The screw-up over the Spencer title is entirely mine. In fact I can't now even remember where I got that erroneous name from. Attribute it to sheer ignorance. I can see that Spencer is a highly controversial addition to the list, and perhaps he doesn't fit well into a 'harmful books' categorization anyway, but I do think that much of the defense of him is beside the point. We're not really arguing about whether Spencer was a good man or whether his ideas, when properly understood, were good; we're arguing about whether their misapplication had harmful effects. I'd wager that Spencer's coining of the term the survival of the fittest has caused untold harm to mankind, even though the poor fellow never intended it to be so and (IIRC) its original application was in economics rather than biology or sociology.
by Alan Allport on June 6, 2005 at 5:05 AM