Spencer’s Puzzle
In 1857, Herbert Spencer published an essay called The Ultimate Laws of Physiology, later in the same year re-published as Transcendental Physiology. This was two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but it was Spencer who came up with the phrase survival of the fittest.
The capacity possessed by an unorganized germ of unfolding into a complex adult which repeats ancestral traits in minute details, and that even when it has been placed in conditions unlike those of its ancestors, is a capacity impossible for us to understand. That a microscopic portion of seemingly structureless matter should embody an influence of such kind, that the resulting man will in fifty years after become gouty or insane, is a truth which would be incredible were it not daily illustrated.
Herbert Spencer – Transcendental Physiology (1857)
Today, Spencer’s impossible puzzle is apparently solved quite easily in general conversation by words such as ‘genes’ or an acronym such as ‘DNA’. However, going no further than this would be to base the solution on a few words, a solution which doesn’t necessarily go much deeper than knowing how to use those words in conversations.
We could go on to suggest that Spencer did at least understand how baffling heredity is, whereas someone today using the word ‘gene’ might possess no more knowledge of heredity than Spencer and possibly less.
It highlights a problem where limited use of the correct technical language in social contexts may have only a superficial connection with what we usually refer to as ‘knowledge’. Even worse, language is frequently used to evade the pursuit of knowledge in favour of fashionable ideas. The evasion can be so successful that those drawn from the real world into the world of wordsmiths cannot tell the difference. Politicians know this.
Looping back to Spencer’s frustration with his apparently impossible problem, there was a time when a general fascination with all aspects of the real world appeared to promise something of vast value. Unfortunately, we never quite grasped it as a permanent cultural gain. Today, we drift back towards that endless conflict with the unreal worlds of wordsmiths.
Source: https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2025/04/spencers-puzzle.html
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