This paper investigates the development of social Darwinism in China from the mid-1890s to 1930 vis-à-vis its ties with social Darwinism in the West, employing a comparative analysis of Spencer, Huxley, and Yan Fu. A form of evolutionism that envisioned a cosmological order based upon strength was transformed into a component of power politics in Republican China, despite unsuccessful political endeavors that illustrated both the triumphs and social malfunctions of evolutionary ideas. From the late 1910s, a new variety of social Darwinism arose alongside the scientific one, reflecting the influence of Kropotkin and de Vries, as Chinese thinkers incorporated non-Anglophone texts. The theories that emerged made sense of the changing Chinese adaptations of evolutionary thinking by contextualizing and modifying them within the intellectual and political dynamics inside China and also in China’s evolving relationship with capitalism and imperialism.

The uses of natural selection argument in politics have been constant since Charles Darwin’s times. They have also been varied. The readings of Darwin’s theory range from the most radically individualist views, as in orthodox socio-Darwinism, to the most communitarian, as in Peter Kropotkin’s and other socialist perspectives. This essay argues that such diverse, contradictory, and sometimes even outrageous political derivations from Darwin’s theory may be partially explained by some incompleteness and ambivalences underlying Darwin’s concepts. “Natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest” are open concepts and may suggest some hierarchical and segregationist interpretations. Circumstantially, Darwin accepted social “checks,” such as discouraging marriage of “lower” individuals to prevent them from reproducing, in a vein of Malthusian politics. This makes Darwin’s theory of selection by struggle collide with his theory of social instincts, by which he explains the origins of morality. It also favors reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man from opposite, mostly ideological perspectives. Darwin’s position is ambivalent, although hardly unreasonable. The recognition he makes of social instincts, as well as the use of the concept of artificial selection, entails accepting the role of human consciousness, by which social evolution cannot be reduced to natural evolution, as socio-Darwinians did next and as some neo-Darwinists seem to repeat. On these grounds, this essay argues the inadequacy of the conventional model of natural selection for understanding politics. If we want to describe politics in Darwin’s language, artificial rather than natural selection would be the concept that performs better for explaining the courses of politics in real society.

Much theology presupposes a metaphysical spirit or soul, the existence of which has been questioned in contemporary neurobiological research. Green, Murphy and others argue for alternatives to metaphysical description. If the neuroscience is correct and the soul, if it exists, is not metaphysical then many theological descriptions will need serious revision or possibly even abandonment. One such theological description, directly affected and long considered to be an essential part of Christianity, is God's personal self-communication to humans. This has traditionally been understood to occur through the metaphysical human soul or spirit. The question explored in this article is whether the existence of a metaphysical soul is an all or nothing matter for Christian theology.

A rational and strong challenge to the existence of metaphysical soul is demonstrably not new. Nonetheless, from the beginnings of modernity it has been generally assumed, utilising Augustinian anthropology, that the soul was a metaphysical element of human anatomy. Huxley's work on sensation, including ‘Has the Frog a Soul’, determines the anatomical location of the soul by its supposed function. Huxley questions early modernity's assumptions regarding the nature of sensation and the presumed role of the metaphysical soul within the sensorium. Huxley deduces limits and conditions on the existence of the soul and arrives at a description which has similarities to Tertullian's corporeal description of the soul. Huxley, however, does not engage with Tertullian, whose relatively orthodox description of the soul answers a number of issues that Huxley raises. Tertullian's careful revision of the Aristotelian category of corporeality is not exactly the same as Huxley's nineteenth-century materialism or contemporary physicalism. Tertullian's description of the soul is remarkably similar to Augustine's, differing mainly on the issue of corporeality and metaphysicality. Tertullian's description ironically draws on and shares the same functions as Greek philosophy and medicine. This description of the soul seems to be based more on these sources than scripture, unusually for Tertullian. Some form of reappropriation of Tertullian's non-metaphysical soul may be useful in the contemporary debate, noting the limitations of his understandings of biology and physics. It seems possible to take note, in some form, of changed and better contemporary worldviews, in order to better describe theological anthropology and in particular that element related to the soul.