American society used to be described as a melting pot, with the implication being that people from many different ethnic and socio-cultural backgrounds would change into Americans, lose their original identity, and melt into the mainstream of American society. This was presented as the ideal, and yet there are signs today that this is no longer being sought as the ideal and that ethnic and cultural differences are instead being revived, maintained, and celebrated. This has caused some to worry that the mainstream will end up being the minority, at least in some areas if not nationwide, and that we are all losing something precious in terms of the ties that bound us together as a people. This concern makes studies of social variation and human behavior all the more important. Linguistic differences are only one of the distinctions separating one group from another, and linguistic differences will be considered here in terms of the Social Darwinian perspective and the Cultural Relativist perspective.
The Social Darwinian perspective as argued by Ernst Haeckel adapted the Darwinian view to German requirements in the late nineteenth century. Social Darwinism took an almost mystical and religious belief in the forces of nature, such as that of natural selection as the fundamental law of life, and combined it with a literal transfer of the laws of biology to the social and political arena. The standard Darwinian ideas of struggle and competition were seen as the foundation for natural law and therefore of social law along with a "religion" of nature that implied a small place for rationalism, the lack of free will, and happiness as submission to the eternal laws of nature. Haeckel postulated that our social and political existence is governed by laws of evolution, natural selection, and biology. He carried Darwin's idea of evolution past biology to social interaction as well. Haeckel describes man as being in nature rather than ...