Herbert Spencer

With so many variations in populations of species, the struggle of existence results in 'survival of the fittest', a term coined by Herbert Spencer. The survival of fittest is a direct result of the selection and proliferation of only those organisms which were most suitable adapted to the environment and most successful in mating. The major achievement of Darwin was to recognize one of the…

Perspectives: Poverty Sociological perspectives allow individuals within societies to look at issues and common social phenomena of everyday life from different points of view. Functionalism was thought of by English philosopher and biologist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). He compared the interrelated parts of the body to parts of a fully functional society. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) took this a step further by applying Spencer’s “Structural-Functional Theory” to explain how societies change…

Hello, I’m Joseph Kim in EDCI246 - Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice. Throughout this course, I’ve developed and refined a question that originally popped in my head in the second week of this course when I compared Lazy Jack and Epaminondas. My Big Question is: Sometimes we have misconceptions in our initial impressions and -- because of our stubbornness -- refuse to correct them. How does an event such as this affect ourselves and those around us? We see several…

This perspective was commenced by the works of Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkham. According to functionalism, society is a system of interconnected parts that work together to maintain a state of balance for the entire community involved. Like stated prior, all three of the convicted men were outcast, thus…

The brain is an amazing part of the human body that has the ability to pick up on moods, behaviours and actions it sees and learns from the environment and retain what it has learnt, and this shapes people to become who they are. These influences are called social agents and they influence the lives of everybody from a very young age up until they grow old. Some agents are more influential for some people and less so for others depending on the way they have been brought up, some of these bring…

Egoism is the theory that people are, and should be, selfish and base their actions on what is going to benefit them the most. Many philosophers including Thomas Hobbes, Macaulay, Herbert Spencer and Aristotle supported and wrote about this theory. There are variations of egoism. One of them is the descriptive which states that people are motivated by their own interests and desires, and no one is exempt from this. The normative variant proposes that people should be driven by their own desires…

It has been far too long since we last spoke and I confess to missing the lack of your counsel. I also confess to the personal pride as well as the national pride which we now exhibit as Mexican positivism. It is indeed great as on this day we celebrate another of our great leader’s birthdays. As I think back, 1876 seems like it could not have been so long ago, yet the changes are so many that surely it has taken decades to come this far. When I think of the liberalism that had plagued this…

Introduction Sociologists have developed three main perspectives to decipher the social world. Each perspective evaluates the society, social patterns, and behaviors through a different lens. These traditional paradigms include structural-functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. The structural-functional theory focuses on the interdependent role of each part that works collectively to stabilize the complex machine of society. The conflict theory considers the inevitable…

During the early 1800s, many European powers had decided to pursue colonization in an effort to access territories and natural resources, such as coal and iron. The person who caused this frantic chase of colonization was King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold hired Henry Stanley, an explorer, to travel “up and down the immense waterways of the Congo River basin” to set up trading posts, to build roads and to persuade illiterate African chiefs into signing treaties (Hochschild). Leopold II did all…

indigenous people? Drawing from the ideas of Darwin that certain races resemble apes more than humans and cannot be civilised, Herbert Spencer further argued that civilisation can be improved by breeding out the weaker races (Jeynes, 2011). Jeynes (2011) notes that Spencer was a major proponent of social Darwinism who developed the term: “the survival of the fittest”. According to Spencer, for the white race to advance against the other races in future society, is to eliminate the continuation…