THE CAPITALIST EMPIRE NEEDED A SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE, SO HE INVENTED ONE:

Darwinists Cannot Deny “Disturbing” Implications (Jan 15, 2009)

In its continuing celebration of Darwin, Science magazine printed an article about “Darwin’s Originality” by Peter J. Bowler. This philosopher from Queen’s University of Belfast described how Darwin’s theory of evolution had “disturbing” ramifications. “In this essay,” he began, “I argue that Darwin was truly original in his thinking, and I support this claim by addressing the related issue of defining just why the theory was so disturbing to his contemporaries.” [...]

In his final section, “The Struggle for Existence,” Bowler is not so keen to let Darwin and the modern Darwinists off the hook with a “Get out of jail free” card just for being scientists. In the first place, the Malthusian idea of struggle for existence, which was pervasive in Victorian England, could have been applied in different ways. Bowler argues that Spencer applied it to individual effort to succeed. “Much of what later became known as ‘social Darwinism’ was, in fact, Spencerian social Lamarckism expressed in the terminology of struggle popularized by Darwin,” he claimed. What Darwin did, though, was make this struggle metaphor something ruthless and impersonal:

This point is important in the context of the charge raised by modern opponents of Darwinism that the theory is responsible for the appearance of a whole range of unpleasant social policies based on struggle. Darwin exploited the idea of the struggle for existence in a way that was unique until paralleled by Wallace nearly 20 years later. Their theory certainly fed into the movements that led toward various kinds of social Darwinism, but it was not the only vehicle for that transition in the late 19th century. It did, however, highlight the harsher aspects of the consequences of struggle. The potential implications were drawn out even more clearly when Galton argued that it would be necessary to apply artificial selection to the human race in order to prevent “unfit” individuals from reproducing and undermining the biological health of the population. This was the eugenics program, and in its most extreme manifestation at the hands of the Nazis, it led not just to the sterilization but also to the actual elimination of those unfortunates deemed unfit by the state. Did Darwin’s emphasis on the natural elimination of maladaptive variants help to create a climate of opinion in which such atrocities became possible?

It has to be admitted that, by making death itself a creative force in nature, Darwin introduced a new and profoundly disturbing insight into the world, an insight that seems to have resonated with the thinking of many who did not understand or accept the details of his theory.

Darwin himself, of course, could not have known what was coming. Lest anyone misunderstand, Bowler states clearly that “Darwinism was not ‘responsible’ for social Darwinism or eugenics in any simple way.” In fact, some eugenicists and social Darwinists denied the mechanism of natural selection. The Nazis did not want to believe that Aryans had evolved from apes. There were a variety of views about evolution and the struggle for existence. Nevertheless, Bowler is not ready to let Darwin off the hook so easily:

But by proposing that evolution worked primarily through the elimination of useless variants, Darwin created an image that could all too easily be exploited by those who wanted the human race to conform to their own pre-existing ideals. In the same way, his popularization of the struggle metaphor focused attention onto the individualistic aspects of Spencer’s philosophy.

This brings us back to the original question: can scientists distance themselves from their findings? Keep in mind that Darwinism goes beyond a discovery of facts about the living world. The Origin did not really catalog any new facts of biology that were not already known. What he did was put them together into “one long argument” that presented an entire history of life, a world view, that generated all the variety of living organisms via selfishness and struggle. When any scientist proposes to change the way we think about the world, Bowler argues that he or she must be willing to take responsibility for the consequences. Let’s listen to his closing paragraph, where he generalizes the Darwin saga to all of science.

Modern science recognizes the importance of Darwin’s key insights when used as a way of explaining countless otherwise mysterious aspects of the natural world. But some of those insights came from sources with profoundly disturbing implications, and many historians now recognize that the theory, in turn, played into the way those implications were developed by later generations. This is not a simple matter of science being “misused” by social commentators, because Darwin’s theorizing would almost certainly have been different had he not drawn inspiration from social, as well as scientific, influences. We may well feel uncomfortable with those aspects of his theory today, especially in light of their subsequent applications to human affairs. But if we accept science’s power to upset the traditional foundations of how we think about the world, we should also accept its potential to interact with moral values.

All you really need to know about Darwinism is that even he wouldn't have believed in it if he were a low caste Hindu in the Raj.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2009 4:49 PM