Implications of Darwinism

Dr. FAZLUR RAHMAN*

In this article:

• INTRODUCTION
• IMPLICATIONS
• IMPLICATIONS ON ANTHROPOLOGY
• DARWINISM IN ACTION
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES & REFERENCES

 

INTRODUCTION

            The Year 1809 witnessed the birth of two extra-ordinary personalities, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Each was destined to gain pre-eminence in his career. Among all born in the nineteenth century, none, with the possible exception of Karl Marx, did as much as Darwin to change the main trends of thought, and to produce a new outlook in human affairs(1)^. “Darwinism” is a concept as firmly fixed in the Western mind as Marxism, Malthusianism, and Machiavellianism, probably because the Western mind is already been brought into a receptive state(2).

            Charles Darwin was the son of Robert Darwin who had one of the largest medical practices outside of London, and the grandson of the physician Erasmus Darwin, the author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, and of the artisan-entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin thus enjoyed a secure position in the professional upper middle class that provided him with considerable social and professional advantages (3).

            Two events directly influenced the thoughts of Darwin, (a) firm friendship with Henslow, professor of  botany and Sedgwick, professor of geology and (b) Studying of Malthus’ Essay on Population. Darwin  received an offer through  professor Sedgwick to sail as naturalist on board the naval ship Beagle, starting out  on an extensive surveying expedition in the southern hemisphere. Looking back on his voyage in latter years, Darwin rated it “by far the most important event in my life.” It determined his whole career. His journey from 1831 to 1836 of various continent and Major Island enabled him to write his famous 7book, Origin of Species. In the beginning, he was unable to explain the appearance and disappearance of species. He was not clear about the origin of the species, their modification with the passage of time, their divergence into numerous branches, and often disappearance from the scene completely.

The key to the mystery came through a chance reading of Malthus’ Essay on Population. Malthus had shown that humankind’s rate of increase was retarded by such “positive checks” as disease, accidents, war, and famine. It occurred to Darwin that similar factors might keep down the population of animals and plants. Thus was born the famous Darwinian doctrine of “natural selection,” “struggle for existence” or “survival of fittest,” the foundation stone for the Origin of Species.

            Darwin applied the formula of “artificial selection” on “natural selection”. He was convinced that if evolution can be brought about by artificial selection, it is possible that nature functions in the same manner, by natural selection. In nature, however, the breeder’s place is taken by the struggle for existence. Among all forms of life, Darwin observed, an enormous number of individuals must perish. Only a fraction of those that were born can survive. Some species furnish food for other species. The battle goes on ceaselessly, and the fierce competition eliminates animals and plants unfitted to survive. Variations in species take place to meet the conditions necessary for survival. According to him, the principle of natural selection is that some individuals in a species will be stronger, can run faster, are more intelligent, immune to disease, or better able to endure the rigor of climate than their fellows. These will survive and reproduce as the weaker members perish(4).

            Following The Origin of Species, a stream of books appeared about Darwin and Darwinism in the Western world(5). Numerous books provide accounts of Darwin’s life and of his theory and the role, it plays in Biology and the development of modern thought. It seems that the Darwin revolution and the impact of Darwinism now have a secure place in the history of western thought(6).

            Darwin theory was not only a scientific paradigm-providing biologist with a set of rules to answer many of their research problems, but also went far beyond restructuring a new mode of investigation in the biological field. Transformed into a set of ideas of universal application, Darwin’s theory triggered varied inquiry into many aspects of human activity. The diffusion of evolutionary theory implied that, in a number of cases, Darwin became a minor figure in the movement called Darwinism. The importance of Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel and Henry Bergson in transmitting evolutionary ideas is recognized by many scholars. The application of Darwin’s theory by Spencer to encompass the whole cosmos had a great impact on shaping an intellectual life of the West(7).

            While Darwin had not attempted to explain the general laws of evolution, Darwinism has been used to denote many things to many people. The term Darwinism can indicate Darwin’s specific explanation of the theory of evolution by natural selection(8). It can also be used in a broader sense to mean any evolutionary theory with or without natural selection, which rejects Lamark’s(9) ideas on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Some writers have equated Darwinism with Social Darwinism. Just because the term was used in a broader context, it is hard to avoid a certain impression when discussing the influence of Darwinism on the world(10).

            The idea of evolution is not a new concept in modern times(11). Two novel views were advanced in the nineteenth century regarding it. One group of thinking applied the idea to the whole universe, including matter and force. Another group restricted its application to the world of living organism, including the kingdom of plants and animals and the human race. Those who adopted the general theory of evolution faced, undoubtedly, the controversial issue of creationism and the forces that control the universe. The advocates of the evolution of living things concentrated on the impact of natural factors, such as climate, environment and the availability of food, and did not elaborate beyond these matters. In so doing, they avoided a direct confrontation with those who believed in extra-natural control by religious powers. Thinkers who generalized the notion of evolution to encompass the whole universe, however, needed to resolve the issue of the forces that regulate the world, and this issue cannot be separated from the question of creation and creator.

Among Western intellectuals, one of the most articulate spokespersons for the general principles of evolution was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Before Darwin published the Origin of Species, Spencer had organized a general philosophical theory based on the principle of evolution. He defined the term evolution as:

An integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation(12).

            For him, evolution was a progress, a movement from simple, undifferentiated matter to more complex, differentiated matter. He also explained that the evolution of life was a complete adaptation between the needs of a living organism and its natural environment. In other words, environment is the direct cause for variation among species. Spencer applied his principles of “survival of the fittest”, a laissez- faire social system coupled with innate struggle, in a highly formal way. The deep-rooted confusion of Spencerism led a variety of thinkers to attack his ideas on philosophical grounds.

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IMPLICATIONS

            Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, and within a decade, his theories of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” were applied or misapplied to contemporary politics and economics. This pseudoscientific social Darwinism appealed to educated Europeans already demoralized by a century of higher criticism of religious scripture and conscious of the competitiveness of their own daily lives in that age of freewheeling industrial capitalism(13).

            Social Darwinist held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by survival of the fittest, a phrase proposed by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). The social Darwinist, notably Spencer and  Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) in England and William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)in the United States believed that the process of natural selection acting on variations in population would result in the survival of the best competitors and in continuing improvement in the population. Societies, like individuals, were viewed as organisms that evolve in this manner. The theory was used to support laissez-faire(14) capitalism and political conservatism(15). Class stratification was justified because of natural inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or rather means would therefore, interfere with natural process; unrestricted competition and defense of status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were unfit and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success(16). At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist and racist politics, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon(17) or Aryan(18) cultural and biological superiority.

            By the 1870, books appeared explaining the outcome of the Franco-German war, for instance, with reference to the ‘vitality’ of the Germanic people by comparison to the ‘exhausted’ Latin. Pan Slavic literature extolled the youth vigour of that race, of whom Russia was seen as the natural leader. A belief in the natural affinity and the superiority of Nordic peoples sustained Joseph Chamberlain’s (1836-1914) conviction that an Anglo-American-German alliance should govern the world in the 20^th century. Vulgar anthropology explained the relative merits of human races based on physiognomy and brain size, a ‘scientific’ approach to world politics occasioned by the increasing contact of Europeans with Asians and Africans. Racialist rhetoric became common currency, as when Kaiser referred to Asia’s growing population as ‘the yellow peril’ and spoke of the next war as a ‘death struggle between the teutons and slaves.’ Poets and philosophers idealized combat as the process by which nature wed out the weak and improve the human race. By 1914, therefore, the political and moral restraints had arisen after 1789-1815 were significantly weakened. The old conservative nation that established governments had a heavy stake in peace lest revolution engulf them, and the old liberal notion that national unity, democracy, and free trade would spread harmony, were all but dead. The historian cannot judge how much social Darwinism influenced specific policy decisions, but a mood of fatalism and bellicosity surely eroded the collective will to peace(19).

            This approach to survival has its drawbacks. Should the environment change suddenly, those who have gambled on specialization may lose, while those who have retained a generalized form and remained adaptable can adjust to the new situation and survive. Overall, the order primate, which contains humans and their ancestors, has retained this approach, an evolutionary flexibility that has enabled primates to respond to change when it has arisen. Some writers also perceived in the growth stages of each individual a recapitulation of the earlier stages of the society. Strange customs were thus accounted for on the assumption that they were throwbacks to an earlier useful practice; an example offered was the make- believes struggle sometimes enacted at the marriage ceremonies between the bridge groom and the relative of the bride, reflecting an earlier bride-capture custom(20). The same is the case of nudism (also called naturism), the practice of going without clothes. Nudism is a social practice in the West in which the sexes interact freely. The origin of the practice in Germany in the early 20th century coincided with a rebellion against the rigid moral attitudes of the late 19th century. Nudism is the direct outcome of Darwinism. It spread through Europe after World War I and became established in North America during the 1930s, in the United States and Canada. Public nudity of varying degrees and pornography in extreme sense has become increasingly common in the latter part of the 20th century(21).

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IMPLICATIONS ON ANTHROPOLOGY

            The 19^th century saw on one side rapid development of various disciplines, on the other side increasing specialization within disciplines. Perhaps the most significant theme, common to all branches, was the declining influence of religion. The philosophers of enlightenment(22) had concurred in thinking that the transcendence of God doomed to failure any attempt to encompass him within the framework of human discourse. Herder had stated, “It is necessary to read the Bible in a human manner, for it is a book written by men for men.” By the late 19^th century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had announced that God was dead. Nevertheless, the death of God also meant that the essence of God in every man was dead...that which was common to and that in virtue of which the individual transcended the natural, material world and his purely biological nature. Also dead was the part of a person that recognized universal God-given ideals of reason and truth, goodness and beauty. There thus emerged views of man that, while integrating him more thoroughly with the natural world--treating his incarnation as an essential aspect of his condition--had to come to terms with the consequences for science, morality, and the study of man himself of the removal of a transcendent support for belief in absolute standards or ideals. The presumption of a fixed human nature was undercut at the level of natural history by the emergence and eventual acceptance of evolutionary biology. This added a historical, developmental dimension to the natural history of man, which complimented developmental views of culture and of man as a culturally constituted being. But more importantly, evolutionary biology made man a direct descendant of nonhuman primates and suggested that the gift of reason, which so many had seen as establishing a gulf between man and animal, might too have developed gradually and might indeed have a physiological basis. Even though Buffon had tied classification to the ability to reproduce, and had thus introduced a temporal dimension into the characterization of species, he had retained the idea of stable species. However, a static classification could not explain the dynamic relations between isolated species. A primitive time line of natural history thus developed. The relationship of families led to the idea of filiations between them according to an order of succession. The interpretation of fossils aroused impassioned debates. From them have arisen concepts of mutation (the process by which the genetic material of a cell is altered), transformism (the theory that one species is changed into another), and evolution. These concepts, already being formulated in the 18th century, were refined in the work of Darwin(23).

            The experience of the Industrial Revolution was crucial to most 19th-century thought about man. Reactions to this experience can be put into three broad categories. There were those who saw in industrialization the progressive triumph of reason over nature, making possible the march of civilization and the moral triumph of reason over animal instinct. This was a view that continued the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its confidence in reason and the ability to advance through science. Into this category can be put the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a stout defender of liberal individualism. Mill's philosophy was in many respects a continuation of that of Hume but with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian view that the foundation of all morality is the principle that one should always act so as to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This ethical principle gives a prominent place to the sciences of man (which are conceived as being parallel in method to the natural sciences), their study deemed necessary for an empirical determination of the social and material conditions that produce the greatest general happiness. This is a non-dialectical, naturalistic humanism, which gives primacy to the individual and stresses the importance of his freedom. For Mill, all social phenomena, and therefore ultimately all social changes, are products of the actions of individuals. The humanist opponents of capitalist industrialization fall into two groups, both presuming some form of dialectical humanism: those who, like Marx, retained a faith in the scientific application of reason and those who, like Goethe and Schiller, fundamentally questioned the humanity of mechanistic science and the technology it spawned. The Romantics questioned the instrumental conception of the relation between man and nature, which is fundamental to the thinking behind technological science. They insisted on an organic relation between man and the rest of nature. It is not man's place outside of nature that is emphasized but his situation within it. Equally central to this view was a recognition of the historicity of human culture and a rejection of any conception of a fixed, determined human nature on which a science of man parallel in structure to the natural sciences (i.e., a science with laws, whether empirical or rational, that determine the actions and the historical development of mankind) could be based. There was a continued commitment to the perspective of the individual, and his creative relation with the world, an orientation that was carried over into the philosophical anthropology of 20th-century phenomenologist and existentialists, with their critiques of modern industrial science. The Marxist opposition to capitalist industrialization is not to industrialization as such but to capitalist forms of it. This opposition is founded on socialism, which stresses the role of social structures; it is at the level of society--its structures and its economic base of production--that the course of history can be understood. Marx emphasized the importance of labour and work in man's relation both to the natural and to the social worlds in which he finds himself and which condition his ability to realize himself through these relationships. He deplored the loss of humanity associated with capitalist industrialization, which was manifest in the alienating conditions under which members of the working class were treated as objects and thus deprived of their full status as human subjects by their industrial masters. Nonetheless, he retained a faith in scientific knowledge and in the possibility of a scientific understanding of history by integrating its economic, social, and political aspects. Marx argued, however, that it was not reason but revolution that would cause the overthrow of the capitalist system. Common to all of these reactions is that whether they privileged reason or not they did not seek to validate the claims of reason--and hence the claims of science--by reference to a rational God. However, with this transcendent guarantor removed, the question of the objectivity of rational standards and of the commonality of human thought structures became pressing. The Cartesian starting point focused attention on thought as a sequence of ideas, knowable only to the individual concerned. Animals, even if capable of uttering structured sound sequences, were denied linguistic abilities on the ground that these sound sequences could not be the expressions of thoughts and could not have meaning; lacking minds, animals also lack ideas, the thoughts that give words their meaning. According to this view, words are simply conventionally established vehicles for the communication of thoughts that exist prior to, and independent of, their linguistic expression. However, if it is not assumed that human minds are all instantiations of a single transcendent mind, or that although individual they were created from a common pattern, this account of linguistic communication must appear inadequate. Since according to Cartesianism introspection is the only route to awareness of ideas, each person can only ever be aware of his own ideas, never of those of another. He could never know that his attempts to communicate succeed in calling up in another person's mind ideas similar to those in his own. Some new way of looking at linguistic communication was required, and this could be nothing short of a new starting point, a new way of thinking about thought(24).

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DARWINISM IN ACTION

            The journey of the Western civilization from the Dark ages up to the enlightenment is not more than 500 years. The enlightenment or the vice versa of any civilization is considered to be the direct outcome of its principles, belief system, moral values and social institutions. The sum of these elements is called civilization. Amongst people, some are influenced from these elements while others influence these elements. The latter are those people who design the structure of a specific civilization. Modern civilization is composed of five inalienable elements: Philosophy of materialism, atheism, popular sovereignty, nationalism and free sex. The concept of social evolution in decaying pious sentiments and moral values of the society is more significant than the role of these components. The genesis of this philosophy is found in materialism, while utilitarianism provided sustenance and the thrust of conquest of time and space provided public popularity to it. The result was that oppression, bloodshed and suppression of weak became high moral values. If we critically analyze the personalities behind this philosophy, Hegel, Marx and Darwin are seen in the front row. Darwin’s account of biological evolution gave a further impetus to this way of thinking(25). The sum of the philosophy of these three philosophers is:

a)      Evolution in life is because of insoluble contradictions with itself(26),

b)      humanity flourishes because of this irreconcilable antagonism,

c)      survival of the fittest’ is the only formula for existence in this universe,

d)     the main objective of the life is ‘success’ gained by any means(27).

            The main reason of this approach was the separation of religion from state. Writings of Saint- Simon, Auguste Comte, Sigmund Freud, and Emile Durkheim perceived religion as ‘childhood of man’. Freud persuaded people to get rid of the guilt feeling, which caused neurosis. Marx visualized man imprisoned in structures, religion included. Giving primacy to means of production, he thought that under the apparent economic relationships is ‘the inner but concealed essential pattern’. Their differences aside, which are mostly peripheral, their mental landscape was shaped by evolutionary theory, though they were not the only one who consciously accepted the ‘truth’ revealed by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. There were others as well who zipped their way to the ‘truth’ and embraced it. For example, Spencer saw in evolution the justification free enterprise capitalism. Nietzsche concluded political absolutism from it. Kropotkin visualized in it the rationale for cooperative anarchism. Moreover, Marx obtained support from it for his dialectical materialism. Thomas Huxley equated evolution with the United Nations’ charter. Such were the divergent inferences drawn     from a scientific ‘truth’. Their personal inference consolidated their own bias towards a certain set of thoughts, but the damage done to social sciences and man’s quest for harmony and peace was incalculable(28).

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CONCLUSION

            These giants in sociology failed to understand that science can improve man’s material conditions but not his moral and spiritual horizons. In addition, the scientific method is not applicable to human scene, which is a different kind of a world by any norm. Science deals with ‘cause- effect and spatio-temporal relations.’ Science can only describe a phenomenon but discovers no criteria for human action. “When we treat”, says Toulmin, “[a scientist’s] tentative and carefully qualified conclusion, as universal certainties, or even we inflate some discovery having a definite bonded scope into the solution of different problems in other fields-ethics, aesthetics, politics or philosophy; then we are asking  of him things he is in no position to give and converting his conceptions into myths(29).”

            Science gave the taste for material comfort to man, but scienti-

cism, when applied to man, dissolved his scriptural dignity as a creation with divine spark in him and dished him out as an ape that ascended the scale of evolution to become human. His nobility known through his compassion, courage, and will power melted in the test tube and traced to different constituent chemicals, which through laboratory manipulation can be induced, enhanced or eliminated. Forgetting in the process the difference between the act, the triggering of chemicals, and the thought behind it. A cumulative process, which is a complex interplay of divergent elements, and is more than its constituents, was reduced to a mere phenomenon. Scienticism took the romance out of man and planetary existence. The result is that:

 “Corruption doth appear on the land and sea because of (the evil) which men’s hands have done, that He may make them taste in order that they return”(30).

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NOTES & REFERENCES