{"id":11098,"date":"2013-01-06T08:27:37","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T12:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=11098"},"modified":"2013-01-06T08:27:37","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T12:27:37","slug":"christopher-donohue-at-imperial-college-london-on-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2013\/01\/06\/christopher-donohue-at-imperial-college-london-on-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Donohue at Imperial College London on Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of Maryland PhD student and Ether Wave Propaganda contributor Christopher Donohue has been spending time this academic year in Moscow, at the\u00a0Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities<\/span><\/a><\/span>, which is part of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. This week, he will be passing through London, and on Thursday, 10 January, he will be speaking at Imperial College London’s CHoSTM seminar. The seminar will be held, as usual, from 4 to 6pm at the Seminar and Learning Centre (SALC) on the 5th floor of the Sherfield Building in South Kensington<\/span><\/a><\/span>. His talk is titled:<\/span><\/p>\n

From \u2018Natural Selection\u2019 to \u2018Social Selection\u2019: The Differentiation and Career of a Concept in Early Twentieth-Century Social Thought.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Abstract below the fold<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Building on the work of the ethnologist Paul Broca, Georges Vacher de Lapouge in \u201cLes S\u00e9lections Sociales\u201d (1896) argued that while \u201cnatural selection\u201d was most important in determining the fitness of animals in nature, the \u201cfitness\u201d of human beings, due to the existence of civilization, was determined by fundamentally different factors. Rather than physical strength, resistance to disease, or the ability to obtain food or a mate, the \u201cfitness\u201d of human beings was defined by such diverse elements as marriage customs, legal institutions, occupations, social class, war, and residency within the urban city as opposed to the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lapouge\u2019s work inaugurated a decades-long debate among social theorists in Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, which included figures as diverse as the sociologists Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Edward Ross, and the economist William Ripley over the exact scope, power, and mechanisms of \u201csocial selection.\u201d\u00a0 Discussions of \u201csocial selection\u201d refined detailed debates over the nature of civilization, the role of institutions in the development of individual and group psychology, and the divide between the animal and the human among numerous and important social theorists of the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The presentation will describe how social theorists in Europe and America used the concepts \u201cnatural selection\u201d as well as \u201csocial selection\u201d to determine the critical divide between the \u201cnatural\u201d and the \u201csocial\u201d from the beginning of the twentieth century to the years leading up to the inter-war period.\u00a0 The presentation will also depict how the debate over \u201csocial selection\u201d and \u201cnatural selection\u201d greatly helped to define the subject matter of the rapidly developing social sciences in the first decades of the twentieth century.\u00a0 Finally, the presentation will end with a consideration of how the terms \u201csocial selection\u201d and \u201cnatural selection\u201d continue to characterize discussions of \u201csocial evolution\u201d and the relationship between \u201cculture\u201d and biology in the work of Walter G. Runciman, Gray Dorsey, and Marvin Harris.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Maryland PhD student and Ether Wave Propaganda contributor Christopher Donohue has been spending time this academic year in Moscow, at the\u00a0Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, which is part of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. This week, he will be passing through London, and on Thursday,<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Christopher Donohue at Imperial College London on Thursday<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}