Herbert Spencer

[Paul Mackin]

Reading Sebastian's interesting meditation got me meditating on why the
idea of progress (or evolution) is so appealing to the human species.
Maybe it-itself is an adaptation (or an adaptive characteristic) that, as
a result of natural selection, has fitted us for living and persevering in
a universe of ultimate heat death. (to bring Pynchon into it)

As an add-on to Sebatian's post I cribbed the following from the
Spencer article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

In First Principles he argued
that there is a fundamental law of matter, which he called the law of the
persistence of force, from which it follows that nothing homogeneous can
remain as such if it is acted upon, because any external force must
affect some part of it differently from other parts and cause difference
and variety to arise. From this, he continued, it would follow that any
force that continues to act on what is homogeneous must bring about an
increasing variety. This "law of the multiplication of effects," due to
an unknown and unknowable absolute force, is in Spencer's view the clue
to the understanding of all development, cosmic as well as biological. It
should be noted that Spencer published his idea of the evolution of
biological species before the views of Charles Darwin and the British
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace were known, but Spencer at that time
thought that evolution was caused by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, whereas Darwin and Wallace attributed it to natural
selection. Spencer later accepted the theory that natural selection was
one of the causes of biological evolution, and he himself coined the
phrase "survival of the fittest" (Principles of Biology [1864], vol. 1,
p. 444).

			P.