Varieties of Evolution

Abstract Perhaps the single feature that most marks out nineteenth-century philosophy was that this was the century that discovered progress and development. This was, of course, a Europe-wide phenomenon, but there were also many examples of this shift specifically in Britain, and this chapter focuses on four home-grown philosophies each of which emphasized a different aspect of the dynamic nature of things. The chapter begins by examining Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ theory of historical materialism, before moving on to look at Herbert Spencer’s theory of universal evolution. The chapter then moves on to consider the most famous developmental view of all, Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species by natural selection, focussing on its general philosophical import and its application to human evolution. Finally the chapter looks at William Thomson’s work on thermodynamics, both with respect to the age of the earth and the heat-death of the universe.