Talk:Benjamin Kidd

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Untitled[edit]

I have removed the following:

The main theme of Social Evolution is the conflict between private interest and social welfare, the struggle which eliminates the unfit being the condition of progress. Kidd held that society should be interpreted in terms of biology.[1]

I do not think this is a fair representation of Kidd's main idea, which is about the essential conflict between the interest of the individual in his lifetime and the interest of the group, including, importantly, the yet-to-be-born. 'Social welfare' is a socialist concept that relates only to the present and not to the grand scheme of evolution over all time. This is why he criticises socialism as inevitably doomed to fail. Only a 'supra-rational' sanction can save the group in the long run. At one point he uses the analogy of a pear picked from the tree, which he says will continue to ripen for a while using its accumulated resources, but will then die without the tree. Socialism does the same for a society. --Memestream (talk) 15:35, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

npov[edit]

did not become known until the publication of his 'brilliant' essay?

Major edit March 5, 2015[edit]

In seeking needed citations, I found many other “reliable sources” of information important to the article. (It had been rated as "Stub-class.”) I also found material from a tendentious self-published book that had been cut-and-pasted in the article without quotation marks and that ignored WP:NPV. Working in needed citations and new material required a major rewriting. I used as much of the previous version as I could while deleting material that Wikipedia says should be: material without citations and material from non-reliable sources. Vejlefjord (talk) 17:35, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]