All true, Jonah, as the mention of Veblen in my original post illustrates.

The difference is **DATA**, which we have, & the 19th-century thinkers didn’t. Having the human genome mapped makes all the difference. Their evidence was circumstantial; ours is hard and physical, more so by the day. As David Stove pointed out, Darwin died as ignorant of genetics as Julius Caesar was.

This isn’t Social Darwinism; it’s Social Neo-Darwinism. That “neo-” makes all the difference, though I’m going to resist the temptation to draw analogies.

Incidentally, several readers have apprised me of this book, which I didn’t know about.