Darwin's revolution
(Investigator 130, 2010
January)
2009 was the
200th
anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the
publication of his seminal "On the Origin of Species by means of
Natural Selection".
Most
articles about Charles
Darwin perpetuate the flawed Victorian-styled philosophy that perceives
'progress' in any field as originating in the minds of a few men (or
women) of genius – unrelated to the historical societies in which these
ideas found expression. I hope to nudge the reader into an appreciation
that Darwin's contribution was determined by the world in which he
lived; although he saw himself as a respectable middle-class Victorian
gentleman (which indeed he was!), standing outside of society, and
would have been horrified to be described as a 'revolutionary'.
In fact
his findings were
to undercut Victorian society in many ways as intelligent spokesmen of
the status quo correctly recognized at the time. Indeed, the Darwinian
'revolution' remains incomplete. Arguably, only the minority of today's
scientists (working in the biological/digital field), fully appreciate
the extent to which Darwin forces a fundamental 'redefinition' of the
human being.
Charles
Robert Darwin died
on April 19 1882. Plans for his funeral, in his quiet Kentish village,
were quickly interrupted when influential figures called for him to be
buried at Westminster Abbey. A House of Commons petition stated this
"would be acceptable to a very large number of our countrymen of all
classes and opinions" — and so it was: Darwin was buried alongside the
cream of the British Empire; one of less than half a dozen non-royals
to be buried in Westminster Abbey in his century. Today, it is hard to
avoid Darwin. Bank notes and coins bear his face, whilst towns,
universities and national parks are named after him. The anniversary of
his birth has led to a torrent of articles, television and radio
programmes.
Young Darwin's life and
times
Evolutionary
speculations
were already very much 'in the air' in early Victorian society.
"Freethought" was increasingly attractive to middle-class
intellectuals, no longer satisfied with the Biblical explanations of
human origins.
Specifically,
within his
family, it could be argued young Darwin was a synthesis of his two
grandfathers: Erasmus Darwin was a personification of the enlightenment
in Britain; in Zoönomia and the epic poem Temple of
Nature he
advocated a loosely defined evolutionism, reflecting his belief in
reason and progress. His maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgewood, was a
rich Unitarian pottery industrialist. Four first-cousin marriages
connected the Darwins and the Wedgewoods — they personified the
increasingly influential Unitarian Whig bourgeoisie — although wealth
would push them towards Anglican respectability.
Darwin's
father complained
of him as a young man: "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and
rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and your
family."(1) Quickly bored with his medical studies at Edinburgh
University, he chose instead to attend the debates and collect marine
invertebrates on the shore of the Firth of Forth. He transferred to
Cambridge University, then a deeply religious and conservative
institution, as a step towards a career with the Church of England. In
his spare time (there was much more of it than at Edinburgh), he
continued collecting beetles; on Friday evenings he would attend
Reverend Henslow's dinner parties, for discussions on natural history.
In 1831,
the 22-year-old
Darwin set off on a five-year voyage around the world. HMS Beagle,
bristling with the latest technology, and a not insignificant amount of
firepower, was to survey the South American coast. (The 'sun never set'
on the British Empire of those days and this entailed regular and
increasing explorations of the lands far distant from the British
homeland. Considerable British capital was already invested in South
America!)
As
readers of the (still)
'best seller' The Voyage of the Beagle will be aware, Darwin
hit foxes
on the head with his geological hammer, knocked hawks off branches with
the barrel of his gun, tormented lizards and shot anything too slow to
get away. On one occasion, he was looking for a rare species of bird,
only to discover he had just almost finished cooking and eating one!
Despite the 'savages', he was pleased to note that "little embryo
Englands are springing into life".(2)
The changing Society
Returning
to Britain in
1836, Darwin found important political changes had taken place. The
Reform Bill had finally been passed in 1832; the 1834 Poor Law
Amendment Act introduced the dreaded workhouses. Even more fundamental
changes were set in motion — a growing chorus of voices called for
professional scientists, not the traditional gentlemen-amateurs. The
British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded, in
opposition to the conservative Royal Society. Darwin and many others
came to embrace Comte's positivism — no longer would nature be
explained by God's random interventions, but rather by fundamental
laws. (Perhaps God had initiated the laws of nature, but for an
increasingly secular science, that was a secondary, philosophical
question.)
These
were the 'new'
conditions under which Darwin began to condense his thoughts and
observations on 'transmutation' (evolution) in 'secret' notebooks, in
1837.(3) [These were also the years of Chartism. Darwin's cousin, Emma
Wedgewood, whom he married in 1838, presumably summed up their shared
feelings when on reading Thomas Carlyle's Chartism pamphlet, declared
it "full of compassion and good feeling, but utterly unreasonable".(4)]
A
variety of factors held
Darwin back from publishing his ideas, not least of them being family
and friends who would be shocked. It seems clear he didn't realize the
extent to which his ideas, if fully developed, represented a serious
challenge to the very essence of bourgeois society.
His
intuition regarding
'natural selection' had come (he claimed) from the then popular work of
Rev. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the principle of population.
Malthus was
a reactionary spokesman for the existing ruling class; his book went
through six editions between 1798 and 1826 — the anonymously published
first edition was a frontal assault on the enlightenment. In later
editions, the focus was on the Poor Laws and anything else that might
help the workers to survive and multiply. Malthus's ideas boiled down
to 'do nothing'; help for the impoverished workers now would only make
things worse later. [Malthus famously claimed that, whilst population
increased geometrically (eg, 1, 2, 4, 8...), resources, primarily food,
could only increase arithmetically (eg, 1, 2, 3, 4...). Both of these
assumptions are flawed; contraception and artificial fertilisers, to
name just two things, upset his neat schema.]
Given
the unsettled times
Darwin was also concerned his ideas might be appropriated 'from
below'. His fears were understandable — 'people's philosophers'
were skilled at 'plagiarizing' the work of the bourgeoisie for
progressive ends. Aside from the Chartists, there were 'illegal'
newspapers, like the Oracle of reason, expounding atheist and
evolutionary ideas. [Editor after editor was jailed for
blasphemy.] In August 1838, the latest editor of the Oracle
(and
the man who coined the term 'secularism'), George Holyoake, went on
trial and transformed the event into a propaganda epic. From the dock
he spoke for eight hours on atheism and socialism; he was sentenced to
six months in prison! That summer witnessed a huge and prolonged
Chartist-inspired general strike. Troops marching from London to put
down disorder in Manchester passed Darwin's street, followed by
screaming crowds, who shouted at the soldiers, "Remember, you are
brothers — don't go and slaughter your starving fellow
countrymen."
For a
respectable Whig like
Darwin, these manifestations of the growing 'class struggle' must have
been terrifying experiences.
By 1842
Darwin had produced
a basic outline of what would become On the Origin of Species.
Yet he
compared discussing his ideas to "confessing a murder".(5) However, by
the mid-1840s evolutionary ideas were beginning to gain respectability
even in 'polite society'. The anonymous publication in 1844 of Vestiges
of the natural history of creation by Robert Chambers, written for
a
popular audience, led many to accept that species could and had changed
over time, and was crucial for preparing the way for Darwin's more
properly researched material.
In 1845,
Prime Minister
Robert Peel embraced 'free trade'. The following year the hated Corn
Laws were repealed. Darwin turned his attention to that most pressing
of subjects, barnacles! It demonstrated that the man, who up to now had
largely lived on his father's money, could also do 'proper science',
and not merely theorize in the abstract.
Then
1848 happened. The
French King fled to Britain and Europe exploded in revolution.
Thousands of Chartists planned to meet on Kennington Common in April.
The upper class engaged in an extensive programme of arming and
fortifying buildings — even the geologist, Reverend Buckland, now Dean
of Westminster, wielded a crowbar, ready to bludgeon any undesirables
who entered the Abbey.(6) As it turned out, the Chartist demonstrations
were peaceful, a period of calm was ushered in; the economy boomed in
the 1850s.
On June
18 1857, a long
letter landed on Darwin's doormat from Alfred Russel Wallace, a working
class socialist, born at Llanbadoc, near Usk, in South Wales (an
Englishman born in Wales!). He had some ideas for the respected English
naturalist to look over. Little had he realized how closely they
paralleled what Darwin had been working on 'in secret'. Darwin
panicked, and rushed to publish his own ideas.
On the origin of species
On
the Origin of Species
by
means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races
in
the struggle for life was finally published on November 24, 1859.
It was a
surprise
bestseller alongside Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, a
novel set
in the context of the French revolution, and Alfred Tennyson's Idylls
of the King (superficially a retelling of the Arthurian legend,
widely
interpreted as an allegory of the class struggle). The popularity of
such works tells us much about the attitudes of Victorian Britain.
Origin
begins by discussing
artificial selection. It was clear that selective breeding had strongly
changed many species. Thus from the humble wild cabbage came Brussels
sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. From the wolf we bred the diminutive
Chihuahua and the mighty Irish wolfhound. Darwin argued, by drowning
the reader with examples, nature worked in the same way. All species
were varied, and most have the ability, in theory, to rapidly increase
in numbers. Yet this does not happen. There is therefore a "struggle
for existence". The phrase 'survival of the fittest' originated with
Herbert Spencer, and Darwin used it in later editions of Origin
(as a
less anthropomorphic alternative to 'natural selection').
The
biological term
'fitness' does not refer to one's 'personal' capacity for
distance-running or weightlifting. 'Fitness' refers to the overall
suitability of an organism for survival and, crucially, in today's
scientific terminology, for passing on its genes. The fitness of an
organism reflects its phenotype — the way the genotype is expressed in
combination with environmental factors. Fitness is about adaptation to
the changing local environment, not some supra-historical schema. With
the rise of the 'gene-centred view of evolution', provocatively labeled
by Dawkins as 'selfish gene theory', the way we understand fitness has
changed considerably. What matters is that genes are passed on — an
organism can therefore be 'fit' either by passing on these genes
itself, or by helping another who shares the genes.
Many
individuals have a
problem with the idea of the 'selfish gene', but their confusion arises
from a crass simplification and a 'moral outrage' at the label. The
theory 'in the abstract' is neither 'progressive' or 'reactionary' if
misapplied to 'social science' – a 'selfish gene' can be taken as
support for the status quo (capitalism), or, on the other hand, by
undermining the idea that selection takes place at the level of the
individual or social group, it can equally support a progressive world
view. Richard Dawkins described himself as "mortified" to discover that
The selfish gene was Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's favourite book and that
he took it in a social Darwinist way.(7) Dawkins repeats this message
in the introduction to the latest edition of The selfish gene.
The
essence of Darwin's Origin
was the claim that gradual natural selection was the
primary
mechanism by which evolution occurred. The idea of
gradualism was thick in the air Darwin breathed, and so long as
'change' was envisaged in this manner only (no 'sudden' leaps, no
revolutionary 'leaps' of the dialectical kind suggested by Hegel and
Marx), this philosophy, in so far as it went, posed no threat to the
status quo. The bourgeoisie wanted 'progress' (eg, industrialization),
but it did not want the proletariat to overstep its mark; archaeologist
August Pitt Rivers put things somewhat more honestly than many of his
contemporaries when he said the law that nature "makes no jumps" can be
taught to the people "in such a way as at least to make men cautious
how they listen to scatterbrained revolutionary suggestions".(8)
But
gradual change is not
necessary for Darwinism. T H Huxley — among many others — was critical
of Darwin's repeated use of the phrase Natura non facit saltum ('Nature
makes no leaps') in Origin. As Huxley quite rightly suggested, "We
believe that nature does make jumps now and then, and a recognition of
the fact is of no small importance."(9)
In the
later editions of Origin
and in The variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication
(1868), Darwin sought to speed up evolution by a variety of mechanisms
and advocated an increasingly multi-causal view of evolution.
The most
controversial
element of Darwinism for progressively minded people has been the idea
of the 'struggle for existence', or 'survival of the fittest'. Darwin
states in the Origin that he uses the expression 'struggle for
existence' in a "large and metaphorical sense". There can be no
simplistic moral application to human society of descriptions of
natural processes; we need to remove our anthropomorphic spectacles
when looking at nature. This debate has continued in recent years.
By
definition, 'natural
selection' is slower than the 'artificial' selection imposed by human
intervention today — nature is blind, change is not teleological. Over
time varieties became species. In conclusion, Darwin's Origin
was a
remarkable book, and the yet-to-be discovered genetics was the
invisible 'elephant in the room' within it. Speaking personally, I find
it impossible to read the Origin, today, without being ever
conscious
of the 'gap' in his theory, of which Darwin himself was so aware — a
gap that was to be filled many years later, with the identification of
the 'gene'.
One
notable omission in
Darwin's final opus was human evolution. This is what ordinary
people largely talked about; Darwin was quite clear, in private, on the
implications of his work. He was not keen on a fight – and evaded the
issue by concluding his text, "light will be cast on the origin of man
and his history". Even so, the true social significance of the book was
clear — a number of reviews of Origin and books such as the
Duke of
Argyll, George Campbell's Reign of law (1867) attacked Darwin,
not only
for undermining theology, but also the 'natural' basis of class society.
It was
Darwin's 'bulldog',
Thomas Huxley, who took on the topic of human evolution most directly
with his Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). Darwin
later
showed the diversity of his thought in The Descent of Man and
selection
in relation to sex (1871). As this was being published, the
Parisian
working class 'stormed the heavens'; the Paris Commune was to be the
most significant action of the lower classes until 1917. As a topical
comment, The Times criticized Darwin's application of
evolutionary
ideas to humans, which it claimed would lead to "the most murderous
revolution".(10)
Behind
all this lay the
struggle between supernaturalism (religion) and materialism. Philosophy
had become mired in the 'scepticism' of Kant and Hume. A key role
played by Hegel was in transcending Kant's 'thing-in-itself', but Hegel
remained an idealist, chasing the Geist through history. Materialism
was also troubled, being largely mechanical and contemplative. Darwin's
ideas were powerful ammunition for materialist thinkers – hence the
reaction of the Marx and Engels to Darwin's ideas. The former's initial
reaction to Origin, in a letter to Engels on December 19 1860,
was
that, although "developed in the crude English style", Darwin's
argument "contains the basis in natural history for our point of view".
At Marx's graveside Engels declared: "Just as Darwin discovered the law
of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of
development of human history."(11) Since then, Marxists have
adopted a plethora of positions — for Dutch council communist Anton
Pannekoek, the essence of Darwinism was valid, but he advocated a
'division' whereby Darwinism only applies until man appears (12), an
approach that finds favour with this writer!
Darwin's Really
Dangerous
Idea
In his
outstanding
contribution, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett suggests
that
although Darwin's evolutionary theory originated to explain questions
in biology, the theory 'threatens to leak out', offering answers in
other fields. He is especially interested in the implications for
theories of 'mind'. Consider, the example, a research study published
in Science (1982), which found human neonates, of average age
just 36
hours, effectively discriminated and imitated three of their mother's
distinct facial expressions — happy, sad, surprised. This finding
demonstrates much more than just the perceptual ability of the newly
born infant — not only has the child identified the mother's
expression, but has related it to themselves and proceeded to imitate
it! In other words, less than two days after birth, the infant has some
vague sort of 'self' concept.(13) How can we explain this amazing,
'innate' ability?
For the
theist, this
discovery is seen as further evidence of the 'divine spark' present 'in
the soul' of each individual – from conception? Dennett
suggests an alternative answer. If we can explain the whole of human
development through the algorithmic 'mindless' process of evolution,
explored and described by Darwin, and can account for the
breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, why must we assume
the products of our own "real" minds must be exempt from an
evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatens to spread
all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own
divine spark of creativity and understanding.
In the
modern scientific
world it has become as unthinkable within science to credit any
biological feature to a designer as it was previously unthinkable to do
without one. According to Dennett, the origin of the human mind must be
attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of
materialism and natural selection (a crane), and not to a mystery or
miracle (skyhook), but this does not mean that human behavior or mental
activity can be understood directly on the basis of material concepts
like stimulus and response or natural selection.
Although
many aspects of
evolutionary theory remain controversial, Dennett asserts confidently
that the overall success of Darwinism-in-principle has been so
impressive that the basic program — all the way up and all the way down
— is established beyond question. Yet the resistance continues, mostly
from 'religious people' determined to preserve some role for a creator
(14).
Undoubtedly
the most
important work carried out in this specific area is under the umbrella
of Artificial Intelligence, where Dennett, as a philosopher, has been
very active for many years. Essentially, work centres upon devising
'intelligent' computer self-learning programs, not dependent upon human
instruction, with problems to solve which, had a human being solved
them, we would describe the feat as 'intelligent'.
Whereas
a human child is
'born' with a built-in 'intelligence' (the outcome of millions of years
of 'natural selection', within the genetic structure), we begin with a
computer which has been 'programmed' (as the human child goes to school
and learns how to read, etc.), with skills to 'learn' and 'remember'
its own resultant experiences, as, for example, 'learning how to play
chess' or whatever. As with many of the skills put to the computer,
after a short space of time, the computer is soon better at these
skills than the humanoid who 'taught' it. (Most parents have a
similar experience having taught the game to their own children!) As
the human central nervous system handles 'information' digitally, so
does the computer; there is much in common in the processes developed –
remember, though, computers are NOT, as yet, biological. [Biological
computers are being developed in Japan – significant advances will flow
from this advance.]
Much of
the resistance to
Darwinism "all the way up" comes from scientists and philosophers who
deny the capacity of natural selection to produce specifically human
mental qualities like the capacity for language. To true-believing
Darwinists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, the more
intricately "designed" a feature appears to be, the more certain it is
to have been constructed by natural selection — because there is no
alternative way of producing design without resorting to God or chance.
These
questions engender
very real 'moral' questions for many people. Consider the position of
Christian parents, not necessarily fundamentalists, suspecting the term
"evolution" drips with atheistic implications. The whole point of
Dennett's thesis is that the parents are dead right about the
implications, and that science educators who deny this are either
misinformed or lying. Do parents then have a right to protect their
children from indoctrination in atheism, and even to insist that the
public schools include in the science curriculum a fair review of the
arguments against the atheistic claim that unintelligent natural
processes are our true creator?
Dennett
cannot be accused
of avoiding the religious liberty issue, or of burying it in tactful
circumlocutions. He proposes that theistic religion should continue to
exist only in "cultural zoos," and argues that those who 'insist on
teaching children falsehoods — that the earth is flat, that "Man" is
not a product of evolution by natural selection — must expect that
those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe those
teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to
demonstrate this truth to the children at the earliest opportunity. All
our future well-being depends on the education of our descendants'. It
is not freedom of speech that worries the parents, rather the knowledge
that in a fair playing field, the greater effective argumentative power
of the atheistic materialists.
Social Darwinism
What
came to be labeled
social Darwinism stems from Herbert Spencer, particularly in his Progress:
its law and cause (1857), published two years before
Darwin's Origin. Spencer took little from Darwin; instead
his
views were
more a foul cocktail of the worst of Comte, Lamarck and Malthus; he
took the bourgeois yearning for all-embracing natural laws to its
logical conclusion.
The idea
that the working
class was 'unfit' was palpable nonsense and owed little to biology. The
combining of social Darwinism with the modern idea of 'races', as
advocated by people such as Ernst Haeckel, was equally unscientific. At
heart the ideas of Spencer and Haeckel were largely about attacking the
working class and socialism.
The
eugenics movement,
which sought, in effect, to 'improve the human gene pool', may have
reached its zenith in Nazi Germany, but it was heavily influential
elsewhere. Supporters ranged from HG Wells to John Maynard Keynes and
to the highest echelons of American society. Indeed the second largest
eugenics programme was directed by the Swedish social democrats.(15)
Clearly
ideas on evolution
have reflected what is going on in society as well as the 'scientific
evidence' related to the topic under discussion. This is certainly the
case with things like the 'worship of the gradual', which, as we have
seen, was in many senses a key element of Darwin's original ideas. It
is not, however, an essential element. The task facing us today is to
disentangle the science from the reactionary politics. We must take
scientific questions seriously — not merely because they are
'interesting', but because they are the means for changing the world —
hence the need to understand them. As Fred Engels put it, "The more
ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds, the more it finds
itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of working
people".(16)
References:
(1) Autobiography of
Charles Darwin: Dover (1958) p 9.
(2) Charles Darwin
Voyage of the Beagle (1989) pp 173, 358.
(3) Early Notebooks
now in Darwin on Man by Howard E Gruber (1974)
(4) A Desmond, J
Moore Darwin (1991) p 288
(5) Ibid p 314
(6) Ibid p 354
(7) Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion (2006) p 246n
(8) Antiquity 64
(1990) see pp 549-558.
(9) J B Foster Marx's
Ecology (2000) p 192.
(10) A Desmond, J Moore op
cit p290
(11) Marx and Engels
Selected Works (1951) Vol 2: p 153.
(12) Serge Bricianer
Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils Telos (1978) p.15.
(13) Field, Woodson,
Greenberg & Cohen Facial Expressions by Neonates in Science (1982)
218, pp 179-181.
(14) The entire book
deserves to be read: Daniel C Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea
(1995).
(15) For starters on the IQ
debate, the 'history' is well covered by Stephen J Gould's The
Mismeasure of Man – although, in my view, the book has many flaws ,
misreports and misrepresents the work and views of numerous
contemporary researchers. Not the best of Gould's works, written with a
political axe to grind.
(16) Marx and Engels op cit
p 364.