Many years after Darwin’s death, his theory of evolution by natural selection is still a cause of debate. Colin Smith considers the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s achievement. [International, May/June 1982]
At 11am on 27 December 1831, HMS Beagle weighed anchor in Plymouth harbour to start a four year voyage to survey the coastline and islands of South America. The Beagle’s master was Captain Fitzroy, an ardent Tory, nephew of Castlereagh and a fervent believer in the literal truth of the bible. A favourite hobby of Fitzroy was calculating the dimensions of Noah’s Ark. Also on board was the captain’s ‘gentleman’s companion’–a newly graduated student of theology, a Whig supporter, nephew of Josiah Wedgewood, who had brought along a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. His name was Charles Darwin.
Fitzroy and Darwin did not get on, as such social, political and intellectual differences would suggest. Years later, Fitzroy was to blame himself for Darwin’s godless theory. At the famous evolution debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T H Huxley in 1860, Fitzroy was seen roaming around, holding a bible above his head, shouting: ‘The book! The book!”. Five years later he slit his throat.
So much for that Victorian ‘scientific creationist’, but Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (the culmination of years of study, begun on the voyage of the ‘Beagle’) was to meet with much, if less extreme, opposition from like-minded religious fanatics. However, The Origin of Species met with many favourable responses on its publication in 1859, for evolution had been a growing debate in scientific and intellectual circles since the beginning of the century. JS Mill wrote: …after beginning by thinking it impossible one arrives at something like an actual belief in it’. TH Huxley (later to become ‘the attorney-general of Darwinism’) was brief: ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that’.
Others were far more prepared for what Darwin had to say. Within a month of its publication, Engels wrote to Marx about The Origin of Species: “The Darwin, which I am just reading, is really stupendous. Teleology in one respect had still not been finished off hitherto; now it is. Moreover, there has never yet been such a magnificent attempt to demonstrate historical development in nature, or at least not so happily. Of course you have to pass over the crude English method.’ Mаrх later confirmed Engels’ judgement.
Engels’ comments were perspicacious. Before Darwin, the prevailing view of nature was of a static, ahistorical world with fixed and wholly discrete species and biology was dominated by the descriptive disciplines of anatomy, comparative anatomy and tax onomy. Although this view was under pressure and beginning to break down, final causes and creationist views still riddled biological thought and were the predominant explanations for the origin of human life. Lamarck, the ablest of Darwin’s predecessors, failed to provide a coherent theory of evolution without recourse to concepts such as the ‘will to evolve’ and the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’.
Darwin’s theory heralded a revolution in biological thinking. His view of organic life was of a changing, competitive, historical world in which he stressed the common ancestry of species and put forward a thoroughly materialist mechanism for the generation of new species. The triumph of this view gave a tremendous impetus to the development of biological research, displacing the predominance of the old descriptive disciplines and helped to establish new fields of study, such as genetics, ecology, biogeography, molecular biology, and developmental biology as work was done to corroborate, develop and add to Darwin’s original theory.
The basic tenets of Darwinian theory are simple enough: 1) Organisms vary and these variations are inherited (at least in part) by their offspring, 2) Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive, 3) On average, offspring that vary most strongly in the direction favoured by the environment will survive and reproduce. Favourable variation (adaptation) will therefore accumulate in populations by a process of natural selection. Two further constraints are necessary to ensure natural selection a creative role Darwin assigned to it; variation must be random in the first place and variation must be small relative to the extent of change in the foundation of a new species.
The materialist implications of such a theory are clear. God or any other idealist ‘final cause’ are expelled from scientific explanations of the natural world. Evolution has no purpose or direction: ‘There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection. than in the course which the wind blows’, wrote Darwin in his Autobiography. All that happens is that organisms become better adapted to their local environments. The wriggling of a worm is as perfect as the gait of a gazelle.
What makes Darwin particularly impressive as a scientist of his time is that he did not retreat from extending this materialist explanation to the origin of human life. Не wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘Plato says in Phaedo that our “imaginary ideas” arise from the pre-existence of the soul, are not derivable from experience read monkeys for pre-existence.
How did Darwin arrive at his central insight into the role of natural selection. Contrary to many popular ideas as to how scientific research is done, he did not simply accumulate a myriad of ‘facts’ and reason inductively from the particular to the abstract (though he made use of this form of argument), neither did he have a sudden flash of amazing insight like Archimedes in his bath. The theory of natural selection arose as a result of a conscious search using both facts of natural history (Darwin was a biological polymath)and insights from many disciplines outside of biology. Particularly important was his reading of bourgeois economists such as Adam Smith and the doctrines of Malthus.
Ironically, Darwin came to formulate his theory through a misunderstanding. He thought he was applying Malthus’ doctrine on human population to the natural world. Malthus stated that there was a struggle for existence in human society caused by the tendency for the population to increase at a geometric rate, whilst food production could only grow at an arithmetic rate. Such a concept is inapplicable to nature as animals do not produce, they only collect and consume. Malthus was arguing for the restriction of marriage and reproduction among the working class and was a million miles away from any conception of evolution. The point is that Darwin’s misunderstanding did not make his insight into crucial importance of natural selection wrong, but it does show that his theory like those of Adam Smith and Malthus was a product of his time – nineteenth century capitalism. But his methodological confusion was to have consequences for the use to which his theory would, in the future, be put.
Darwin did not see the crucial difference between the natural world and human society. Humans produce their means of life, are not passively dependent on the natural world. Human consciousness and social development is not the simple result of the pressure of environment on genes as if it were merely like wet mortar extruded from between two bricks. The forces fashioning human society exist within that society- the antagonism between the potential of the techniques and means of production for improving the conditions of life and the constraints on this potential of the social relations of production-the struggle between those who labour to produce society’s wealth and those who own the means of production and control the distribution of socially produced wealth.
In practice, Darwin ‘filtered out’ what was inapplicable to the natural world in doctrines such as those of Malthus but his confusion on the crucial scientific difference between human society and the natural world led to a continuing predisposition among Darwinist biologists to mechanically extrapolate from animals to human society. What was science in the confines of biology thus becomes non-scientific ideology or plain nonsense when let loose in the realm of social theory.
In Darwin’s own time his theories were put to use as a justification for the social order of nineteenth century capitalism. Such social Darwinism even for a time eclipsed Marxism in influence as the ‘scientific explanation of human society’ and Darwin himself was not immune from its influence. But his seriousness as a scientist made him extremely cautious about applying his theory to social questions.
Such caution, is unfortunately not shown by the currently growing school of ‘sociobiologists’. Since the 1960s there have been a number of biologists (Lorenz, Morris. Dawkins) who have tried to apply the results of biological research particularly from the field of animal behaviour, to human society. The definite statement of such attempts is to be found in the books of EO Wilson, an entomologist, in Sociobiology – the new synthesis and On Human Nature. Because sociobiologists such as Wilson have no conception of the role of class society in fashioning the social order and individual human behaviour. they have been forced back on a crude pseudoscientific reductionism. Everything in the production of natural selection and social behaviour is the product (and the direct product, at that) of the genetic make-up of human beings. ‘The genes hold culture on a leash… inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool’, writes E O Wilson.
Thus, to give only one example, racism is not due to imperialism but the workings of natural selection: each individual strives to preserve its genes or those of its kin in the gene pool of a population, and therefore, the reasoning goes, individuals will be most hostile to ‘strangers’ from other populations with which there has been little or no interbreeding, and with which, therefore, a bigger genetic difference will exist.
The theorising of ‘sociobiologists’ is all of this flavour. Find a characteristic of society. for example anything from the sexual division of labour or aggressive behaviour to a dislike of spinach, work out a reason why it could be ‘adaptive’ and then posit a gene to account for its presence in human society. The consequences of this sort of rubbish parading as science is obvious. Not only does it inevitably justify practically every aspect of the status quo, if taken seriously it inevitably proposes a whole dangerous array of ‘solutions’ for ‘social problems’- from drugs to genetic engineering, from behavioural therapy to ‘psycho-surgery’.
It would be hard to lay the blame for all this at the door of Charles Darwin, though the fact remains that had he not suffered from his methodological confusion (if only he had read Marx and Engels!) such dangerous pseudoscience as ‘sociobiology’ could be more easily exposed. And, indeed Darwin’s misunderstanding of the inapplicability of Malthus led him to overemphasise the role of overpopulation as the force for evolutionary change. Geographical isolation, the opening up of new environments are at least as important. Nevertheless, Darwin deserves our admiration and our study. He founded a materialist biological science and in doing so, changed our ideas about ourselves.