Chapter 6 Flashcards
Describe “Monogenist”
- Most compatible with traditional scriptural authority
- This was the belief that all human share an ancestry with Adam and Eve
Describe “Polygenist”
- Among American “race scientists” of the time such as Samuel G. Morton and Lois Agassiz, human races were believed to be different and unequal species.
- polygenists suggested that God created the various races of the world at different times, and created them as inherently unequal.
Who is Herbert Spencer?
- opposed to the ideal of degenerationism
- one of the only social evolutionary thinkers writing in the mid-19th century
- Kept the notion of cultural evolution alive and provided a bridge between enlightenment thinkers and the first anthropologists at the end of the 19th century.
- Where Darwin developed his notion of natural selection
Describe “Objectivism”
- proposed by Ayn Rand that the every man is an end to himself, not the means to the ends of others.
- Every man must essentially exist for his own sake
Describe “Unilineal”
-The idea that all societies will pass through a consistent sequence of stages, from savagery to civilization
Spencer and Darwin vs. Tylor and Morgan
- Spencer and Darwin’s work revolved around competition that caused some individuals to survive and reproduce while others perished and evolution was a progressive process.
- Tylor and Morgan argued for unilinear conception of social evolution.
Describe “Orthogenesis”
- the notion that organisms will follow a particular line of development irrespective of selective forces
- counterpart in biology to unilinear conception
- humans were the top of the chain
- Lamarkian, not Darwinian
- Teleological–Moving towards top of arrow (in 5 moves I could be a bird)
Who is Trofim Denisovic Lysenko?
- Gained notice form communist party leadership by promoting agronomic practices based on Lamarckian ideas of inheritance of acquired characteristics
- He believed that instead of breading higher yielding varieties of crops through hybridization, one could achieve higher yields by simply exposing seeds to extreme conditions.
- emphasized environmental influence over genetic inheritance.
- Vilified geneticists as “enemies of the people”
Describe “Psychic of Mankind”
-at any given stage of cultural development, people’s minds work in a like fashion, leading them to invent similar practices in response to their environment.
Describe “Survivals”
-Cultural practices may arise during a given stage, but persist even as the society that invented them evolves. —-This is the notion of survivals, cultural practices that continue through their own inertia beyond the stage that gave rise to them.
Describe “Animism”
- Original religious impulse
- arose as people tried to find an explanation for the universal experiences of dreaming and death.
- People reasoned that the soul has the capacity to persist beyond death
- E.B Tylor thought that everyone moved through these stages
Describe “ Animatism”
- the belief that plants, animals, and other features of the natural world also possess animating forces, called spirits.
- Spirits of the natural world could be propitiated through worship or manipulated through magic in order to ensure success in hunting, fishing, or farming.
Describe “Polytheism”
-An array of gods directing the workings of specific areas of the natural world
Describe “Monotheism”
- Similar to today’s beliefs
- Belief in one god
Morgan
-Economics and technology is what moved individuals unilineal from one stage to the next
