I did not post anything for
November. I kind of like my post for October, on the contrast between Darwin’s
vision of evolution and the more humane vision of some of his contemporaries,
and I would let that stand a little longer.
I will just put up one question
here: Did Darwin use natural selection as a model for artificial selection, or
the other way around? The way this is usually presented is that natural
selection came first for Darwin and then he saw man copying that. Or as a
British writer put it over 200 years earlier, God is the first Husbandman which
becomes a pattern for man to follow as he breeds animals and plants.
But I think it is really
artificial selection that came first for Darwin and for that older writer. Man
improving the world was very much on the mind of many Europeans. Darwin was no
exception. He was rather an exemplification of the belief in improving species. The
British believed they were especially good at it. In case you have not noticed
it, read Chapter I of The Origin of Species
again and you will see how much Darwin boasts about English breeding practices
and “the enormous prices” British productions fetch in “almost every quarter of
the world.”
This means that for Darwin,
British imperialism provided a model for how nature works. That is hardly an
objective way to study nature. When he speaks of small and broken species in Origin, he might just as well have been
thinking of the way the British decimated native groups around the world. What
has been passed off as objective in western science is more subjective than we would like to think..
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
