Abstract
IN the Fortnightly Prof. Karl Pearson heads a forcible article on “Socialism and Natural Selection” with the following quotation from Darwin:—“What a foolish idea seems to prevail … on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.” His contribution is a diatribe against the views set forth by Mr. Kidd in “Social Evolution” and the reviewers who have hailed the work as scientific in its construction and conclusions. Dr. Louis Robinson points out the glaring moral inconsistency of the majority of anti-vivisectionists, who “while they claim to be actuated by the great principle that kindness to all living creatures should be a rule from which only the direst necessity can excuse us … are content to ignore the cruelties which are most wanton, most severe, and most frequently inflicted. Moreover, this strange callousness to the great mass of animal suffering is not deemed inconsistent with a frenzied onslaught on the practice of experimenting upon animals in the interest of medical science, although such experiments are deemed absolutely needful by nearly all those who know anything at all about the subject, and although the pain so caused is but as a drop in the ocean when compared with that inflicted in sport, or for monetary profit.….
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Science in the Magazines. Nature 50, 234–235 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/050234a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/050234a0