Thesis--M. Phil., University of Hong Kong, 1980.

Thesis (doctoral)--Leipzig, 1912. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 93.

B.A.

published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

My study investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with Darwin's evolutionary theory in "The House of Mirth" (1905), "The Custom of the Country" (1913), and "The Age of Innocence" (1920). The value of juxtaposing Wharton's narratives with her scientific knowledge has been recognized by critics since the 1950's. Yet, the few existing discussions of Darwinian allegory that examine these novels do not adequately describe the political dimension of Wharton's fictional sociobiology. My investigation addresses this insufficiency in the criticism. Examining Wharton's fiction in relation to her autobiographical writings, letters, and literary criticism, I demonstrate that her major novels link those laws governing gradual change in the natural world—described by Darwin, and theorists such as Herbert Spencer—with the ideological shifts affecting privileged social groupings. The introductory chapter outlines the critical response to Wharton's sociobiology, and examines specific scientific texts that the author refers to in her extra-literary writing. In chapter two I examine "The House of Mirth's" portrayal of cultural practices that lead to the elimination of unfit individuals such as Lily Bart, and show how Wharton critiques the position that natural selection and other laws theorized in The Origin of Species should apply within human society. The following chapter, on "The Custom of the Country", demonstrates Wharton's interest in representing the effects on existing leisure-class cultural practices of the newly-moneyed socioeconomic elite, whose rise Wharton attributes to social evolution. The novel also describes, I show, an inadequate leisure-class ethics that fails to confront the new elite's biological justification for expansion and dominance. Chapter four investigates "The Age of Innocence", in which Wharton takes aim at leisure-class morality by depicting it as a "negation" ( AI 212) of culturally obscured biological instinct, and by representing the sacrifice of individuals to a "collective interest" ( AI 111) that is portrayed as frivolous. In the concluding chapter, I summarize the ways I have extended existing Wharton scholarship, and describe potential pathways for future research. One key conclusion of my dissertation is that Wharton associates ideological change with natural selection, and sexual selection, in order to articulate the challenges to achieving social equality posed by "primitive" (CC 470) and "instinctive" (CC 355) energies.

My study investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with Darwin's evolutionary theory in "The House of Mirth" (1905), "The Custom of the Country" (1913), and "The Age of Innocence" (1920). The value of juxtaposing Wharton's narratives with her scientific knowledge has been recognized by critics since the 1950's. Yet, the few existing discussions of Darwinian allegory that examine these novels do not adequately describe the political dimension of Wharton's fictional sociobiology. My investigation addresses this insufficiency in the criticism. Examining Wharton's fiction in relation to her autobiographical writings, letters, and literary criticism, I demonstrate that her major novels link those laws governing gradual change in the natural world—described by Darwin, and theorists such as Herbert Spencer—with the ideological shifts affecting privileged social groupings. The introductory chapter outlines the critical response to Wharton's sociobiology, and examines specific scientific texts that the author refers to in her extra-literary writing. In chapter two I examine "The House of Mirth's" portrayal of cultural practices that lead to the elimination of unfit individuals such as Lily Bart, and show how Wharton critiques the position that natural selection and other laws theorized in The Origin of Species should apply within human society. The following chapter, on "The Custom of the Country", demonstrates Wharton's interest in representing the effects on existing leisure-class cultural practices of the newly-moneyed socioeconomic elite, whose rise Wharton attributes to social evolution. The novel also describes, I show, an inadequate leisure-class ethics that fails to confront the new elite's biological justification for expansion and dominance. Chapter four investigates "The Age of Innocence", in which Wharton takes aim at leisure-class morality by depicting it as a "negation" ( AI 212) of culturally obscured biological instinct, and by representing the sacrifice of individuals to a "collective interest" ( AI 111) that is portrayed as frivolous. In the concluding chapter, I summarize the ways I have extended existing Wharton scholarship, and describe potential pathways for future research. One key conclusion of my dissertation is that Wharton associates ideological change with natural selection, and sexual selection, in order to articulate the challenges to achieving social equality posed by "primitive" (CC 470) and "instinctive" (CC 355) energies. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The thesis analyses the Finnish immigration apparatus through a Foucaultian governmentality framework and critiques the way immigration has been problematized. The immigration apparatus, ranging from discourses to various administrative regulations and their rationalities, is examined through the Finnish Aliens Act, Schengen visa regulations, and Finnish Immigration Services implementation documentation as well as through the related governmental bills and reports and parliamentary discussions and committee statements between 1999 and 2010. The thesis argues that the governmentality of immigration is a socio-evolutionary governmentality that relies on largely taken-for-granted conceptualisations of how society needs to be governed. The thesis shows that immigration control cannot be understood solely through the discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism, but that these discourses themselves need to be understood in the light of a state racist socio-evolutionary constellation of power/knowledge at the heart of liberal governmentality and its naturalism. In the first instance, this claim is supported by a discourse theoretical analysis of the functioning of power/knowledge in immigration-related discourses. Additionally, the claim is supported by contrasting the analysis of discourses and rationalities of governing with an analysis of technologies of governing, i.e. rules and regulations of immigration control. The thesis then questions the governmentality of the immigration apparatus through various epistemological tools of decentring. These tools highlight how a commonsensical truth about immigration and its governing is produced through methods, such as utilising explanations relying on psychologism, historicism, naturalisation, market veridiction and universalism/particularism, which enable a silence and scarcity of meaning around the taken-for-granted modes of knowing immigration and its governing. Finally, this claim about state racist governmentality of immigration is evidenced by a comparison of the contemporary way of problematizing immigration with the way immigration was problematized by early American race hygienic immigration policies. This comparison insists that eugenics and social Darwinism should not be exceptionalised, but that their rationalities of governing should be evaluated in terms of the logic of making live and letting die that they propose. The thesis concludes that unacknowledged and taken-for-granted modes of knowing the world in socio-evolutionary terms and specifically in social Darwinist terms emphasizing social position as a measure of fitness and human worth and entailing an all-inclusive logic of racialisation have an impact on contemporary liberal ways of governing immigration both in general and in Finland in, at the point at which we think how immigration should be governed so that it promotes the health and wealth of the population and defends it from degeneration.

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2005. / Thesis advisor: Jason B. Jones. "... submitted as the capstone requirement for the Master of Arts Degree in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-69). Also available via the World Wide Web.

'Culture' is defined as information, such as knowledge, beliefs, skills, attitudes or values, that is passed from individual to individual via social (or cultural) transmission and expressed in behaviour or artifacts. 'Cultural evolution' holds that this cultural inheritance system is governed by the same Darwinian processes as gene-based biological evolution. In Part A of this thesis it is argued that as compelling a case can now be made for a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution as Darwin himself presented in The Origin Of Species for biological evolution, If culture does indeed evolve, then it follows that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should broadly resemble that of the science of biological evolution. Hence Part A concludes by outlining a unified science of cultural evolution based on the sub-disciplines of evolutionary biology. Parts B and C comprise original empirical and theoretical work constituting two branches of this science of cultural evolution. Part B describes a series of experiments testing for a number of hypothesised biases in cultural transmission. Evidence was found for a 'social bias' that acts to promote information concerning third-party social relationships over equivalent non-social information, and a 'hierarchical bias' that acts to transform knowledge of everyday events from low-level actions into higher-level goals. Three other hypothesised biases concerning status, anthropomorphism and neoteny were not supported, although each gave rise to potential, future work using this methodology. Part C presents a theoretical investigation into the coevolution of the genetic bases of human mating behaviour and culturally inherited folk beliefs regarding paternity. Gene-culture coevolution and agent-based models suggested that beliefs in 'partible paternity' (that more than one man can father a child) create a new more polygamous form of society compared with beliefs in singular paternity (that only one man can father a child).

In this dissertation I will consider the extent to which our ethical actions are determined by evolution, as well as the consequences of a view that holds that ethical behaviour arose from evolutionary processes. I will further investigate whether evolution can supply a complete account of ethics in the physical world, without sacrificing human freedom and rationality. To do this, I will start by considering the possible negative consequences of applying evolution to human behaviour, in the forms of Social Darwinism and eugenics. I will argue that while these systems of thought are ethically and scientifically unsound, there is strong evidence for the evolutionary origins of ethics, where ethics can be seen as an adaptation that offers a benefit to the individual exhibiting this behaviour. This view is supported by sociobiology, studies in primate behaviour and neuroscience. The implications of ethics as an evolutionary adaptation will be compared to Kantian morality, which is premised on freedom and autonomy, which I will argue are inconsistent with some scientific explanations. While an evolutionary account of ethics can lead to a deterministic view of our behaviour, new developments in neuroscience claim that freedom is an evolutionary adaptation. This naturally developed freedom, combined with self-consciousness, can supply us with an evolutionary account of ethics that does not need augmentation from transcendental principles. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lk2014 / Philosophy / MA / Unrestricted