July 17 2013. §
Darwin and Smith: Not Cold-blooded Rationalists
Charles Darwin and Adam Smith are highly regarded as individuals who promoted very rational ideas. Darwinian evolution, or “survival of the fittest”, could be understood as a mathematical way to calculate which species will live and which won’t. Adam Smith, the “founder of modern economics”, is very well-known for his work, The Wealth of Nations, which highlights division of labour, productivity, and free markets.
What often gets left out of the discussion is that Darwin and Smith focused a lot of their effort on the less rational, more emotional side of things. Darwin spent most of his time analyzing emotion across species, particularly related to facial expression. Smith’s first major work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which strongly focused on humanity’s ability to empathize with each other (thank you, Dan Gilbert, for opening my eyes to this)
These two men were students of the human experience — and for some reason, we only listen to half of what they said.