Excerpts from The Evolution Wars (2001)



Excerpts from The Evolution Wars (2001)

by Michael Ruse

Social Darwinism

A good and full religion has a moral code, directives that it gives to its acolytes. “Love your neighbors as yourself.” “Honor thy mother and thy father.” “Do not lust after the wives of other men.” Evolutionists took very seriously, as part of their system, this need for obligation. This led to the full development of what came to be known as Social Darwinism—a moral code based on evolution—although truly it would be better known as Social Spencerianism . . . [A Social Darwinist] ferrets out the nature of the evolutionary process—the mechanism or cause of evolution—and then transfers it to the human realm, arguing that that which holds as a matter of fact among organisms holds as a matter of obligation among humans.

Take the case of Herbert Spencer. Several years before Darwin published . . . Spencer (1852) recognized the significance of the struggle for existence for human population development. He saw clearly that natural urges to reproduce would bring on differential survival and reproduction of organisms within and between populations, and that this could lead to permanent biological change . . . Spencer at once drew the implications for our species. Take, to use his example, the different natures and behaviors of the Irish and the Scots. In true Victorian fashion, Spencer argued that even though the Irish have lots of children, because of their lazy, indolent ways they are going to fail in life’s struggles. The far more frugal and hardworking Scots will succeed and thrive, as indeed they do. Change in human nature will ensue.

From this satisfying biological inference, Spencer made an easy transition to economics, arguing that just as biology favors an unrestricted struggle and consequent selective success, so also economically this is the way that one should go for success. In particular, one should promote policies based on extreme laissez-faire socioeconomics. States should stay away from the activities of people following their own self-interest. In no way should politicians try to regulate or otherwise control unrestricted competition . . .

Spencer could sound positively brutal about those who would help the unfortunate within society: “If the unworthy are helped to increase, by shielding them from that mortality which their unworthiness would naturally entail, the effect is to produce, generation after generation, a greater unworthiness” (Spencer, 1873). And one can find similar sentiments in the writings of Spencer’s

followers . . .

But there is much more to the story than this . . . it is clear (from statements and from actions) that it was never the intent of Spencer or his followers to deny the importance of individual charity. Take two of Spencer’s more notorious disciples. John D. Rockefeller [1839-1937] spend the first part of his life building up the vast petroleum company Standard Oil and the second part of his life fighting the federal government as it tried to break up the monopoly he had established over so vital a national resource as fuel oil. From his childhood, Rockefeller had tithed to his church, and he gave seriously and deeply to charity. The University of Chicago would never have become the world institution that it is without Rockefeller munificence.

The same generosity is true of Andrew Carnegie [1835-1919], who came from Scotland and made his fortune by founding and building U. S. Steel. He always claimed that no man should die rich, and he gave huge amounts of money directed toward the founding of public libraries. Carnegie’s charity was an immediate function of his reading Spencer, a reading that stressed the positive rather than the negative side of laissez-faire. Carnegie (like other industrialists) was proud of what he had done, thinking it a credit to his own abilities rather than a black mark against the lesser abilities of others. That poor but gifted children might likewise have the opportunity to develop and use their talents, Carnegie wanted to found public places of instruction and learning where one might go to better oneself . . .

Alternatives to Laissez-Faire

. . . The belief that some are chosen by nature to be successes and some are doomed to failure, that not only are all humans not born equal but that this is a right and proper state of affairs, was to the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie as much a matter of [Calvinist] theology as it was of scientifically based philosophy.

At first this was true also of Thomas Henry Huxley. He spoke of himself as a “scientific Calvinist,” meaning that he thought that the stern laws of nature decided the fates of us all, determining some to succeed and others to fail . . . [Later] despite his continuing friendship with Herbert Spencer, he pulled away from laissez-faire. For the mature Huxley, ethical success lay not in a conformity with and acquiescence to nature’s laws. It lay rather in fighting such laws and the evil consequences to which they lead. At the same time, Huxley saw the virtues of a functioning civil service and of intervention by the state into such things as education and medicine and the military and the like.

One senses that for Huxley there was always a conflict within: his enthusiasm for naked evolutionism, which he always interpreted as based on a brutal struggle, battled with his innate decency and his conviction that it is our ultimate moral obligation to fight those vile personal attributes that come in a package deal as part of our biology. No such worries ever troubled the happy thinking of Alfred Russell Wallace. As a boy, he had been taken by one of his older brothers to hear the Scottish mill owner and early socialist Robert Owen. He always looked back to this moment as a real turning point and, for the rest of his very long life, Wallace was ever an ardent socialist. Against Darwin, he believed that selection can operate for the good of the group as well as for the individual, and he thought that evolutionary success would be something that promoted the harmonious whole over the selfish individual.

Similar sorts of views appealed to the exiled Russian Prince Petr Kropotkin [1842-1921]. He claimed that there exists between all animals, including humans, a natural sense of sympathy, something that he called mutual aid. Kropotkin did differ from Wallace in having little or no time for the state whatsoever. One suspects that his anarchism owed as much to the fact that he hailed from czarist Russia . . . as it did anything in evolution . . .

As always, evolutionism’s relationship with people’s actions and beliefs is ambiguous . . .

1) What are Ruse’s main points in these excerpts?

2) Evaluate the following statements: “All Social Darwinists believed in the same political-economic structure—laissez-faire capitalism. Therefore, Social Darwinism is simply about applying ‘survival of the fittest’ to human society.”

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