Evolutionary Concepts during the Gilded Age

In The Gilded Age, the invention that gave its name to the era, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner described the turbulence of the time. They determine the r exploitation that had gripped social and political institutions, bringing changes that Americans would feel for some(prenominal) generations. According to Paul Boller, the developments in intellectual that occurred during that time "went far-off deeper than a response to economic development." A world visible horizon dominated by a concept of dynamism re transmitd a worldview dominated by static formalisms.

An great part of the turbulence was the American reception of Darwin's supposition of ontogenesis through natural selection. Powerful ideas about change accorded salutary with the atmosphere of relentless change in technology and merciful relations. On the other hand, American intellectual leaders were heady to resist the cutting Darwinian conception, or at least to fit it comfortably within an older ideological framework. Darwinism threaten the habits of thinking even of those Americans most knowledeable about it and most tender to it.

Darwin described a natural world far to a greater extent dependent on random processes than could be accommodated within tralatitious modes of describing and explaining biological processes. For Darwin, the present forms of the various plant and animal species upshot from a continuing struggle for foundation. Because more forms come into existence in any area than the environment can support, o

The contr everyplacesial ideas contained within Darwin's Origin of Species ab initio received four types of reception from American intellectuals. First, there were of signifier those who accepted the claims of the theory as the basis of testable hypotheses within the everyday framework of science. Second, there were those who understood the theory and accorded it a place within the ongoing battle between the claims of a new science and the claims of old (largely religious) traditions. Third, there were those who rejected the Darwinian theory because of their strict adherence to a competing theory. Fourth, there were those who rejected the Darwinian conception as inimical to established conceptions of God.

The widespread adaption of evolutionary thinking to a variety of domains of inquiry testifies to the last-ditch triumph of evolutionary ideas, in some form.

Thorstein Veblen, though doubtless influenced by Spencerian ideas about the history of partnership, used evolutionary arguments as a means of leveling criticism at the privileged. Veblen, adept as a philosopher and later as an economist, attempted a comprehensive explanation of the existence and structure of the " vacuous class." base on a stage theory of social evolution similar to that of Lewis Henry Morgan, Veblen claimed that those at the top rung of society had evolved from a vulturous warrior class, who disdained labor as fit nevertheless for women and slaves. As society developed, becoming more complex and more technologically sophisticated, the privileged continued to value predatory over productive actions. For that reason, the rich engage in "conspicuous leisure" and "conspicuous consumption" as a way of distinguishing themselves from those who moldiness work. The privileged display their superiority by making earth their avoidance of actual work and their consumption of goods out of proportionality to need. Veblen believed that scientific and utilitarian attitudes might eventually replace predatory
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