AP®︎ European History: Topic 7.4 Flashcards

English naturalist whose observations during the HMS Beagle voyage helped him develop evolution by natural selection and a material account of human origins

Biological explanation of species change through inherited variation, natural selection, and common descent, distinct from later political uses of evolutionary language

Change in the inherited characteristics of populations across generations

Process by which individuals with advantageous inherited traits leave more offspring, making those traits more common over generations

Reproductive success in a particular environment, not universal strength, moral worth, or social superiority

Principle that different species descended from shared ancestors and diverged into branching lineages over time

Theory that ordinary geological processes acting over immense time produced major changes, supplying the ancient Earth required for evolution

Earlier evolutionary theory that organisms pass to offspring traits acquired through use or disuse during their lifetimes

Argument that populations grow faster than food supplies, suggesting a struggle in which not all organisms survive and reproduce

Naturalist who independently developed a theory of natural selection that was presented jointly with Darwin’s ideas in 1858

Darwin’s 1859 work presenting natural selection as the mechanism explaining adaptation, diversity, and the development of species

Darwin’s 1871 work explicitly applying evolution and common descent to human beings

Herbert Spencer’s phrase for selection, later adopted by Darwin; biologically it means reproductive success, but Social Darwinists recast it as social or racial superiority

Application of evolutionary language to society to portray class, racial, national, or imperial hierarchy as natural, beneficial, or justified

Thinker most associated with Social Darwinism who applied competition and evolutionary progress to society and defended laissez-faire and limited aid to the poor

Pseudoscientific classification of humanity into supposedly biological races ranked in a hierarchy, often with Europeans placed at the top

Position that natural phenomena, including human biological origins, should be explained through evidence and natural causes

Prominent public defender of evolution known as “Darwin’s bulldog” and associated with the 1860 Oxford controversy

Efforts, named by Francis Galton in 1883, to improve a population’s supposed hereditary quality by promoting reproduction among the “fit” and discouraging or preventing it among the “unfit.”

Darwin’s cousin, who argued in Hereditary Genius that intellectual and social abilities were strongly inherited and coined the term eugenics in 1883