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sidebar to ustwo's post:
eugenics and social darwinism--which is a lovely steaming brown gift left to us by herbert spenser.
most of the mapping of darwin onto human populations owes everything to spenser, who managed to strip almost all the interest out of darwin. for example, spenser compresses the time-frame that darwin was working with. spenser is responsible for the reductive and problematic gloss on "fitness" and survival---in darwin, these are complicated questions. in spenser, they aren't.
reading darwin, you reach a point where you cannot tell if the problem with evolutionary accounts is the time-frame or the categories that we use to order natural phenomena---that one type of organism mutates gradually into another: is that or is that not problematic? well it is problematic if you conflate the way we categorize natural phenomena with the way they are--particularly is you are thinking in terms of very long time-frames.
anyway spenser. i dont know why he gets erased all the time and darwin plugged into the place spenser leaves behind.
and eugenics is a twist on spenser, not darwin.
there. my tiresome historian side feels better now.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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