A QUESTION THAT GOOD SCIENCE SHOULD ALWAYS ASK

This month, on my other blog about the historical, Jewish Jesus, I presented an example of the difference between good scientific thinking and ideological thinking. I would like to do the same here. On the historical Jesus blog, I put it this way: In any scientific or scholarly field, it is always a good idea to think about what is the ideal evidence you would need to prove a theory or proposition. Always ask yourself: If this theory is true, what is the evidence I would expect to find to justify it?

 
That is a good way to proceed with the question of whether Darwin was a racist or not. If it is true, as many claim, that Darwin was not a racist, what sort of evidence would support this? If there is no evidence supporting a proposition, then it is ideology, or worse, mythology.
 
I suppose I should first answer the objection that this way of proceeding is faulty because racism is an anachronistic category for the 19^th century. They just did not think in those terms back then. I have answered this many times in previous posts, but to sum up here: The only reason people make the claim that racism was not a known category in Darwin’s century is that they did not use this expression. But they certainly used equivalent terms: complexional distinctions, complexional misanthrope, physical antipathy to people of color, prejudice, and more. In fact, some writers strongly objected to making negative judgments about whole races and nations, arguing that only individuals can be put on “a gradatory scale”, not groups. I hope people will finally realize that racism was a very real problem in the 19^th century, even if the genuine anti-racists were few and far between.
 
So the question is whether Darwin was not a racist and perhaps was even a real anti-racist. If so, we would expect to see some of the following evidence:
 
Staking out a position of anti-racism. An anti-racist Darwin would have stated somewhere his opposition to thinking in racial or group terms. He would have, like one British military officer, clearly objected to ranking races and would have insisted that individuals are supreme in his thinking.
 
Challenging others who were racists. Many people in Darwin’s time took a definite racist stance. This included his friends Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. Even if Darwin did not want to attack his friends, there were plenty of other racist scientists and writers whom Darwin could have criticized.
 
Emphasizing his scientific position. He should have taken the trouble to point out that his theory of natural selection applies only to individuals and should never be used to make distinctions among groups or to advocate that some groups are superior to others or naturally more dominant.
 
For the most part, all this evidence is non-existent. I suppose that it is remotely possible that in private conversations, Darwin made some of this clear, but if so, none of it made its way into writing. If no one memorialized in writing any encounters of conversing with Darwin in this manner, then this is entirely useless speculation. All we can do is base ourselves on the written evidentiary record. That record is entirely empty of any truly anti-racist thinking.
 
There is only one slight exception to this. Darwin knew there was a lot of variation in any group. He did not lump all individuals of a group into one bag and he did not lump all non-European groups into one racial judgment. He could occasionally offer a positive opinion of this or that group. He thought Tahitians were much higher than other savages he met. But as Stephen Gould admitted, Darwin had his prejudices (which Gould tries to play down by claiming they were the result of paternalism, not racism) and the only way you can make it appear he did not have prejudices is by selective quotation.
 
Basically, not only is there no evidence to establish the above points, but all the evidence points the other way. Even in The Origin of Species, he is constantly ranking groups and making it very clear that natural selection explains why some species are more dominant than others. Natural selection explains the existence of species and races and why, in a system of competition, some beat others in the game of survival. He is even more blunt about it in The Descent of Man. He never challenges anyone for racist thinking, and in his time, there were many who were far more viciously racist than he was.
 
Darwin was not an ostentatious racist. He usually did not gloat over the superiority of white, European civilization (though he occasionally comes close to gloating). But the evidentiary record is very clear that he did hold racist ideas. There is no evidence that would make anti-racism a reasonable theory about Darwin’s beliefs. His alleged anti-racism is purely the result of ideology. It is part of the mythology of Darwin and has nothing to do with the real, historical Darwin.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

A FURTHER COMMENT ON NICHOLAS WADE

Last month (post below), I offered my comments on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance and its scientific racism. The more I think about it, the more I realize that science has little to do with any of this. There has been some controversy over whether Wade has been accurate in reporting the results in recent genetic and population studies. But all that is beside the point.

 
Scientific racism in general has little to do with science. Writers like Wade make certain racist assumptions about human cultures, arranging them in a hierarchy, and then they look for something scientific, or scientific sounding, to back it up. Those assumptions precede the science. The science or pseudo-science is an afterthought. The purpose of the “science” is to make the racist assumptions appear reasonable. You could take out all the discussion about genetics from Wade’s book and it would still have a strong racist tinge.
 
They did the same thing in the 19^th century when they knew nothing about genes. They used evolutionary theory to back up their prejudices and Wade uses genetic theories, but it comes to the same thing. The science is actually irrelevant. The biased assumptions are the key to it all. In the post below, I explored how much Wade has in common with 19^th century scientific racists, such as the way he puts Australian Aborigines at the bottom of the human scale.
 
It is interesting that Wade has absolutely no curiosity about Aboriginal or any other indigenous culture. The details of their cultures and their accomplishments hold no interest for him. He puts a label on them, he sticks them in a category—they are tribal or hunter-gatherers, which are his synonyms for savage, the 19^th century simplification—and declares that to be inferior to western civilization. Tribalism or savagery serves to constitute their entire identity.
 
His excuse for doing this, insofar as he has one, is that he is interested in only one thing: material success. That is his measuring rod for all cultures and since western culture has produced more of this, it becomes the emblem of superiority. That native peoples may have a different relationship to nature is not allowed to enter the picture.
 
He also leaves out some of the reasons for the west’s success. He picks out positive things like the ability to socially cooperate and an encouragement of questioning and innovation. That is part of it, no doubt. But he leaves out other factors like excessive greed and bloodthirstiness. How much were bullying and outright theft responsible for western achievements? Europe stole a lot of gold and silver from other countries to finance its growth, not to mention the expropriation of land, resources, and labor. How many natives were killed along the way? In short: At what cost to others was western success achieved? It is a question Wade will never ask.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

NICHOLAS WADE'S NEW BOOK

The book is A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History in which Wade argues that differences in genes have played a big role in the different social behaviors and institutions of each race. Below is the review I posted on Amazon (July 23), with a few sentences I have added here and there for the sake of greater clarity. I gave the book one star for primarily one reason: It is a very deceptive book. He mixes honesty and dishonesty in such a way as to cover himself from the charge of making overstatements, but leaving you with the impression that everything he says about genes is probably true. He wants to be nice and objective, but ends up being subjective and biased against other cultures. Here is the slightly expanded review:

 
REPEATING MISTAKES OF THE PAST
 
There is a lot of speculation in this book, as Wade admits early on, and he does not prove his thesis, as he himself tells us at the end. Despite these admissions, he pushes very hard to establish genetics as the key to explaining why races have developed along different paths. Yet he constantly acknowledges how important culture is. He accomplishes nothing more than to say that human societies result from the effects of a combination of genes, culture, and environment. He admits we don’t know what the precise mix is (241), but he clearly wants a bigger role for genetics.
 
To get to the central controversy: Will Wade’s speculations about genes and race lead to increased racism? He tries to reassure the reader they will not. He has a subtle point to make and a naïve point.
 
The subtle point is that we have learned that all human beings are essentially the same with only slight differences in genetic make-up. Because of this, Wade argues that no group of individuals can claim superiority over other individuals. That should make ideas of superiority untenable. Many people have already made this point. If that was all there was to this book, why write it?
 
Wade continues that though individual differences are very small, they lead to big differences on the social level. He believes genes can explain why the Industrial Revolution happened in England and why western civilization has been far more materially successful than any other culture. This only translates the problem of racism from the biological level to a combination of biology and culture. Wade probably believes that if you took an infant from any race and raised it in another society, it would turn out to be just as capable as any individual native to that society. But adult human beings are reflections of their cultures, so if Wade argues that western culture is superior to any other, then that means its adults are superior.
 
Words like ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ do not appear in Wade’s book, but there is an unmistakable celebration of western civilization here. Wade makes it very clear that the west is at the top of the heap and deserves to be. He is not above using words like ‘ingrained’ and ‘inbuilt’ to describe social behavior (see 177, 189), implying that western social behavior and institutions are innately better. He argues that it is not accident or luck that the west has outpaced other societies (196, 238).
 
This brings me to his naïve point: Since we have established anti-racism as a matter of policy, no science can undo that. “The lessons of past abuses are still vivid enough,” he says (249). Apparently, he has never heard of how prone we are to repeating our mistakes. What makes it so ironic in Wade’s case is that he repeats many of the same things 19^th century scientific racists gave us.
 
They indulged in ranking societies, with hunter-gatherers at the bottom, agricultural societies above them, and western civilization at the top. So does Wade. No surprise that Wade puts Australian Aborigines at the bottom just as they did (64). Though he never uses the word ‘savages’, he constantly draws the same distinction between civilized and savage, using ‘tribal’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’ as his preferred terms for the latter, and though he would never stoop to using ‘inferior’ as they did in the 19^th century, he constantly trumpets the greater economic success of the west; ‘ingrained behaviors’ (189) is just a euphemism for innate superiority and inferiority. That is the central message of the book, delivered in a very dishonest way.
 
Worst of all, his insistence that we in the west may have slightly better social genes (with only speculation to support this) is just a repetition of the 19^th century claim that God favored us or blessed us. What is the difference between believing that evolution has blessed us and God has blessed us? Both lead to the same arrogance – for who does not believe that evolution is not a whimsical, arbitrary god? Wade claims that evolution has no purpose or goal (178, 249), but his belief that the rise of the west is no accident belies that. He clearly believes that western civilization is the outcome of what the evolution of man has been headed for all along.
 
Wade of course will not proclaim that inferior cultures (e.g., the less economically successful tribal cultures) must be exterminated in this process, as 19^th century scientific racists were all too happy to announce, but he says essentially the same thing when he says that tribal culture and modern, western society are incompatible (173, 178). He leaves no doubt that other cultures have to disappear under the onslaught of the west. He is just too polite to say they must become extinct.
 
Evolution (the idea of species descending from a common progenitor) is basically a sound science, but I don’t think any science has been as misused as evolution. Recently, I saw an old film, “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” with Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas. After the District Attorney has an old friend beaten up by detectives and thrown out of town (he is paranoid that the friend may be intending to blackmail him about an unsolved past murder), the friend is determined to head back, despite the pleadings of his girlfriend. He says something like: “I don’t like being pushed around. I don’t like seeing anyone pushed around.”
 
This protest against getting pushed around is the anti-natural selection mantra. Natural selection is the validation of pushing others around. But what I’d rather say is that pushing people around represents not natural selection, but the most common misuse of natural selection. This was Darwin’s theory of evolution, which Wade often mentions, and Darwin was as guilty as anyone else of misusing the theory in this way. He insisted on the inferiority of savages and their inevitable extermination by western civilization. Humanity, he said, would only rise higher when the lower races were all gone. Wade treads the same path when he insists that tribal societies are incompatible with modern society.
 
Like many other writers, like Niall Ferguson in Civilization, Wade has a strong bias to select only evidence that puts western civilization in the best light possible. He never presents any evidence for the rapacity of the west. When Wade discusses western economic success, he does not point out how much of this depended on outright theft. He never considers that all the gold and silver Europe took from the new world was used to finance its growth, nor the way Europe dispossessed natives of land and resources.
 
He never asks at what cost to others this success was achieved, how many people were killed so that Europeans could take it all. He looks at studies that might reveal there are genes for trust and cooperation and even aggression and violence which we highly value. But he does not look to see if there are genes for bullying, ruthlessness, bloodthirstiness, hypocrisy, or in general, scumbagginess. What if the west succeeded because Europeans have a set of genes for being a scumbag towards the Other?
 
I offer this for the pure, wild speculation that it is, only to make the point that our values show up in the things we choose to look for. There is a bias in the studies that Wade cites. No one wants to discover anything that would detract from the greatness of western civilization, so we don’t look for it, though it may well be there. Genes for excessive greed and bullying—for winning by any means necessary, by fair means or foul—are just as speculative and plausible as anything Wade is looking for. But no one will look for such genes because it would be too demoralizing to find them. It may turn out, as many 19^th century humanitarians complained, that we are just polished savages.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

 

MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, OR DOES IT?

Even people who do not like admitting there was racism in Darwin’s work, in his hierarchy of groups subordinate to groups (as he put it in Origin), have to acknowledge that it is a pretty rough and tumble world that Darwin describes, with only a few groups (or species or races) coming out on top. Competition to the death is the norm in Darwin’s world and not only for Darwin. This is how the majority of intellectuals in his day saw it.

 
But not everyone. Some thinkers objected to this worldview or at least to its universal applicability. Alfred Wallace, who is often described as the co-discoverer of natural selection, did not want to see the principle of competition extended to the relationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples. He understood that competition between a stronger party and a weaker one would lead to the complete destruction of the weaker side. If we do not let up in our competition with the newly discovered countries, we will end up exterminating these peoples and that would be an injustice. He was not alone in thinking this. About thirty years earlier, a missionary to New Zealand made the same point. Competition will cause the natives to die out.
 
Darwin was fine with the extermination of native tribes. It was only natural as he saw it. Some called it the law of might makes right. Darwin did not like his theory being summed up this way (as one letter to Charles Lyell makes clear) but it was not an unfair summary. He had ended Chapter 7 of Origin with “let the strongest live and the weakest die.” Competition was almost always lethal for Darwin.
 
If I had to put anyone at the opposite pole of Darwin’s thinking, it would be John Locke. I don’t think there has ever been a more anti-might-makes-right philosopher than John Locke. This is especially evident in the Second Treatise on civil government. It may be that Darwin was a natural scientist or biologist and Locke a political philosopher, but Darwin did extend his theory to human society, so comparing them is not unfair.
 
The word that looms largest for Locke is consent. That is how disputes should be resolved and not by force. Not only does might not make for right in Locke’s vision, but more might makes for even less right. Greater force or status cannot justify taking something, like land, from another by force.
 
When an “Aggressor … unjustly invades another Man’s Right, [he] can … never come to have a Right over the Conquered …” (all emphases are Locke’s). He compares such unjust rulers to robbers and pirates. An unjust conqueror is like a robber who gains title to a man’s estate by holding a dagger to his throat. “The Injury and the Crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a Crown, or some petty Villain. The Title of the Offender, and the Number of his Followers, make no difference in the Offence, unless it be to aggravate it.” Think of what Locke is saying: Not only does might or status not make right, but it makes for less right and magnifies the crime.
 
Locke is so strong on this that he insists that the descendants of a people forcibly deprived of their land never lose their right to it and can continue to make claims for it. This is the very opposite of what colonialists would assert. Extermination is not at all in the worldview of Locke. He rather promotes the idea of hanging on until justice is yours. Darwin’s work fits in well with colonialism which fantasized about native extermination, but Locke’s does not. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum of ideas about human society. There have always been thinkers who opposed the principles of might and extermination, even when they were at their height in the heyday of European colonialism. We have just tended to ignore them.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

DOOMED RACES?

Darwin was not alone in thinking that the native races of the world were bound for extinction, with a little help from their European friends. The question has been asked why they were so sure of this, why were they constantly trumpeting this news. What did it mean to them that they felt compelled to repeat it so often? I should note that there were humanitarians who were horrified by this exterminatory boasting. They saw nothing good in the disappearance of native peoples, nor did they think it was inevitable. James Bonwick in 1870 quoted one author who believed that anyone who suggested the extinction of natives was inevitable was himself a barbarian. Darwin and most of this fellow scientists did not see it that way. They seemed positively glad to see it coming.

 
It must have made them feel so superior for one thing. Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist who also wrote a series of articles that Darwin favorably referred to in The Descent of Man, noted that savage tribes were not in danger of being exterminated when confronted with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, but they are facing that danger at the hands of modern civilization. This was a good observation according to Darwin. It proves, Bagehot argued, how superior we are not only to savages but to the ancient world which could not exterminate the people we are capable of eliminating.
 
For many European intellectuals and scientists, the ability to annihilate other people was evidence of superiority. As Henry Reynolds has put it, in their world, there had to be winners and losers in nature’s battleground. The fact of there being losers confirmed that the winners were all the more so.
 
Other reasons have also been given for the prevalence of this belief that extermination would be the destiny of inferior peoples. Russell McGregor has suggested that the advocates of inevitability were pessimistic over the ability of savages to improve and adopt western civilization with all its material benefits. I think there is some truth to that, but I don’t think it was a deeply earned pessimism. After the first few decades of the 19^th century, these doomed race theorists were so quick to conclude the natives must be so inferior, since they have advanced so little. Their conclusion was cheap and arrived at with very little thought. Bonwick more sensibly pointed out that it was irrational to suppose that savages could arrive in a few years at a place it took Europeans thousands of years to reach.
 
One of the more obvious reasons for believing in the inevitable decline and disappearance of natives, especially considering how much Europeans were adopting policies pushing them in this direction, is that it relieved European nations of any moral responsibility. If extinction was natural, then Europe has nothing to feel guilty about. Not that humanitarians at the time did not try to make the exterminationists feel guilty. John Lort Stokes, a Commander in the Royal Navy (and later on an Admiral), was one such. “I am not willing to believe,” he wrote in 1846, “that … there is an absence of moral responsibility on the part of the whites; I must deny that it is in obedience to some all-powerful law, the inevitable operation of which exempts us from blame, that the depopulation of the countries we colonize goes on.” But an all-powerful law is exactly what Darwin and so many others believed in.
 
Then there is the matter of greed. If you are going to take everything from a people—their land, their resources, their freedom of movement—then it logically follows that the people have to go also. British colonists were very clear that they wanted it all, especially the land. And how are the people supposed to live if you take all their land from them? The all consuming nature of the greed demands that extermination must follow. Human greed makes it inevitable, if it is inevitable at all.
 
They turned out to be wrong. The widespread extermination they predicted never took place. It was a bad theory. McGregor points out they did not have the empirical data to back it up. But Herman Merivale had made this point in 1841 and no one was listening. It was worse than a bad theory. They proclaimed the inevitable demise of native races as if it were a fact, only it was a false fact. As Darwin well knew, false facts do plenty of harm to science. They are hard to get rid of. False facts are tenacious. Darwin was the one who usually exposed false facts. But this was one time, it got away from him and he fell for a false fact hook, line, and sinker.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

WHY ALL THE MYTHMAKING?

It’s been hard to find the time to post this month and answer the question I posed at the end of last month’s entry. I will be concise, I hope.

 
The obvious answer is that mythmaking is usually carried out by people in power. They need to invent lots of things to hold onto that. A myth or a hero serves both as a symbol of power and to consolidate power. Darwin, whether he liked it or not, was made to serve as a weapon in a contrived battle between science and religion.
 
Even apart from any conflict (real or imagined) with religion, every field of endeavor—and science is no exception—seems to need powerful figures that others must be made to worship. Whether science serves mainly the rich or also the poor and middle class is a question that is trumped by worship of invented heroes. Professional science turns out to be not much different from organized religion.
 
Much more could be said about all this, but I am interested in a more subtle reason for mythmaking. Not only do myths create a false reality, they are also used to obliterate parts of reality that really do exist. They create a forgetfulness. Heroes are often used to erase some quite genuine heroes we would rather not know about, or actually, those in power would prefer we not know about them. And here I will give a concrete example.
 
Darwin and his fellow scientists sometimes pondered the dubious question: Which human race is the lowest? For Darwin, it was a toss-up between the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the Aborigines of Australia. This belies the idea that Darwin was a great humanitarian. Those who do acknowledge that Darwin thought like this usually make the excuse for him that everyone at the time indulged in this kind of thinking.
 
Well, not everyone. We’ve been made to forget.
 
By making an idol out of Darwin, we have covered up those who were the real genuine humanitarians of the day. I can give no better example than a certain British military officer whose name I won’t reveal just yet. I’ll keep that card close to my chest. A couple of decades before The Origin of Species, he was denouncing racism and, among other things, the use of science to make men rich. He knew he was reaping “the ineffable contempt” of men of science and political economists, but he could not help it. As he said, “[W]hen David slew Goliath, he gave great encouragement to little men!”
 
This military men was well aware that many people held opinions about the lowest races and often characterized Aborigines as the missing link between man and monkey. This disgusted him. He insisted that only individuals could be ranked, not races or nations. He believed that the Creator had endowed savages with physical and mental faculties equal to ours. They might wear different clothes or no clothes at all, but under the skin, we were all the same. Savages had the same intellectual capacities or potential as ourselves.
 
All this is as clear an anti-racist position as any that has ever been expressed. And this officer did not stop there. He demanded that all must be treated equally under the law. As you might guess, he severely criticized the brutality of colonialism. So did many others.
 
In particular, another British military officer called “the depopulation of the countries we colonize” a “national crime” and said that the supposed inevitability of the extinction of Aboriginal races (which Darwin, by the way, believed in) should not be used as an excuse to evade moral responsibility.
 
It is remarkable that two military officers should have been so far ahead in humanity than most scientists. Not to be outdone, an Oxford professor argued that the law of the inevitability of Aboriginal extinction, as espoused by Darwin (whom he otherwise admired) and others, was imaginary. On a slightly different point, that second military officer said that colonists have believed in “an erroneous theory, which they found to tally with their interests … That the aborigines were not men, but brutes … and what cruelties have flowed from such a doctrine.”
 
Erroneous theories and imaginary laws—of science, no less. The first military man thought all these bad ideas came from an obsession with national wealth (he complained that his countrymen were always bragging that Britain was the wealthiest nation on earth). National wealth was used to justify everything from child labor to nasty treatment of the Irish to the brutal ways of colonialism. To say he was distressed by this, and by the misuse of science to enhance wealth rather than create true happiness, would be an understatement.
 
I don’t ask that everyone should agree with all this man argued for. But that he stood for the equality and fair treatment of all human beings is undeniable, and that he risked speaking truth to power about these things must also not be denied. If that does not make him one of the real heroes in our western history, I don’t know what would make anyone a hero.
 
I apologize for not revealing the names of these worthy humanitarians. Let my withholding of their names serve as a symbolic reminder of the injustice done to them by the many historians and scholars who have erased them from history. I will certainly reveal all of them in my book, whenever it is done, which won’t be for a while yet.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

MODERN MYTHMAKING—FORGETTING WHO GAVE US EVOLUTIONARY THINKING

We like to think that ancient peoples were mired in myths and that we have evolved beyond that. But if anyone were to list all the myths we still believe in, it would fill more than one volume. I am not concerned with all myths. Just the ones about Darwin and the history of science are my main concern. These myths are so firmly ingrained. You cannot read any article or book about Darwin or that relates to Darwin in some way without being bombarded with sheer ignorance about this history.

 
On January 19, 2014, in the Sunday Times Book Review, there was a review of a book about how species spread around the globe. The reviewer, Jonathan Weiner, wrote that in Darwin’s day, “the reigning explanation was supernatural: God put them there. Darwin’s thinking was more mundane.” Everyone wants to believe that 1859, when The Origin of Species was published, inaugurated a revolution in biological thinking. That is about as far from truth as one can get.
 
Long before Origin, other scientists were thinking mundane, as Weiner might put it. Robert Chambers made his points in public fifteen years before. He was as critical of the idea of special creation by God as an explanation of anything as Darwin was. His book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was exceedingly popular. Darwin’s book did not overtake Vestiges in sales until the 20^th century. Darwin was not influenced by Chambers. He was making the same points privately in his unpublished essays of 1842 and 1844. But what has to be remembered is that Chambers was preparing the public for mundane thinking. There were ten editions of his book before Origin. The public and many fledgling scientists were gobbling it up. They were impressed for a good reason. Chambers did a good job.
 
By the time 1859 rolled around, special creation was no longer the reigning explanation. Herbert Spencer had also previously joined in the attack (in an 1852 essay which was republished in an 1858 book). Special creation may not have been quite knocked out of contention, but there was more doubt and confusion than there had been in 1844. It was more the case that Darwin’s book took advantage of the changing times than that he started something new. Credit also has to go to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who was arguing for the evolution of human beings from apes, and the evolution of all living things, in 1809, the year Darwin was born. Darwin would not talk about human evolution until 1871 in The Descent of Man.
 
I was also startled to see some odd comments in an article on new ideas about plants in a recent issue of The New Yorker (Dec. 23 & 30, 2013) by Michael Pollan. Here too Darwin is a revolutionary. This time, the revolution is the idea that man is continuous with the rest of nature and Darwin is the man who singlehandedly started it. “Since ‘The Origin of Species,’ we have understood, at least intellectually, the continuities among life’s kingdoms—that we are all cut from the same fabric of nature.” Darwin, Pollan says, “brought the humbling news that we are the product of the same natural laws that created animals.” These are quite the overstatements. There were many others who had pressed for this understanding and while it is true that Darwin also promoted this, his main effort lay elsewhere.
 
What Darwin emphasized was that there is a hierarchy in nature, groups subordinate to groups, some weaker, some more dominant and stronger, with man at the summit as he tells us at the end of Descent. Even in Origin, also at the end, he takes the view that evolution has been leading to “the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving … the higher animals.”
 
Everybody put man at the top. Robert Chambers did it too, just like Darwin. Well, we all do, if we are honest. But with Chambers, there is a profound difference. Chambers brought the truly humbling news that every place in nature, even the highest place occupied by man, is just one part of the whole and the whole is more important than any one piece, no matter how high it may be. Lamarck too stressed the whole of nature over individuals. Darwin stressed dominance and weakness and individuals in fierce competition.
 
Darwin and Chambers both believed that human and animal intelligence were different in degree only—yes, others fought for the idea of gradations and made the public aware of it; Darwin was no sort of lone knight—but Chambers drew a conclusion that Darwin never would. Because of our close relationship to animals, “We are bound to respect the rights of animals … even their feelings.” Darwin would never say that. “LIFE is everywhere ONE” is what evolution meant to Chambers and from this he concluded that this new view of nature, as he called it, “extends the principle of humanity to the meaner creatures also.” It is Chambers we have to thank for this kind of thinking, not Darwin. (Brevity forces me to omit how much Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck contributed to holistic thinking. Not to mention more obscure personalities who thought about what was sometimes called ‘network theory’, and all this before Charles Darwin put his two cents in. His two shillings?)
 
It is true that Darwin hated cruelty towards animals, but he was not prepared to go as far as Chambers did in his remarks. In 1875, Darwin testified before a Royal Commission investigating experimentation on live animals. At the end of his testimony, he made his feelings clear about experiments done without anesthesia if was not absolutely necessary to do so. But the whole purpose of his testimony was to plead with the Commission not to ban such experiments altogether. Darwin stated, “I am fully convinced that physiology can progress only by the aid of experiments on living animals.” It would be “a very great evil,” he said, to prohibit them altogether. In a letter to a professor that was later published in the London Times, he called the prohibition of these experiments a crime against mankind. Respecting the rights and feelings of animals was not the way he would have expressed himself.
 
So why all this mythologizing of Darwin? And why the misrepresentation of all that evolutionists accomplished before Darwin? Since this post is getting quite long, I will try to answer these questions in the next one.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com