In his fine companion to this essay, Eric Michael Johnson points out the Trump Administration's disturbing return to eugenicist language and policies. Like it or not, we have a president who says things like, “We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It is commonly said that Darwin’s theory was used to justify social inequality (Social Darwinism), even though this was a distortion of Darwin’s own views. The real history is more complex and interesting, which Eric knows well as a scholar of the period. Darwin’s emphasis on the possibility of change and moral virtues as the essence of what it means to be human was eagerly embraced and developed by socially progressive thinkers, even as others, including Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, indeed headed in a eugenicist direction.1
Why should we care about what someone said decades and centuries ago? Far from being “merely academic”, a careful accounting of the history of ideas is essential for how we think and therefore how we act in the present. If we lose the accountability of good scholarship and science, we are cast into an abyss of self-serving propaganda and misinformation. As Voltaire put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
There is far more to say than can be included in this short essay. The bottom line is that Darwinism, properly understood, is far more relevant to evolving a better world than most people currently realize.2 Here is a taste.
Goodbye, biological determinism: Biological determinism attributes the properties of an individual, such as being a murderer, to some essence of that individual, such as their “genes” or “blood”. The idea long predates Darwin and was the basic logic behind animal and plant breeding practices, which Darwin used to explain his theory of natural selection.
But Darwin knew nothing about genes. For him, heredity meant a resemblance between parents and offspring caused by any mechanism. As a result, much of Darwinism in the late 19th and early 20th century would be recognized today as cultural evolution, not genetic evolution. Unfortunately, with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work at the dawn of the 20th century, the study of evolution quickly became gene-centric, as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. It wasn’t until the closing decades of the 20th century that evolutionists went back to basics and defined Darwinism as Darwin did—any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR). This is called generalized Darwinism, and it is now in full swing, although it deserves to become far more widely known.
An example is the acronym WEIRD, which stands for “Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic”, coined and elaborated upon by Joseph Henrich, a major proponent of generalized Darwinism. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Henrich shows that WEIRD societies are a tiny slice of worldwide cultural diversity. Since the vast majority of scholarship and science has taken place in WEIRD societies; however, a very peculiar culture has been mistaken for human nature. Generalized Darwinism can help us see beyond WEIRD cultures in a way that merges with earlier critiques of biological determinism leveled by people who called themselves social constructivists.
Hello, biological determinism: The fact that generalized Darwinism goes beyond genetic evolution does not deny the importance of genetic evolution and the influence of genes on our bodies and behaviors. But it does make the study of those genes a lot more complex. The days of expecting a given property of an individual to map onto a “gene for” that property are—or should be—over. Genes are part of an incredibly complicated system of the whole organism. Most of our measurable traits are influenced by hundreds of genes, interacting with each other and receiving environmental, social, and cultural inputs throughout development.
Today, biological determinism takes the form of personalized (or precision) medicine, which tailors healthcare to the individual patient’s unique genetic, environmental (including cultural) and lifestyle factors. It is fascinating how attitudes about biological determinism make a U-turn when it comes to personalized medicine. Of course we should expect women and men to be different from each other as biological organisms. Treating women based on medical research conducted only on men, and vice versa, should be unconscionable. The same goes for the ancestry of any person. Your ability to digest lactose or synthesize vitamin D depends on where your ancestors came from. Personalized medicine must consider genetic, cultural, and personal evolution as interacting VSR processes operating at different time scales.
Two things make this modern form of biological determinism benign, with the proviso that any tool can also be used as a weapon without vigilance. First, the differences that reflect biocultural selection pressures operating in different geographical regions do not map onto politically motivated racial categories, as Joseph Graves has extensively written about in his academic articles and trade books. Second, the equality of individuals who differ from each other for any reason is fundamentally a moral issue, which brings me to my next point.
Hello, Darwin’s insights on prosociality: As Eric recounts in his companion essay, Darwin’s true legacy should be his insights on the evolution of prosociality, defined as any behavior oriented toward the welfare of others or one’s group as a whole. These insights can be described in two stages. First, what he discovered about the evolution of prosociality in all species. Second, what he discovered about prosociality as the signature adaptation of our own species.
Darwin began by realizing a shortcoming in his theory. If natural selection favors individuals that survive and reproduce better than other individuals, then this weighs against the evolution of prosociality. Having identified the problem, he also identified the solution: Even though prosociality is selectively disadvantageous within groups, groups of individuals who behave prosocially toward each other will robustly outcompete groups of individuals who cannot cohere.3
Here is why this insight is so crucial: Darwin did not show that prosociality evolves anywhere and everywhere in nature. On the contrary, he showed that it evolves only under special conditions, namely when between-group selection outweighs within-group selection. Vast swaths of nature are therefore indeed red in tooth and claw, as Darwin richly appreciated. In some cases, however, what we recognize as moral virtues in human life do evolve in other species. This is why bee hives and ant colonies have been admired by us humans since antiquity for the industry of their workers on behalf of their groups.
Having outlined the conditions for the evolution of prosociality in all species, Darwin then identified between-group selection as an especially strong force in human evolution. The modern literature on generalized Darwinism affirms his insight. Nearly everything that distinguishes us from other species is a form of prosociality that evolved by between-group selection—including our moral psychology and ability to transmit large amounts of learned information across generations—our very capacity for cultural evolution.
Hello, a new theoretical foundation for economics, business and public policy. If all this still appears “merely academic”, then consider that it has a transformational effect on economics, business, and every other topic domain relevant to public policy.4 For over two centuries, the main justification for unbridled competition, while sometimes called Social Darwinism, was not an invocation of Darwin but an invocation of Newton and the allure of creating a “physics of social behavior”. The idea that “laissez-faire leads to the common good” has been used to justify the unequal distribution of wealth.5 Against this background, the impact of Darwin’s theory was to provide another foundation that qualified as scientifically authoritative but led in a very different direction, allotting a much greater role to history and a conception of human nature as inherently social and malleable. The new paradigm enabled Thorstein Veblen to ask in 1898, “Why is economics not an evolutionary science?” and recognize the laissez-faire distribution of wealth as predatory in his Theory of the Leisure Class.6
It has taken a long time for evolutionary thinkers to arrive at generalized Darwinism in its current form, with many twists and turns along the way. No doubt there will be further progress, but what we know now can be a powerful force for good in a world that is crying out for a new “view of life”, as Darwin put it in the final passage of On the Origin of Species. I look forward to a time in the near future when not only is Darwin’s birthday celebrated annually, but his ideas, properly understood, are put into practice every day of the year.
References:
[1] For more, see the specialissue of This View of Life titled "Truth and Reconciliation for Social Darwinism."
[2] For more, see my book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution.
[3] For more, see my book Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others.
[4] For more, please visit the New Paradigm Coalition webpage.
[5] For more, see my podcast with Nat Dyer and review of his book Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray.
[6] For more, see my podcast with Charles Camic titled The Relevance of Thorstein Veblen and His Era for Rethinking Economics in the Present.
