La sacculina e il "Regno dell'uomo". Edwin Ray Lankester, la degenerazione e il futuro della civiltà

Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929), a British zoologist and evolutionary biologist, described degeneration as one of three possible effects of natural selection (the others being “balance” and “elaboration”). He defined it as a gradual change of structure by which an organism becomes adapted to less various and complex conditions of life. Degeneration could result in atrophy or “suppression of form”, as in parasites. Lankester himself applied this idea to human societies, past and present, to warn that regression was as possible as progress. To him, degeneration was a law of life, based on observations in comparative anatomy and embryology. Still, one can wonder if the concept was not, as it were, ‘tainted’ with an axiological connotation since its first use by Lankester, as it had clearly been the case with its inventor, Morel. If so, its application to human affairs was not only understandable in their context, but, to some extent, inevitable. Some instances of the uses of degeneration in bio-social contexts are also discussed, including writings by the theologian Henry Drummond, the science fiction author H.G. Wells, the Belgian socialists Demoor, Massart and Vandervelde, and the entomologist William Morton Wheeler.