Darwin, Social Darwinism and Evolution

Conservatives need Darwin more than Darwin needs conservatives

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca
5/6/07

Patricia Cohen of the New York Times wrote a piece this week about how social conservatives (NY Timese for “falangists and fascists”) might despise “Darwinism” (the right wing’s misnomer for the theory of evolution) but that they needed Darwin’s theories to explain, in Cohen’s words, “traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.”

Cohen noted that when asked if they rejected the theory of evolution, three of the GOP candidates – Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo – raised their hands. All three should drop out now: America has had six years of leadership by illiterate god-struck morons, and it hasn’t worked out. We don’t need more of the same.

Cohen’s link is supposed to be a cute playoff between Darwinism and Social Darwinism, but the main problem is that neither tag has much of anything to do with the vast array of scientific knowledge that is collectively known as “the theory of evolution.”

Nearly all of Darwin’s suppositions existed in an era when nobody knew what DNA or mitochondria were, or what dinosaurs might have been, or had ever heard the phrase “extinction level event.” Nothing remains of Darwin’s suppositions except for his two main observations: that species change in response to their environment, and that it seemed likely that over time, a species might change so much so as to become an entirely different species.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is the effort to explain and predict based on observation and measurement. Gravity is a theory based on the observed fact that mass attracts to other mass, and even though nobody has ever seen a unit of gravity, few dispute its reality. Evolution is based on observed changes in existing species, and the certain knowledge that not only are 90% of all species that lived on earth now gone, but that few of the present species were around 500,000,000 years ago, or even 50,000,000. In short, species die off – and are replaced.

Social Darwinism is based on the buzz phrase, “survival of the fittest.” It’s always a favorite with the rich and powerful because it gives a flattering reason why they are rich and powerful, while providing them with a comforting rationale for remaining rich and powerful. White racists like it, because it provides a rationale for “white superiority” to explain how Europe broke out of a 10,000 year technological tie some 500 years ago and gained a transitory advantage. Anyone who sneers at the technological level of aboriginals need only look and see how a middle class family of the “white master race” lived in thirteenth-century London. At least the aboriginals have enough sense to bathe.

Social Darwinism got mixed up with eugenics, and was used to justify the Holocaust, and American atrocities such as castration and lobotomization of the mentally retarded, or the institutionalized racism against black people. Then too, it supports the notion of “might makes right” and justifies whatever power structure happens to be in place at the time. The biggest dog always thinks dogfights are the best way to settle matters because that’s how God planned it.

Cohen conflated the three disparate elements in order to provide her story with a cute hook, but it reflects a greater confusion.

Social Darwinism takes the false notion that evolution is driven by competition among species and applies it to human societies. Even Darwin, however, noted that species survival was as much a matter of cooperation as it was of competition.

In evolution, cooperation, both within a species and among different species, is absolutely essential to survival. Humans were not a dominant species until they learned how to cooperate as a tribe. A solitary pre-technological human stood absolutely no chance on his own.

While there are solitary predators, such as polar bears and some of the big cats, they all seem to be clinging tenaciously to survival. Tigers are endangered everywhere, and polar bears are threatened. The successful animals all form packs of some sort, or colonies, or hives. This includes humans.

Within such packs there is always competition, especially among the primates and canids, but there is also cooperation, in the hunt, in the rearing of young, in grooming. The dominant wolves eat first, but they always leave some for the lesser wolves, since without them, the dominant wolves are doomed to starvation through lacking a large enough pack to hunt successfully.

There is cooperation among species. Humans have a variety of animals that they have mutually beneficial relationships with, either wittingly, as with dogs, or unwittingly, as with the microbes in our intestines, or the mites that clean our eyelashes (Yes, we all have mites in our eyelashes. Deal).

Without ants, worms and other small critters to convert our waste into soil and nutrients in the soil, we would have all drowned in our own shit long ago.

Cooperation is key to survival among all species. Even the rare solitary species have to cooperate enough to mate and produce offspring.

The other part of Social Darwinism that is patently absurd from an evolutionary point of view is that humans are the master species. We’re an apex species, to be sure, but we’ve only managed that for 5,000 years, ever since we learned to form small noisy bands and wave sticks and frighten the big kitties. Then we spent a lot of time in a toss-up battle with our close relatives, the baboons and the chimps, who learned the same tricks. Fortunately, we discovered fire first.

But the problem with being an apex species, the top of the food chain, is that when there is a disruption in the food supply, the apex species go first. It’s happened hundreds of times, and the earth has had dozens of extinction events, including one that eliminated virtually all land life and 90% of the life in the oceans. Failed species include some who were apex species for tens of millions of years. Compare with the humans, who have about 5,000 years as an apex species, and you realize that the notion that we are inherently superior is a largely untested one.

We’re still badly outnumbered by the ants, who will probably still be around long after we’re gone. As noted, they can live without us and have done so for hundreds of millions of years, but we can’t live without them.

So much for that vaunted social Darwinist superiority.

Taking this “natural theory” that has no basis in nature and applying it to human societies has about the results you might expect. At best, you end up with a large slave population. At worst, you end up with death camps. Social Darwinism is arrant nonsense in nature, and it’s a pure poison in human societies.

Any candidate who simultaneously claims to disbelieve in evolution and who thinks Social Darwinism is a good idea is an ideological crackpot with nothing good to offer the rest of us.

Stay away from them if you want to remain an apex species.