Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Quite a lot has been said about the issue of Social Darwinism and the Eugenenics movement in the Nazi programme and the Holocaust. I’ve even said some of it myself here and here. Less has been said about the role of Social Darwinism in the First World War, though it probably had more effect on the science and religion question, if not on the death count, though the First War’s 37 million is at least comparable to the Second’s 60 million. The estimates of deaths due to “evolutionary” communism range up to 150m, and so dwarf both wars.

In my series on the phases of theistic evolution I touched on the interesting link between the spirit of the age and which scientific theories (and what kind of theistic evolution) are popular, or even possible. It’s hard sometimes to tell what dictates that spirit, but it does seem that it is at least as much the case, or possibly more so, that worldview dictates science rather than that the scientific evidence forms the worldview. Which is curious indeed.

In another context Gregory linked to an article by Steve Fuller. In this post the argument of the article itself is not important. But part of what it said was to point to the work of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Of Maxwell Wikipedia says: Maxwell is considered by many physicists to be the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics. The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists says he is generally considered: …the greatest theoretical physicist of the 1800s, as his forbear Faraday was the greatest experimental physicist.

For your edification, let’s attempt a synthesis of economics, free will and Intelligent Design. Maybe it will kick off a whole new academic discipline. Or maybe not.