MAKE DARWIN GREAT AGAIN:

If the natural world is built on merciless competition to survive and reproduce, how is it possible that a species has arisen--human beings--who devote a great deal of time, effort, and money preserving the lives of those who, according to the dictates of natural selection, should be quickly and efficiently snatched from existence?

Writes Darwin:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Such a view of the natural order has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is only with considerable effort that we can recognize how strangely subversive it truly is. The weak should be eliminated. That they are not, and that they even survive to propagate their kind, is subversion indeed, for allowing the "worst animals to breed" can lead only to the "degeneration of the race."

Darwin paints us into a corner. If human beings truly are just as much a product and part of the natural world as any other species, and therefore a manifestation of the very same forces of natural selection, then those who express such sympathetic tendencies should have been selected against and extinguished eons ago by colder and more calculating competitors.

Darwin seeks to explain this apparent contradiction in terms of sympathy:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.

Darwin attempts to seduce his readers by sleight of hand. First, he makes sympathy an "instinct." Since it, too, must have arisen from the same natural forces that explain everything else about us, sympathy must be instinctive. Because human beings felt sympathy toward one another, they were able to cooperate and out-compete solitary human beings.

Yet what basis does Darwin provide for regarding sympathy as the "noblest part of our nature"? If he is correct, for the time being sympathetic groups might outcompete individuals who look out only for number one, but over time, should we not expect groups to arise that maintain cooperation yet cast off their weak, thereby reaping an even greater survival advantage?

Think of ancient Sparta, which practiced infanticide, or the more recent specter of Nazi Germany, which sought to eliminate "worthless eaters" while preserving a strong spirit of patriotic unity. In Darwin's purely naturalistic portrait of creation, allusions to the "noblest part" of human nature ultimately ring hollow.

In Darwin's scheme, there can be no noble or ignoble, no virtuous or vicious, and ultimately no high and low--there is only impersonal natural selection, patiently winnowing the biological chaff from the kernel, and translating tiny differences in adaptation into the death of organisms and species. There is no good or evil, but only what persists and what does not.

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