*yawn* already the author loses my attention by rabbiting on about utter trivialities, in a bid I suspect, to impress me. The fact is that the author could have shortened all of the above paragraph into 3 words: "Some socialist guy". That is all I need to know. Do I care that this guy was Italian, or a criminologist, or an editor of a magazine I have never heard of? (No I don't care). I don't wish to read articles like this - extremely low information per page.
The fundamental flaw of this article seems to be that the author is confusing Social Darwinism with the single term Darwinism used as slang to refer to the Theory of Evoluton. Both very different ideas in both type and content.
Noone is going to deny Social Darwinism has connections to Socialism, but the scientific theory of evolution as well as what the author deems "Scientific materialism" has absolutely nothing to do with socialism at all. I don't need a degree in "wordnomics" to know that and no amount of quoting of "famous" socialists is going to change that.
Enrico Ferri (1856-1926), a prominent socialist of his day, was an Italian criminologist who for many years was the editor of Avanti, a socialist daily.*yawn* already the author loses my attention by rabbiting on about utter trivialities,
See, I started to wonder why the socialists named their daily after a cool-looking excecutive aircraft built by Piaggio 