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To: Stultis
I'm not even sure that Darwin read Smith.

It seems he did. In Descent of Man, chapter 4, he wrote: "Adam Smith formerly argued, as has Mr. Bain recently, that the basis of sympathy lies in our strong retentiveness of former states of pain or pleasure." There's a footnote (#21) that says, in part: "See the first and striking chapter in Adam Smith's 'Theory of Moral Sentiments.' "
Source: here. (Search on "Adam Smith" to find it.)

555 posted on 02/06/2005 11:22:05 AM PST by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: js1138

I neglected to ping you to 555.


556 posted on 02/06/2005 11:23:05 AM PST by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: PatrickHenry; js1138
Of course Darwin was well aware of Smith, I'm just not sure that he read him in the original (although he was well read in contemporary economic theory of the same school). I've just now discovered that he did read at least one work analyzing Smith, and also found some support for js1138's thesis:

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2004/10/smith_and_darwi.html

I’ve always liked Stephen Jay Gould’s revision of Malthus’s role in affecting Darwin’s thought. Consider these passages from one of Gould’s finest essays, “Darwin’s Middle Road,” appearing in Gould’s 1980 collection, The Panda’s Thumb.

Gould cites an article from a 1977 issue of The Journal of the History of Biology in which the author, Silvan Schweber, researched in detail Darwin’s reading just after the great naturalist returned from the Galapagos Islands on the Beagle. Here’s what Darwin read that Schweber found to be most influential on Darwin’s thought:

- Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive
- various works of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet
- Dugald Stewart’s On the Life and Writing of Adam Smith

About the first, Gould says that Darwin “was particularly struck by Comte’s insistence that a proper theory be predictive and at least potentially quantitative.”

About the second, Gould reports that Darwin got a much better statement of Malthus’s theory of population and food-supply growth.

About Stewart’s intellectual biography of Adam Smith, Gould has this to say: “[Darwin] imbibed the basic belief of the Scottish economists that theories of overall social structure must begin by analyzing the unconstrained actions of individuals.”

Gould goes on:

The theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.

The more you learn about the Scottish Enlightenment in general, and about Adam Smith in particular, the more struck you are by the out-and-out genius and vision of those great Scots.


557 posted on 02/06/2005 11:33:56 AM PST by Stultis
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