The Concerns of a Repentant Galtonian.

[Place of publication not identified] : Hatje Cantz, 2012.

1 online resource.

dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts ; 63

"Even in my dotage, I have never failed to mark the day that I felt compelled to distance myself from my first mentor, Francis Galton. In his day, he was a hero to his public, an intellectual giant amongst his peers, and the person I then credited with whatever learnedness I had achieved. During my youth, I was completely enamored of the conviction that Europe was unrelentingly progressing toward ever-greater prosperity and perpetual peace. This irresistible amelioration was fueled by science, engineering, and enterprise. The entirety of the earth, from the soil, to the animals, to humanity itself, could be managed and optimized solely by the application of scientific principles. The polymaths and visionaries of this new rational world would become collaborators with evolution itself in order to shape a perfect human for a perfect society. Such are the utopian excesses of youth. One can only imagine my horror when in a moment of clarity I realized the folly of my beliefs. As I increasingly distanced myself from the advice of the men who dominated my thinking with regard to sociology and biology-men like Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Malthus-I found myself acquiring an ever-deeper understanding of evolutionary theory. (I know this list of influences must appear quite amusing to a contemporary reader, as it has been many decades since these names were uttered in a university lecture hall, but in their time their influence cannot be overstated.) Slowly, I found my utopian desires giving way to a form of reasoning grounded in skepticism rather than in certitude. My skepticism was so profoundly disruptive that every principle I thought irrefutable became susceptible to interrogation..."-- provided by distributor.

9783775730921
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Biology.
Political science.
Sociology.
Biologie.
Sociologie.
biology.
sociology.

Tracts (Ephemera)
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Funcke, Bettina, editor.
Marten, Cordelia, editor.
Martínez, Chus, editor.
Sauerländer, Katrin, editor.
Schauff, Ralf, translator.
Schnoor, Frauke, editor.
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