Out of Spencer’s Long Shadow of Pseudo-Evolutionism: Toward a Social Niche Construction Approach for Human Society

Why should we still care what Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) had said about evolution? We should care about what Spencer had said, for one last time, when it comes to social evolution and social sciences, because Spencer had invented some of the most influential misunderstandings about biological and social evolution despite being a quasi-evolutionist at best and a pseudo-evolutionist at worst. His four key ideas about evolution include: 1) evolution as a universal phenomenon; 2) evolution produces “survival of the fittest”; 3) evolution is development as unfolding a design via differentiation and integration; 4) human society is a Super-organism that requires both a structure and functions. I show that none of them is valid, even though Spencer’s pseudo-evolutionism had penetrated deeply into our understanding of social evolution. In place of Spencer’s pseudo-evolutionary organicism and structural functionalism approach, we should adopt a social niche construction (SNC)-based approach toward human society, which is genuinely social evolutionary. I then single out Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Norbert Elias’s The Court Society as quintessential SNC theories, and underscore that some key principles of SNC have been partially responsible for their explanatory power, even though SNC was not known during their time.