Exam 6: Spencer, Darwin, and Some Evolutionary Tales for Our Time

Unlike Lamarck and other evolutionary predecessors, Darwin rejected the notion that physical traits acquired during the life of the individual would be passed on to their offspring.

E.B. Tylor argued that the behavioral differences between people in civilized and "savage" societies were due to the racial differences between their members.

Among early nineteenth-century "race scientists," polygenists argued that God created the human races as inherently separate and unequal.

While Tylor attributed some logic to primitive religion, Morgan claimed that "all primitive religions are grotesque and to some extent unintelligible."

The idea that competition fuels evolution through "the survival of the fittest" was one that originated with Charles Darwin.

Morgan's recognition that there are six basic systems of kinship terminology used by all of the world's cultures is still accepted as valid today.

Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko rejected Darwinian evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics, and used his position to persecute Soviet scientists who disagreed with him.

Social Darwinism involves the idea that competition is the natural order of human society, and that this competition results in evolutionary progress by eliminating society's weakest members.

According to Tylor, the earliest impulses for religious belief developed as people sought to explain what happened during dreaming and death.

Unlike many "armchair anthropologists" of the nineteenth century, Lewis Henry Morgan conducted original fieldwork with a number of Native American societies.