Nature - autonomous learning

54 the ‘nature’ of geographyin Victorian Britain and beyond.They maintained that whole societies (andclasses or groups within them) were akin to species. In Britain, earlysociologists and statisticians (like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton)popularised the idea that competition within and among societies is‘natural’ – an idea that justified European colonialism as much as a beliefthat in any society the ‘fittest’ (mentally and physically) rise to the top ofthe hierarchy. Finally, in the late nineteenth century, several of Darwin’sacolytes (and some of his critics) resurrected the evolutionary doctrinesof Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Neo-Lamarckians maintained thatevolution proceeded more quickly than Darwin had allowed and wasnot subject to Darwin’s ‘random variation’.They insisted that the qualitiesacquired by an organism during its life-experience could be directlytransmitted to its progeny and that will, habit or environment droveevolution forward, not a ‘blind’ process of competition, variation andadaptation.What has this mélange of evolutionary thinking got to do with latenineteenth-and early twentieth-century geography? A good deal as it turnsout.According to Livingstone (1992) evolutionary theory – domesticatedto their own needs – furnished the early geographers with a means ofbringing humans and the environment within a single explanatoryframework. In its ‘strongest’ version this framework proposed to linknon-human nature with human nature (bodily and mental) and humansociety.This was was most obvious in the works of Davis’s students, suchas Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, where the neo-Lamarckian strainwas strong. Semple’s (1911) tellingly titled Influences of Geographic Environmentand Huntington’s (1924) The Character of Races made causal links betweenphysical environment, the bodily and mental capabilities of different humangroups (Caucasians, Blacks,Aborigines etc.) and the levels of ‘civilisation’of these groups. Even as late as 1931, it was not unusual to encounterthe following statements:‘Psychologically, each climate tends to have itsown mentality, innate in its inhabitants and grafted onto its immigrants’(Miller 1931: 2).This sort of ‘environmental determinism’, as it became known, was acurious doctrine. It awarded the physical environment the status of anindependent variable, while making human nature and human societydependent variables. Yet, for all its determinism, it did allow room forchange and manoeuvre in human biology and ways of living. As Semple(1911: 2) acknowledged, humans were seen as ‘shifting, plastic, progressive