The term "social Darwinism" owes its currency and many of its connotations to Richard Hofstadter's influential Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (SDAT). The post-SDAT meanings of "social Darwinism" are the product of an unresolved Whiggish tension in SDAT: Hofstadter championed...

Why do people diet? The proximate cause of dieting is a desire to lose weight, but, because there are different ways by which a person becomes heavier than he wants to be, the ultimate causes of the choice to diet vary. Using a simple, graphical model grounded in the physiology of weight...

Evangelical Protestantism and evolutionary science comfortably coexisted in Progressive Era American political economy. Leading progressive economists, many of them evangelicals attached to the Social Gospel movement, routinely assimilated ideas borrowed from evolutionary science—heredity,...