Not all Darwinisms are alike. Biological Darwinism is by now an established fact: its basis (first developed in The Origin of Species, 1859), natural selection, seems to have resisted so far to any serious falsification attempt. However, this idea has, over time, lent itself – with greater or lesser success – to applications even outside the biological sphere. The two books we will deal with in this paper are, in some way, extensions to the non-biological sphere of natural selection. One of them is such an extension in its proper sense: Dan Sperber’s Il contagio delle idee proposes a theory of the diffusion of cultural representations based on the idea of Darwinian natural selection. The other one – Patrick Tort’s Effetto Darwin – aims rather at correcting a bad reading of Darwin’s texts, and the opinion of those who see the British naturalist as the founder of social Darwinism and eugenics. Some “anti-functionalist” considerations will be followed by a description and contextualization of the two texts, an analysis of their Italian translations and, finally, a summary of its results.
