The question of Darwin's views on social evolution has long been a controversial one. At one extreme, writers like the anthropologist Marvin Harris have represented Darwin as a Spencerian in his general outlook, accusing him of "biological Spencerism" or racial determinism. To these writers Darwin was a powerful exponent, though not the originator, of "social Darwinism" the belief that competitive struggle between individuals, tribes, nations, and races has been the chief engine of progress in social evolution. Authors of this persuasion have not hesitated to call Darwin a "racist."' At the other end of the spectrum, writers like the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman have insisted that Darwin had nothing to do with "social Darwinism" and that his views on biological and social evolution were entirely different from those of Herbert Spencer, whose speculative methods he distrusted. Darwin, Freeman would have us believe, was an "interactionist" who "recognized that human history had long since reached a phase in which learned behavioural adaptations had become 'much more' important than genetic variables in determining social change, while still attaching importance to the nature of the brain and body of man as these evolved, in earlier times, predominantly by means of natural selection."2 The fifteen commentaries on Freeman's essay published in the September 1974 issue of Current Anthropology illustrate the wide disparity of opinions prevailing on the subject of Darwin's concept of social evolution. Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, Carl Bajema, John Blacking, U. M. Cowgill, Santiago Genov&s, Michael Ghiselin, Neven P. Lamb, and Johannes Raum support Freeman's position with few qualifications. Marvin Harris defends his own position against Freeman's attack. Charles Gillispie, John Greene, Robert Carneiro, Daniel Heyduk, and Kinji Imanishi take