful, the illustrious author of the Synthetic 

 Philosophy made no attempt to give us a sjmthesis of social 

 history considered from the evolutionist standpoint. Such a syn- 

 thesis does not yet exist. But, on the Continent, a psychologist 

 of the eminence of M. Ribot has treated the question of heredity 

 under its sociological aspects, and the anthroposociological school 

 associated with the names of Ammon and Vacher de Lapouge has 

 endeavoured to apply Darwinian conceptions systematically to 

 social evolution. Nor can the valuable works of Francis Galton, 

 Ritchie, and Haycraft be overlooked. Although Galton's 

 researches on the heredity of genius and similar problems were 

 primarily undertaken from a purely biological standpoint, their 

 repercussion on the domain of sociology was inevitable. 



In the course of this work we shall endeavour to show the 

 essential correlation of the two domains of biology and sociology, 

 as seen not merely in the analogies between the life and develop- 

 ment of organisms and the life and development of societies, so 

 brilliantly and conclusively expounded by Spencer; but also in the 

 way in which the law of the survival of the fittest finds application 

 in both. We shall find that selection plays a role in sociology 

 no less important than it plays in biology ; we shall examine the 



