Essay by usamabinladen January 2006

download word file, 2 pages 4.0

I have learned many new theories I have never known before, there are a great many

objectives and thoughts that I had never even knew existed before. Learning

about the history of anthropology has opened my mind of thinking in all these

different schools of thoughts. One thing that has shocked me is that I have

learned the early evolutionists had never done fieldwork, but would make

assumptions. The person that has shocked me the most is the theories Herbert

Spencer. He saw the different classes of the British Empire and he wanted to

know how to classify them, which is normal. He came up with a cellular

difference, the rich have intelligent cells and the poor have sex cells, this

seems ridiculous to me.

Spencer says the only thing that should matter to the

poor is survival of the fittest, why waste public money and health benefits on

them when they don't do anything.

The right way out of the poor to Spencer is

suicide. The things he says are so unbelievable, they have no truth, or any type

of evidence to back it, because of the fact that early evolutionist did no

fieldwork. The next thing that has surprised me is the progress that appears

after the enlightenment. Condorlet wrote mankind is perfectible and can progress

through the expression of genius. Malthus says Condorlet was wrong, he says

humanity will go down because of consumption, like food. These two theories seem

a little bit strange to me. Condorlet's theory makes sense, but what can he

say about the rest of the people? Not everyone can be a Leonardo Da Vinci.

Malthus worked out his theories with some type of mathematics, but his

conclusion are not likely to happen and we are living proof, so what type of...