ORIGIN OF THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

The great Charles Darwin (1809-1892) is the subject of this entry, and the title alludes to his most famous work On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection.

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Charles Darwin is introduced by Webster’s Biographical Dictionary as “the great naturalist,” which is, of course, the standard way of describing him. His world-historical influence, however, transcends such tags. Whether he can be called a philosopher in the non-traditional sense may be somewhat debatable, but what cannot be disputed is his titanic role as a generator of philosophies, even if not a philosopher per se. What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Bertrand Russell says, Darwin was to the nineteenth. It may be argued however that today Galileo and Newton are no longer that hot, while Charles Darwin and his Evolution are sizzling, with burning sparks flying all over America, while in Europe, with the exception of the Vatican, his authoritarian reign has long been indisputable.

Once again, I am content to provide narrative borrowed from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.

Darwin’s theory has two parts. On the one hand, was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is generally accepted now, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck, and by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied a colossal mass of evidence for this doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He, thus, gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it.

The second part of Darwin’s theory is the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply a lot faster than nature can provide for them; therefore, in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In an environment of a given kind, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to it have the best chance. Therefore, among chance variations, those which are favorable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run more swiftly, cats stalk more silently, and the giraffes’ necks become longer. Given enough time this mechanism, Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.

This part of Darwin’s theory has been much disputed in technicalities. That, however, is not what concerns the historian of nineteenth-century ideas. From the historical point of view, what is interesting is Darwin’s extension to the whole of life of the economics which characterized the philosophical radicals. The motive force of evolution according to him is a kind of biological economics in a world of free competition. It was Malthus’s doctrine of population extended to the world of animals and plants that suggested to Darwin the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as the source of evolution.

Darwin was a liberal, but his theories had consequences in some degree inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal, and the differences between adults are due wholly to education, is incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species. (This is a terribly important kernel of an idea to develop, suggesting that in the modern world, where education no longer has the same prestige as it use to, material success, which is the paramount criterion of life achievement, appears to have nothing to do with traditional liberalism of “all men are created equal.” On the contrary, an all-new type of the survival of the fittest has been underway where the propensity for money-making seems to be a congenital success characteristic, whereas a poor understanding of business struggle for success has come to be seen as a congenital defect… See also my entry Business And Darwinism in the Contradiction section.)

Continuing the narrative above, Russell has a most interesting, although by no means unexpected discussion of Darwinism and Nietzsche, in another chapter (The Utilitarians) of the book. With that superb paragraph I shall presently close my Darwin entry:

Darwinian competition was not of the limited (Benthamite) sort; there were no rules against hitting below the belt. The framework of law does not exist among animals, nor is war excluded as a competitive method. The use of the State to secure victory in competition was against the rules, as conceived by the Benthamites, but could not be excluded from the Darwinian struggle. In fact, though Darwin himself was a Liberal, and although Nietzsche never mentions him, except with contempt, Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzsche’s philosophy, than like Bentham’s. These developments however belong to a later period, since Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 and its political implications were not at first perceived.

I wonder if Hitler’s Kampf is, in fact, an organic extension of Darwin’s Struggle for Existence, at least as it was seen by his publisher, the one who had come up with that flashy Mein Kampf title…