By Anthony O’Hear

All Evolutionists Now

IN A BROAD SENSE, I suppose, we all accept evolution, if by ‘we’ we mean anyone likely to be reading this. Of course, if ‘we’ includes the whole world, we all don’t; and many who do accept the theory of evolution probably have only the vaguest notion of why they should. How much this matters is another question, but quite clearly to anyone who looks at the evidence without any preconceptions it is hard not to think that life on earth has come about through evolutionary processes. In particular, all that we know of geology and its related disciplines tells us that the earth is very old, and has itself been subject to a process of continuous development. From the fossil record we can also conclude that life itself is very old, and that its earliest forms were very simple compared to much of what we see around us to-day. We also see evidence of species long since extinct. Then, from biology and from the remains of older, now extinct forms of life, we see remarkable similarities among natural forms and their embryos, which strongly suggest common ancestries. We know from experiments and observations that a process very similar to what is described in evolutionary theory (to put it no stronger) actually does occur in the world to-day. From genetics and micro-biology we know a great deal about the mechanisms of hereditary transmission and about the relationships between genes and behaviour, and between genes and morphology. And no doubt there is much more and in very great detail which contributes most impressively to filling out the evolutionary picture and to its broad credibility.

To be sure there are problems. The fossil record is incomplete, but in what we see, we do not see a process of continuous evolutionary development, by constant little changes, as Darwin suggested. Quite large changes seem to happen rather quickly and suddenly, followed by long periods of comparative stability. One wonders, if that is so, how big changes to species, requiring more or less synchronised development in a lot of genetic sites could have occurred by purely random trial and error; the classic random variation and selective retention beloved by Darwinian theorists seems far more appropriate for the gradual accretion of small changes, step by step (which is what we do see in the breeding of fruit flies and the like). And maybe, connected to this point, there is the more general point that many basic evolutionary changes seem to depend on whole complexes of genes being in situ, so to speak, ready for the change, but without contributing anything to the organism’s well-being in advance of the future change.

Intelligent Design

THIS LAST POINT IS the one hammered away at by theorists of Intelligent Design, much to the irritation of the Darwinists, who insist that the examples adduced by their opponents either can be brought within standard evolutionary explanations or will be. As a non-biologist I am not competent to judge on the plausibility of these claims – on either side. However, as a philosopher I can make three critical points about Intelligent Design, two of which are quite independent of the detailed examples, and the third is an entirely general point about the nature of the examples. The first is that in some of its expositions (e.g. Dembski’s), heavy reliance is made on probability, viz, whether the type of complexity found in biological organisms is more or less likely to have occurred through natural selection or through the guiding hand of a designer. The problem here is actually an old one, and is not in any way peculiar to the specific examples adduced by Behe, Dembski and the like. It is that, in the absence of examples of sets of universes with and without designers, we simply have no basis for making the relevant judgements of probability. Universes are not, as C.S.Peirce was fond of saying, as plentiful as blackberries, so we cannot tell whether features of this universe – the only universe – are more or less likely to have emerged randomly or with a intelligent designer.

In reply to this, it might then be said by defenders of the design argument that from what we know of natural processes an ‘irreducibly complex’ system is not likely to have occurred by a blind evolutionary process, and is far more likely to have been produced by a designer as least as intelligent as a human being, which brings me on to the second point. The fact, if it is a fact, that one explanation (blind evolution) is unlikely does not by itself make another explanation (intelligent designer) more likely. And the postulation of an immaterial intelligent designer outside the universe in connexion with things in the universe is something of which we have no experience whatever and is, in addition, beset with all kinds of problems of its own, which was Hume’s point from long ago. So, if their proposal is to have any empirical force,  the proponents of intelligent design will have to tell us rather more about the nature of the designer and his operation than they are actually in a position to do.

And then, thirdly, we are assuming that ‘blind evolution’ cannot do the job required. Not only is this a risky ‘god of the gaps’ manoeuvre, involving a deal of question begging on the part of the intelligent design theorists – for the Darwinists will (and do) vigorously attempt to close the gaps by producing explanations within their framework, showing, for example, that the supposedly independent bits within an ‘irreducibly complex’ biological set-up are not biologically independent at all. Remember that Behe’s favourite image is of the bits of a mousetrap lying around on the ground, with the implicit question as to how such independent entities could ever have been lying around like that without the activity of the mousetrap designer, who then, of course, puts them together. But biological systems are not made up of independent bits in that way; their elements are already living and working together, allowing the systems to take on new functions with quite small changes. Behe would probably say that this is his point: how are we to explain the living, holistic aspects of biological development? But the argument may still go against him here. The organs and tissue of an already existing living organism are not like the components of an inanimate mousetrap, and could, one imagines, take on new functions with comparatively small changes in structure.

Genocentrism

THE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE mousetrap analogy is that it suggests too mechanistic a picture of the biological world. But it may be that standard neo-Darwinism is guilty of a similar defect (which may, incidentally, conspire to make intelligent design creationism look more plausible than it should). What I am referring to is the tendency of neo-Darwinism to explain everything – evolution itself, morphology of individual organisms, and behaviour, individual and social – in terms of genes and their supposed striving to replicate themselves. This tendency has been dubbed by Brian Goodwin ‘genocentrism’, and according to Goodwin, for all its power and success, it fails to account for or to credit the extent to which living things are complex systems, wholes exercising a top down effect on the bits which make them up.

So genes are not, as it were, individual atoms or billiard balls pursuing their own independent ends, and entering into complex organisations only to further their own ends, and turning those organisations to their own ends. Such, of course, is the picture given by talk of selfish genes, but, even assuming it makes sense to think of genes as striving to do anything or that we understand just where they got their impetus to reproduce themselves, this picture is no more true at the genetic level than an analogous form of individualism is true at the social level (Hobbes). An alternative view is being developed currently according to which there is an emergent biological order, in which organisms are seen as wholes, governing their own development from embryonic origins to adulthood. In this new model the lives of complex organisms take on an intrinsic value and quality quite apart from their efficacy at survival and reproduction. It thus stands in opposition to the reductionism of neo-Darwinism, taking organic form and complexity to be irreducible to the parts of the organism, and seeing these forms as guiding the development, the existence and even the creativity of the organism as it makes its way through life.

In a way the emergent complexity view will provide an answer to the intelligent design theorists, for the ‘irreducible complexity’ which so baffles them will now be seen as a fundamental property of biological life, just as natural as the physics of gravitational attraction. What we actually have here is a tertium quid, between the question begging reductionism of the selfish gene and the miraculous and inexplicable activity of the intelligent designer within the created realm. We will also have a view of life and of biology which goes beyond the characteristic Darwinian tropes of the survival of the fittest and of the ‘rigid destruction’ of variations with characteristics ‘in the least degree injurious’ – in Darwin’s own words. (Did anyone, even in the heyday of Darwinism, really believe this last thesis, even though Darwin himself took it to be virtually synonymous with Natural Selection? The fact that they didn’t shows that for all the claims about Darwin’s theory being scientific, in its innermost core it was never taken as refutable.)

It is claimed by its advocates that the recasting of biology in terms of holistic morphogenetic analyses helps us to account for the large scale evolutionary developments which caused Darwin problems. They will also point to the fact that the molecular composition of chromosomes does not in itself determine the forms of the things the chromosome goes on to instruct; principles governing the organisation of the organism in question have to be in play, including both the presence of other features elsewhere in the organism and even environmental influences, such as good mothering, which can in some cases turn genes in their young on, so to speak. The key point is that some of the things genes do are not in themselves determined by the composition of the molecules of the chromosome, but depend for their functioning on feedback mechanisms from within the whole organisms in which the genes exist and on influences from outside the organism. Moreover segments of DNA only replicate themselves fully, without reverting to simpler and simpler forms, in the context of whole systems of cells. Then there is the striking fact that chemically very similar bits of DNA behave differently within organisms, depending on the cellular context and the function of the phenotypical bit they are producing or upholding.

The neo-Darwinist picture is one of genes determining form and behaviour from the bottom up, so to speak, and in a kind of Hobbesian universe in which already existing contractors help each other but only to further their own ends. As already mentioned this picture may inadvertently have given ammunition to the proponents of intelligent design, by making the complexity of whole organisms and even their parts seem more mysterious at the biological level than it really is. In contrast some biologists are coming to see the organism as a whole, as a ‘functional and a structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular form. This means that the parts of an organism-leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain-are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism.’ (Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, second edition, Princeton University Press, 2001, p 197) So we should not see what we take to be the parts of organisms, including their genes, to have an independent existence apart from the wholes of which they are parts; and some would extend the notion of the whole here to include the ecology of the environments in which organisms exist, which would suggest a far less confrontational model of the organism-environment relationship than is suggested by classical Darwinism.

We can and indeed should accept a generally evolutionary account of the living world, even if we are ready to contemplate some significant shifts from Darwinian and neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, including the use of the ever burgeoning study of complexity and complex organisations in many areas, from mathematics and chemistry to the social sciences and the study of artificial life. So far, though, much of what I have been pointing to touches on aspects of biology which are beyond my competence to do more than report on in a rather journalistic manner. In my conclusion, though, I will have something to say about the implications of a potential shift from a genocentric biology to a biology of emergent complexity, which focuses on the forms and organisation of organisms as a or even the primary explanatory tool. I want now, though, to look at what strikes me as an unresolved tension which runs through much of Darwin’s own thought, and which bears particularly, though not exclusively, on the application of his theory to the human species. The tension derives from Darwin’s own understanding of evolution.

Evolution and Progress

ACCORDING TO ONE STRAND of Darwinian thinking, evolution is fundamentally a relative notion, and that there is in Darwin’s theory no necessity that the development of evolutionary processes should be progressive in any sense other than ‘better at surviving and reproducing’. Proponents of this interpretation will point out that in The Origin of Species Darwin hardly uses the term ‘evolution’ (which definitely has connotations of progress in a more general sense), but tends to speak of the laws of variation, natural selection and descent with modification. ‘Descent with modification’ carries with it no implication that the modifications brought about through natural selection will necessarily be bigger or more complex or more beautiful or more intelligent. Indeed they definitely won’t be any of these things if the costs of greater complexity, intelligence, etc., in terms of energy consumption and so on outweigh the survival advantages they bring.

On this austere understanding of what is going on, success in the struggle for survival is all that really counts, and all that natural selection guarantees, and that may come in all sorts of ways. What the theory says is that variations which benefit their possessors in the struggle for survival will do better and eventually displace their competitors and their less successful con-specifics.

But success is always relative to a given environment, and may not require greater complexity or perfection viewed in absolute terms. Thus a longer neck might benefit its possessor if there are tall, food-bearing trees, but not if the trees all die out. If that happened the very same characteristic which was once an advantage will later prove a disadvantage. This effect can be quite radical in leading to the shedding of costly characteristics within a species when they are no longer required. Thus we see cave-dwelling descendants of sighted creatures with no sight, or flightless birds in New Zealand (before humans arrived with their rodent followers). In each case the effort and energy needed to produce sight and flight was not necessary for survival, so the faculties in question simply dropped off. They constituted a cost with no consequent advantage, and so long as there is no better equipped competitor there will be no evolutionary impetus towards what we might regard as an improvement, or what might indeed be an improvement, absolutely speaking.

Darwin was well aware of all of this: ‘As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates… Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances of nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our idea of fitness.’ And having mentioned bees being killed by their own stings, drones being produced in vast numbers for just one act, then to be slaughtered, ichneumonidae feeding in the bodies of live caterpillars, and other examples of waste, profligacy and worse in nature, he concludes ‘the wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed.’ (The Origin of Species, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1982, p 445).

Logically what Darwin says here is impeccable. Relative fitness and non-progressive development, fit enough just for the relevant environment, is all that is strictly implied by the theory of natural selection. Indeed we could argue that if species’ longevity and geographical spread are the criteria of evolutionary success the most successful species may well be certain types of insect. Certainly mammals in general and human beings in particular will be nowhere near the most successful. And, more generally, Darwin is keen on occasion to point out that our own ideas of what constitute perfection in a species might just be a little, shall we say, anthropocentric: he wrote in a letter that while to us intelligence may seem the chief mark of progress, to a bee it would no doubt be something else. This last sentiment might well seem to some to put Darwin in a favourable light, as immune to the race and species progressivism characteristic of his age. Unfortunately (perhaps) Darwin turns out to have had no such immunity, nor did he see evolution in general in strictly relative terms.

This is actually perfectly evident from the closing pages of The Origin of Species. ‘As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection’, he writes at the end of the penultimate paragraph. What he says there is something of a non sequitur, especially given our earlier observations on the logic of natural selection, which would license no such perfectionist optimism. One wonders, moreover, what Darwins’s own standard of progress and perfection is. Is a horse more perfect than a dinosaur, a fish than an amoeba? Is mankind more perfect than the bee? If we think we know what Darwin’s answers might be to at least some of these questions, there is more than a hint that in his judgements he would be implicitly judging the animal kingdom by the human characteristics of intelligence, rationality, morality, brain complexity and the rest.

Darwinism and the Creator

AT THE START OF the paragraph we have just quoted, Darwin had spoken (as he always did in all editions of The Origin of Species) of his system as being in accordance with ‘the laws impressed on matter by the Creator’. We can argue about just what Darwin meant at the various stages of his life by ‘the Creator’; but it would be hard to have a mind-set which could make any reference, however metaphorical, to a creatorial mind which did not take some tendency towards the better as being inherent in creation. Darwin may have become an agnostic theologically speaking, as he tells us quite explicitly in his Autobiography, even while admitting ‘the extreme difficulty or even impossibility’ he has ‘of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man and his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.’ And even granted Darwin’s steady drift towards personal agnosticism, in his core theorising there are significant traces of (dare we say?) design thinking.

It is not just that nature mimics human livestock breeders, which is what Darwin argues in his less exuberant moments. In a striking, but not a-typical passage from the Natural Selection chapter in The Origin of Species, Darwin says: ‘Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being…’ (The Origin of Species, p 133)  Natural selection scutinising, rejecting, preserving, adding, silently working at the improvement of each (!) organic being, and doing it all daily and hourly. Strewth! Falls of sparrows notwithstanding, the Gospels never imply so much; nor is Thomas Aquinas’s all-sustaining First Cause quite so busy and officious here on earth. Metaphor, all metaphor, we will be told, no doubt correctly. But metaphors reveal and metaphors are powerful; and this one is all of a part of Darwin’s attempt to hold on to natural selection as a progressive, beneficent force, an attempt which all but forces him to envisage it anthropomorphically, as a displaced intelligent designer, doing the Creator’s work for Him, through the laws He has impressed on it. (Although it would take us too far afield here, it is worth noting briefly that the God envisaged in the best traditional theology is not an interfering being at all, so not the one Darwin is replacing with natural selection, but rather one whose rain falls on the just and the unjust alike; not a being among beings, but the source of all that is who has withdrawn from creation precisely in order to allow things to develop and emerge according to the order of creation.)

In the closing passage of The Origin of Species Darwin says this: ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ Yes, we may think, but this is some distance from the earlier dispassionate nod in the direction of more cases of the want of absolute perfection. And life breathed in? How? By whom? And stylistically the endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful will certainly outweigh in the reader’s mind the war, the famine, the death which led to this inspiring result, and displace them from the forefront of his consciousness, as much as in any traditional theodicy.

But what of the writer’s mind? We know that in fact even as early as 1856 Darwin lamented the ‘clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature.’ In 1865 he reflected on the certainty of the extinction of all life: ‘to think of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into a red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.’ And in 1881 he told Wallace that even with everything to make him happy and contented, ‘life has become very wearisome to me’, partly surely because of his growing agnosticism. (See John C.Greene, Debating Darwin; Adventures of a Scholar, Regina Books, Claremont, 1999, pp 53-4.) For all Darwin’s pointing up of aspects of sympathy among us and other creatures, and his talk of grandeur in his vision notwithstanding, one can easily become depressed, as Darwin seemed to be himself, with the fundamentally cruel and bleak aspects of his re-imagining of nature.

Our Knowledge of Reality

ACTUALLY RATHER MORE HANGS on agnosticism at this point than Darwin’s personal mood, as Darwin himself recognised. If natural selection is all that there is, and if the human mind can be explained in purely evolutionary terms, as deriving from that of the lower animals, why should we accept that what we think about ultimate reality has any objective validity? ‘A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton’, Darwin wrote in 1881. He went on to express a ‘horrid doubt’ as to whether ‘the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’ (Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, John Murray, London, 1888, Vol I, p 285.)

Part of the point here is that just like a bee, a monkey might have a very different perspective on the world from us; and, in the case of scientific and philosophical speculation, compared to us, a very limited one. But equally, ours might seem even more limited to our distant descendents or to creatures with higher intellectual powers. Darwin hopes that natural selection will eventually produce people who would look on him and Lyell and Newton as ‘mere barbarians’; but while that does seem to follow from the point about natural selection’s programme of relentless scutinising and improving, what confidence would that leave us in the theories of Darwin, Lyell and Newton? Will their theories, in the future, seem no more reliable than those of the primitive and barbaric Tierra del Fuegans Darwin encountered on his epic voyage did to him, and who caused him to remark in his journal for 17 December 1832 on how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man, greater than that between wild and domesticated animals, ‘inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement’? So what would an improved Darwin or Lyell of 500 years hence think of what will no doubt seem to be the primitive ramblings and superstitions of their predecessors from the Nineteenth century?

If these were not sufficient grounds for scepticism on our existential and metaphysical convictions, we also have to consider the nature of Darwinian explanations. As we have already pointed out, the theory of natural selection tells us that a creature’s physical and mental development is conditioned by what will aid survival and reproduction – and that is all. Why are we to suppose that speculating on our own nature has anything to do with that, or, even more, that the faculties we have developed to help us get round the savannah and find mates in earlier times are going to help us in coming to the truth in advanced scientific and philosophical investigations? Or indeed in the looking long into the past and into the future, which Darwin himself saw as part of our capacities? How did these come about through natural selection alone? And apart from the scope of our enquiries, surviving and getting mates are different aims from a disinterested pursuit of truth, and techniques and perceptual media which work well at the level of basic survival and reproduction may be pretty sketchy, if not actually misleading, when it comes to investigating areas remote from everyday experience.

Darwin’s point is put with telling directness by Thomas Nagel: ‘If, per impossibile, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious scepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range’. (The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p 79.) Nagel concludes that the development of the human intellect – which can go beyond the limited and the familiar – probably provides a counter-example to the view that natural selection explains everything. I would concur, adding two further points. The first is that even if we add the role of the intellect in sexual selection, saying that our minds have developed partly in order to attract mates through storytelling and other mental performances neither validates those performances or explains why it is that potential mates value those who pursue objective theory (if they do). The theory of natural selection needs supplementing at both these points to give a satisfactory account of our pursuance of objective theory.

Then secondly, as Darwin himself acknowledged, the theory of natural selection is in danger of self-destructing. If that theory explains what we think and do in terms of the value things have for us in promoting survival and reproduction, saying in effect that we accept them because they promote survival and reproduction, the same must be true of the theory of natural selection itself. We accept it, if we do, because it helps us in the struggle for existence, not because it is true, which would of course provide no rational argument against the creationist or the Islamist who might, not unconvincingly, find great support for survival in the following of his creed. So Darwinism undermines its own claims to be true (just as in analogous ways do the theories of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud if we take them at face value).

Faced with these problems, one could, of course, take a completely different tack at this point. Maybe, as Nagel suggests, the mind and our searching for truth shows that natural selection is not the whole story. Along with other human capacities (for co-operation, for the appreciation of beauty, to name but two), our acquiring of knowledge for its own sake might be something rooted in nature, something to which evolution in the broad sense has been tending, and even something anticipated in earlier forms of life. After all, it might seem to the dispassionate observer, not already convinced of the truth of strict Darwinism, that much in the behaviour of the ‘lower’ animals is done for its own sake, for amusement, play and curiosity, and hard to bring within the procrustean bed of the promotion of survival and reproduction. To the dispassionate observer, not already committed to selfish genery and the like, the human mind might come to seem not an anomaly whose self-centered classificatory schemes unjustifiably over-estimate mind in general and the human mind in particular, but as something indeed cued into reality itself in a way which transcends the demands of survival and reproduction. If we do follow this tack – which we are surely not barred from doing by anything in biology in the strict sense, as opposed to the dogmas of neo-Darwinism – then we would not have to worry about our theories of nature self-destructing. But we would, of course, have to pay the price of admitting that at least one of them, that is the Darwinism which would see everything as either anomalous or conducive only to survival and reproduction, is false.

Savages and Civilized Races

LET US, THOUGH, FOR the moment assume that Darwinian explanations are in general true and do not apply to the Darwinian theory itself, and let us see what that theory implies about human development. It turns out that Darwin’s early reaction to the Tierra del Fuegans was not an anomaly, but is all of a piece with the core doctrine of continuous improvement through natural selection. He refers to them again at the end of The Descent of Man in 1871: ‘They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their tribe’. And opening out his discussion, he goes on to say that he would prefer to be descended from a monkey or a baboon who manifested traits of loyalty and self-sacrifice as from ‘a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.’ (The Descent of Man, second edition, John Murray, London, 1898, Vol II p 440.)

Earlier in the main body of The Descent of Man Darwin had written a whole chapter on the way inferior races had been replaced by superior ones; even ‘at the present day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting where the climate opposes a deadly barrier’. (Vol I, p 197)  This is due, he suggests, to the working out via natural selection of the effects of better intellectual and moral faculties and sensibilities, which give their possessors advantages in the struggle for survival, which, together with their ‘daring and persistent energy’ (also a product of natural selection) go some way to explaining the ‘remarkable success of the English as colonists’ and ‘the wonderful progress of the United States.’ (p 218) Indeed part of Chapter V of The Descent of Man is devoted to rebutting the contrary suggestion that all races started at the same level, with some declining over time. For Darwin, as an evolutionarily progressive thinker, the descent of man implies ascent both from lower species and from lower stages of human development. As early as 11 October 1859, in a letter to Charles Lyell, Darwin had written ‘I look at this process as now going on with the races of man; the less intellectual races being exterminated.’ (The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge University Press, 1983-2004, Vol 7, p 345.)

As late as 1881 Darwin wrote: ‘The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.’ Admittedly this is in a letter (the same one, in fact, already referred to), but that remark (redolent as it may be of the contemporaneous talk of ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ and of ‘sick men of Europe’) is precisely in reply to a correspondent who was doubtful that the struggle for survival and natural selection had done much to contribute to human progress. In 2011 it is hard not be disturbed Darwin’s casual reference to the elimination of endless numbers of lower races, and even more by the way this sort of thinking was taken up by his followers such as Haeckel and von Treitschke, who in turn influenced Hitler.  Moreover the remark in question is all of a piece with the teaching of The Descent of Man, even if more forcefully expressed.

The question we have to face here is not whether Darwin held the views ascribed to him. He clearly did. The question is whether those views follow from the theory of natural selection. The inescapable conclusion is that, if that theory is to be applied to human history, it is hard to see how, in some form, it can fail to do so.

The very first chapter of that book is entitled ‘The Descent of Man from Some Lower Form’, so clearly no species egalitarianism there. It is indeed just what we had been led to expect from the conclusion of The Origin of Species where we were promised that the theory of natural selection would through light on origin of man and his history. For if natural selection is a doctrine of progress and if it applies to human history as well as to human origins we must expect that humans will be better than animals in significant respects and that some humans will be significantly better than others. There is, of course, an elision in Darwin’s thinking between better in the struggle for existence and more civilized. Bulgarian atrocities aside, there is no necessity here.

Indeed when we come to human affairs, the whole thing becomes rather ragged. We might indeed think that the Bulgarian atrocities are small beer compared to the atrocities produced by the ‘civilized’ peoples of the twentieth century (or indeed to those perpetrated in the French Revolution and by Napoleon just a bit earlier.). Is the society which produces reality television (or television at all) more civilised than that which produced Chartres Cathedral and the Divine Comedy? Is there progress from Beethoven and Schubert to Stockhausen and Sir Harrison Birtwhistle (or even the Beatles)? For all our universal literacy have we produced any writers to compare with Aeschylus or Shakespeare, or thinkers to compare with Plato or Kant? These questions are, of course, undecidable, as is what lies behind them. It is impossible to see any general trend in human affairs towards progress or universal improvement, partly (but not only) because the terms in question are inherently vague, and where not vague are likely to be essentially contestable. What is, though, more clear to us than it may have been to Darwin is that in human affairs the struggle for existence is not in itself a guarantee of progress in any dimensions other than those of surviving and reproducing.

Darwinism and Social Policy

MORE CLEAR, BUT DARWIN was not entirely unworried in this area. For he did, like many of his contemporaries, notice a tendency in his time for the unfit, the inferior ‘in body or mind’ and even the abject poor to breed, and, though he does not say this explicitly, possibly to outbreed the prudent and the strong. If mankind is to advance, we must uncover the laws of inheritance and then legislate against marriages among the inferior. We must encourage the poor not to marry (for abject poverty ‘tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage’), while at the same time urging the prudent and the most able to rear the largest number of offspring. (Maybe Darwin would have seen himself as suffering from a related dilemma had he not been personally so rich; at the time of his marriage he was wondering whether he would be able to have both books and children.) Above all we must ensure that the struggle for existence is not softened in its severity by laws and customs: ‘otherwise (mankind) would sink into indolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted.’ (All the quotations are from The Descent of Man , second edition, John Murray, 1898, vol II, pp 438-440.)

There is in fact a degree of tension in Darwin’s own mind at this point, because as well as the struggle for existence, he wants our moral qualities to be developed (partly because he believes that a group with a strong communal morality based on mutual sympathy will do better than less coherent groups). But might it not be just those moral qualities which recognise a common good, which protect the inferior and the poor against the most severe effects of the struggle for existence, which might then undermine human progress (on his view)? Indeed it is just so. ‘It is surprising’, Darwin observed, ‘how soon a want of care… leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.’ But in our own case, and for moral reasons, a degree of such ‘ignorance’ must be tolerated. We must, Darwin admits, ‘therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind’, while at the same time doing what we can to ensure that ‘the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound.’ (The Descent of Man, Vol I, p 206)  So the general import of his message is clear. We must take as much care in our own marriages as we take in the breeding and selection of our domestic animals, and we must also maintain social structures which allow untrammelled competition; both these injunctions follow pretty directly from applying the theory of natural selection to human society, as does the view that societies are to be ranked in degrees of success.

Evolution and the Anthropic Principle

WE HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING a number of aspects of Darwin’s theory. In so doing we have found a tension between the theory of natural selection taken strictly and things which Darwin clearly holds strongly and wants to say. In particular we have found difficulties with his view of evolutionary progress, with his view of our own mental capacities, with his attempts to rank human societies, and also with what he considers desirable within human societies. To put it bluntly, natural selection gives no warrant for any progressivism regarding evolution. It makes it hard to see what faith we should have in our scientific and philosophical speculations. It gives no warrant for associating success in evolutionary terms with a greater degree of civilisation. At the same time the theory of natural selection seems to sanction a type of society which would run counter to many commonly held moral virtues and decencies. The interesting thing is that in each case Darwin himself gives sign of straining against the strict view of natural selection, and of wanting to promote a less austere view of things.

In a way, this connects with what we said at the beginning abut moving away from a genocentric biology towards an approach which emphasised complexity and co-operation. If what is central to our study is not the gene or the organism, considered as discrete atomic individuals, but the complexes which they are and of which they form parts, we may begin to see existence in terms other than that of the survival of individuals and of what contributes to that.

In what we have come to see as the austere version of evolution, that delimited by Darwin’s strict theory of natural selection, the picture which is given is of life being a desperate struggle by individuals to survive in an environment which if not actually hostile is largely indifferent to them. The key levers in this drama are random variations within the individuals and selective retention of a few of them by an environment which cares nothing for any of it. We are obviously a long distance from Darwin’s own sense of natural selection carefully scrutinising, selecting, preserving, ceaselessly and silently working for the good of all and each, and it is difficult to see where any such notion could gain a foothold. Nor is there any sense that the process as a whole is likely to move in a progressive direction, towards greater intelligence, complexity and morality. Rather to the contrary, the universe looks far more like that described by Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity (Knopf, New York, 1971): ‘The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.’ (p 145)  We human beings are here by chance, in a universe which is not responsive to us at all, and within which our existence has no significance. For Monod, mankind is a gypsy, living in an alien world, which is deaf to his music. (He apparently saw no difficulty in having this alien world giving rise to creatures (us) who are able to conceive the world and their activity in terms of values.)

In recent years, as is well known, the view that the universe was not pregnant with life and consciousness has been challenged by what has become known as the anthropic principle. It is obviously true, tautologically so, that, given that we are here, the universe must be such and must have been such as to allow for the existence of intelligent knowers, such as ourselves. It turns out, though, non-tautologically, that a very high degree of fine tuning even at the start of the universe, would have to have been in place in order for intelligent life (us) to have been possible. Can anything be concluded from the fine tuning point?

At the very least, it suggests that Monod’s basic stance needs qualification. From the very beginning, the universe was, if not pregnant with life, certainly ready for the emergence of life. And the more precise the fine tuning and the more etched into the substance of things that fine tuning is, given the immense amounts of time and space involved for things to work themselves out, the closer readiness becomes to pregnancy. In a universe of the extent of ours, it is not unrealistic to think that possibilities embedded in the universe’s basic structure are highly likely actually to occur. It is reasoning of this sort which leads the adherents of the so-called ‘strong’ anthropic principle to conclude that life and mind do not have to be imported into the universe from outside or by chance. They are ‘etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy half-glimpsed life principle.’ (Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma. Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? Penguin Books, London, 2006, pp 302-3) Given the notorious problems in explaining life and consciousness in purely physicalistic terms, such a view is not just helpful in general terms. The difficulties themselves might actually open us to the possibility that some such thing must be true, that life and mind are there, embryonically, right from the start – otherwise it becomes well-nigh impossible to see how they could have arisen.

AT THIS POINT IT is worth mentioning Christian de Duve’s book Vital Dust (Basic Books, New York, 1995) in which the distinguished biologist (and, like Monod, a Nobel prize winner) shows in great and sober detail, how, the importance of chance events in the actual history notwithstanding, the development of life towards human consciousness (and maybe beyond) is almost inevitable, once life in its most basic form had emerged. (See especially his summary pp 294-300.)  And he also argues, in line with proponents of the anthropic principle, that given the physical conditions obtaining on the Earth 3.8 billion years ago, RNA-like molecules were bound to arise at some time or other. Further given the nature of the universe itself those conditions apt for the emergence of RNA were almost bound to arise not only on the Earth, but in many, many other planets. Hence de Duve’s evocative title ‘Vital Dust’, suggesting that the elementary particles of which the universe is composed have an inbuilt tendency to form themselves into life and mind-promoting complexes. In the letter to Lyell referred to earlier, Darwin had said that he ‘would give absolutely nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.’ Consciousness and even life itself can look highly mysterious, if we are reductive physicalists, but not so miraculous if our perspective is that of de Duve. A de Duvian perspective, then, can help to smooth out the course of a theory of evolution in the way Darwin himself required.

We do not have to acquiesce in the more colourful conclusions drawn by advocates of anthropic thinking to see its basic orientation as suggestive in a number of ways. If the universe is disposed to produce life and mind right from the start, we will no longer see ourselves as tangential to it, a mere random accident in a fundamentally lifeless system, gaining whatever knowledge we have of it as a chance side effect of our striving to survive in it. If our mental faculties are rooted in the fabric of the universe, it will not be surprising or problematic if they do deliver knowledge of it way beyond the basics we need for survival. If the universe as a whole is evolving forms of life and mind, the progressive thrust of evolution in that direction will not be such a mystery. Also, if life and mind are themselves goods from the point of view of that evolution, we may well be led to value states of feeling and mind for their own sakes, and not simply as aids to survival and reproduction. Indeed something more than survival and reproduction may come to be seen as implicit in nature from the start; so our own tendencies to morality and co-operation (genuine altruism) will no longer seem the anomaly they will inevitably are if nature is conceived in strictly Darwinian terms.  Finally an approach to evolution and life which stresses complexity and mutual belonging will be far less concerned to emphasise struggle in the way Darwin does, which will obviously have ecological and ethical resonances.

It remains to be seen whether any of this would be helpful to religion in restoring that sense of the Creator which Darwin found so hard to dispense with even in his agnosticism. On the positive side, a universe pregnant with life and a biosphere pregnant with mind would be far more congenial to religious understanding than the bleak cosmic landscape envisaged by Monod. And the idea of God or the divinity working through creative processes is one common to many religious traditions (and it would also pick up on Teilhardian ideas of the cosmos existing in order to know itself). On the other hand these ideas may in themselves do little to exorcise the weariness and despair many others than Darwin feel when confronted with all the apparent waste, prodigality and suffering inherent in creation. Without some revelation or gift of grace, the problems involved reconciling ourselves to a God who chooses to work like that, or who can work in no other way (which may be even worse for the traditional notion of an intelligent designer) remain as intractable as ever.

Anthony O’Hear, an editor of The Fortnightly Review New Series, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London. He is the author, most recently, of The Great Books: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature.

For more on this topic, please see Beyond Evolution : Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford) by Anthony O’Hear.