The Social Meaning of Modern Biology

From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology

Howard Kaye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351473941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Biologie

The Social Meaning of Modern Biology analyzes the cultural significance of recurring attempts since the time of Darwin to extract social and moral guidance from the teachings of modern biology. Such efforts are often dismissed as ideological defenses of the social status quo, of the sort wrongly associated with nineteenth-century social Darwinism. Howard Kaye argues they are more properly viewed as culturally radical attempts to redefine who we are by nature and thus rethink how we should live. Despite the scientific and philosophical weaknesses of arguments that "biology is destiny, " and their dehumanizing potential, in recent years they have proven to be powerfully attractive. They will continue to be so in an age enthralled by genetic explanations of human experience and excited by the prospect of its biological control.In the ten years since the original edition of The Social Meaning of Modern Biology was published, changes in both science and society have altered the terms of debate over the nature of man and human culture. Kaye's epilogue thoroughly examines these changes. He discusses the remarkable growth of ethology and sociobiology in their study of animal and human behavior and the stunning progress achieved in neuropsychology and behavioral genetics. These developments may appear to bring us closer to long-sought explanations of our physical, mental, and behavioral "machinery." Yet, as Kaye demonstrates, attempts to use such explanations to unify the natural and social sciences are mired in self-contradictory accounts of human freedom and moral choice. The Social Meaning of Modern Biology remains a significant study in the field of sociobiology and is essential reading for sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and psychologists.

I Social Darwinism and the Failure of the Darwinian Revolution

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

— CHARLES DARWIN (1859, p. 490)

Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. . . . The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and Atheism overwhelming is upon us.

— GEORGE ROMANES (cited in Himmelfarb 1967, p. 390)

Because the contemporary social speculations of molecular biologists and sociobiologists have so often been forced into the polemical conceptual mold of social Darwinism, their deeper continuities and discontinuities with the preceding century of debate on the social meaning of evolutionary biology have remained obscure. By reexamining this debate and the social, philosophical, and scientific factors that have influenced it, and by focusing particularly on the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Darwin himself, I hope to develop a new historical perspective with which to examine contemporary efforts in a very different light.

It is a misleading commonplace of cultural history that the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 set in motion a profound revolution in the Western world view and self-conception. It seems self-evident to many that Darwinism carried with it radical and terrifying implications that, once recognized, transformed virtually all areas of human thought and belief. According to most accounts, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection obviously made of God an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis with increasingly less to do. The marvelous adaptation of organism to environment was no longer proof of God's existence and benevolence but was, instead, an automatic and bloody result of population pressure, random variation, and intraspecific struggle. With God a victim of "structural unemployment," the species created in his image was reduced in stature to its proper position: a rather plebeian primate species descended from other, even less remarkable primates. With so base a lineage, the special hopes, privileges, and responsibilities previously claimed for Homo sapiens must have appeared suspect, we are told. For some theists, agnostics, and atheists there may have been "grandeur" in this new view of life and a welcome release from a culture of arrogance and guilt, but, according to the standard view, for the mass of believers the "flood-gates of infidelity" must certainly have appeared to be open.

Equally widespread is the view that social theory was the area of human concern most aggressive in its exploration of Darwinism's implications. We are told that those termed "social Darwinists," such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, formed a vanguard party in the Darwinian Revolution, brutal in their misguided application of Darwinian concepts to the social life and history of man. To the social Darwinists, it is said, human society had always been a battleground for competing individuals and races in which the fittest survived and the unfit were cruelly eliminated; and, for the sake of human progress, this struggle for existence must be allowed to continue unchecked by governmental intervention or social reform. Whether attributed to gross misinterpretations of Darwin's work or to the presence of ideological elements in Darwin's own theory, social Darwinism is wrongly understood to be a pseudoscientific defense of the capitalist status quo, which by long use has entered the American political unconscious (for a recent version of this curiously Lamarckian argument, see Reich 1982).

Yet, in light of such views on social Darwinism and the Darwinian Revolution, how was it possible for the Nobel Prize—winning geneticist Hermann J. Muller to declare in 1959 that "One Hundred Years without Darwinism Are Enough"? Remarkably, what Muller deplored was precisely the absence of any Darwinian Revolution in the area where it was most needed—the human soul and its social order. Because of resistance by antiquated religious traditions and moralities, the American people, Muller argued, had failed to incorporate into their society and personalities "the wonderful world view opened up by Darwin and other Western biologists . . . the source of the profoundest idealism and hope." For Muller, a passionate and lifelong advocate of eugenics, Darwinism was to be both a guide to social policy and, more important, an "ideology." Evolutionary biology would help America win its struggle with the Soviets for the minds and spirits of men, while rescuing American youth from decadence and self-indulgence by imbuing them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life (1959, pp. 140, 146).

Muller concluded by calling on the scientific community to take the lead in sweeping away religious resistance and in winning over the vulnerable souls of the young to the perspective and moral demands of Darwinism. In the years that have since passed, the influential biologists to be studied here have indeed responded to Muller's call and have begun what they claim to be the long-delayed Darwinian assault on mind and society.

The ever more confident claims of contemporary biologists that the Darwinian Revolution was incomplete because it dealt with man only metaphorically, if at all, and that their own efforts to finish it are very different from the social Darwinism of the past have received indirect support from a number of recent historical works.¹ It now appears clear that although Darwinism created problems and tensions within the minds of many over the last century, they were problems that most found ways to solve within the context of established convictions. To say that Darwinism destroyed old beliefs and ways of thinking and revolutionized our fundamental conceptions of life and society is logically plausible but historically suspect. In light of mounting evidence, our received views on social Darwinism have also been called into question. Evolutionary biology has been referred to as a source of scientific sanction for a variety of social and political perspectives. Nevertheless, this misleading equation of all such efforts, past and present, with reactionary, capitalist ideology persists.²

Despite its enormous impact, manifold uses, and potential implications, the Darwinian Revolution in religion, philosophy, and social theory has been, until recently, a limited one because it has left human psyches and societies virtually untouched. Why has this been so? What have been seen as the philosophical and social problems posed by Darwinism and how have intellectuals responded to them over the last century? If our picture of social Darwinism as capitalist ideology is distorted, how, in fact, has Darwinism been used in social theory? How have changes in scientific knowledge and social climate since the time of Darwin affected the social uses and interpretations of evolutionary biology? These are the questions that I will address in this chapter and that I will use to develop a new perspective on the Darwinian debates of the past—and even on the creation of scientific knowledge itself—against which to compare the efforts of contemporary biologists.

Darwin's intellectual concerns, like those of his Victorian contemporaries, do not fit neatly into the disciplinary divisions of today. In the mid-nineteenth century, science, theology, philosophy, and social theory had not yet been severed from one another to form autonomous disciplines. For many practitioners science was still a branch of natural theology engaged in for the purpose of discovering God's presence and order in nature, by which human life was to be guided. In the new science of society, the use of biological concepts and analogies was a well-established principle, sanctioned by the positivism of Comte and Spencer and the nineteenth-century belief in the unity of the sciences. Yet in spite of its pretentions to "natural science," social thought remained bound to natural theology. However agnostic or atheistic social theorists might have been, they still clung to the belief that Nature held the key to right living. What was required of the social sciences, as J. W. Burrow notes, was "not merely techniques of social engineering but a basis for ethics and political theory and an account of the human situation in relation to the rest of creation" (1966, p. 264).

Darwin's theory of organic evolution was able to evoke a broad intellectual debate because the imprint of extrabiological ideas on the Origin of Species and Descent of Man made these works recognizable to all the subdisciplines of natural theology. From William Paley's Natural Theology Darwin derived the assumption of perfect adaptation of organism to environment and the optimistic theodicy that Nature's cruelty was but a small price to pay for tomorrow's progress. From Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population Darwin derived his perception of population pressure and struggle in nature, unmitigated by the moral restraint found in human societies. From Spencer, A. R. Wallace, and Walter Bagehot, Darwin borrowed arguments for the evolution of human mental and moral traits by natural selection. From his cousin, Francis Galton, Darwin gained an awareness of the alleged "survival of the unfit in contemporary social life" (Greene 1977; Jones 1980; Young 1969, 1973).

Thus Darwin, like all other scientists—even the molecular biologists and sociobiologists of today—does not conform to the positivist image of a pure Baconian scientist collecting the facts of nature immune from the natural-theological concerns of his contemporaries and devoid of both metaphysical assumptions and social interests. Nor is the influence of such extrascientific elements confined to Darwin's social speculations. They are imbedded in his biological theory as well—a source of both scientific insight and scientized social philosophy.

Long before the Descent, Darwin was interested in the human and cosmological meaning of his biological work. But why would so cautious and retiring a scientist as Darwin take up, in public, the sensitive question of human evolution? Greta Jones has suggested that Darwin was compelled to do so in order to protect his biological theory from religious counterattack. Unless Darwin could show how the same biological mechanisms could account for the evolution of human intellect, social instincts, and moral sense, an opening would have been created through which God could reenter the world of nature. If a God was necessary to explain the origin of man, could not this God have also been involved in the origin of other species (1980, pp. 10-18)? Nevertheless, it is clear that in pursuing the question of man Darwin was not just defending his organic theory; he was, in addition, acting on his long-held belief in naturalism and in the moral message of humility and compassion toward other species and other races that he hoped to express in his work. As Darwin noted in his second notebook on the "Transmutation of Species" (1838), "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals" (cited in Himmelfarb 1967, P. 153).

Despite Darwin's metaphysical and moral interests in the meaning of his work for man, he decided not to discuss this topic in the Origin of Species and remained rather cautious in his application of evolution by natural selection to Homo sapiens. Darwin was careful not to attack religion directly, and like his fellow evolutionary theorists, T. H. Huxley and A. R. Wallace, he was reluctant to authorize extensions of the theory into the realms of ethics, politics, or social policy. In his reluctance to extrapolate, unaltered, from his biological theory to human society and thereby offend established viewpoints, Darwin was certainly prudent. He was anxious to insure a fair hearing for his biological theory and to protect the emerging discipline of "science" from religious and political attack. Yet Darwin's caution reflects as well his own ambivalence toward the implications of his work and his moral opposition to the workings of nature in civilized societies—an ambivalent opposition subsequently expressed in his theory of human evolution.

Darwin, no less than his contemporaries, found the image of nature opened up by his theory of natural selection to be disturbing at times. The optimistic Deism of Darwin's conclusion to the Origin (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) appears to have been only a temporary resting-place in his journey from conventional orthodoxy to a scientific agnosticism (on Darwin's religious views, see Mandelbaum 1958; Fleming 1961; Moore 1979). The term natural selection—with its analogy to artificial selection practiced by men—may have suggested to many a "Natural Selector" behind the evolutionary process choosing those variations which further progress toward a desired goal, but Darwin knew that the mechanism of natural selection, the essence of his theory, was "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel" (cited in Greene 1981, p. 153). A nature that was ruled by natural selection was a nature "red in tooth and claw," a nature ruled by force, accident, and death. What kind of deity would create a world in which conspecifics struggle to the death and so much life is destined for suffering and extinction. Such a world, whether ordained by a Creator or by the mechanical and statistical law of natural selection, could easily appear indifferent to human fate and man's "highest life" and as a horrifying model for human social behavior.

Because of this problem of theodicy, the "grandeur" that Darwin professed to find in "this view of life" was short-lived. In May i860, Darwin confessed to the American botanist Asa Gray: "I cannot ... be contented to view this wonderful universe and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me" (Darwin 1959, vol. 2, p. 105). Finding himself in such a metaphysical quandary, Darwin settled into an agnosticism based on the inadequacy of the human mind, as a product of evolution, to deal with such enormous questions. Nevertheless, Darwin's metaphysical and moral discontent—which had informed his science—did not disappear with his rejection of theism but lived on as an unconscious influence upon his theory of human evolution.

For Darwin, no less than for Wallace or Huxley, the extension of the theory of evolution by natural selection to the problems of human mental and social development involved descent with substantial modification. Significant variations exist between their theories of organic evolution and human evolution, variations that are neither random nor ideological (in the economic sense). The political viewpoints of Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley differed, but the effect of their theoretical modifications was always to diminish the role of natural selection among men and to reassert established human values with or without the blessings of science.

In Darwin's view, the mechanism of natural selection played an important role in early human history, but the qualities selected were less those of physical strength and fecundity than those of intellect, sympathy, mutual aid, and moral sense. The "struggle for existence" in human societies has thus become less literal than metaphorical, less physical than moral. Such desirable mental and moral traits are of great reproductive advantage because they increase man's behavioral flexibility, productive capacity, and ability to cooperate peacefully with others. As a result, such traits "tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world" and are progressively extended "to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society and finally to lower animals" (Darwin [1871] 1981, vol. 1, pp. 103, 163).

In the advance and diffusion of these naturally selected traits—the essence of human evolution—Darwin considered other mechanisms to have become increasingly important. Just as in the years after 1859 he began to place ever greater emphasis on Lamarckian evolutionary processes in his biological theories, Darwin attributed to the inheritance of acquired mental traits an important role in the development of the human intellect and moral sense. Favorable mental and moral characteristics spread through the human population through exercise, imitation, habit, and eventually instruction and thereby became innate and heritable ([1871] 1981, vol. 1, pp. 102-04). So important have these mechanisms been in human evolution that in civilized societies the role of natural selection in human affairs and in generating human progress has been largely checked and supplanted by cultural and moral means. "The highest part of man's nature" has been and is being "advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection." In addition, this noblest part of our nature—our intellect, sympathy, and benevolence—compels us actually to counteract the "process of elimination" in civilized society ([1871] 1981, vol. 2, p. 404, vol. 1, pp. 168-69).

What, then, characterizes Darwin's views on human mental and social evolution is a partial shift of emphasis away from natural selection and toward Lamarckian and cultural factors and a tendency to mythologize human evolution into a story of progressive intellectual and moral advance. But why does Darwin's theory of man differ from his theory of organic evolution in these ways and with what effect?

Darwin's increasing but ambivalent reliance on the Lamarckian mechanisms of use-inheritance and the direct action of the environment has been generally explained on strictly scientific grounds. Lamarckism helped Darwin account for the origin of variations and of useless characteristics; it enabled him to explain how small, favorable variations could be preserved despite his view of inheritance as a blending of parental traits; and it allowed Darwin to meet the objections of Lord Kelvin that the Earth was not old enough to allow for the origin of species by the natural selection of small variations. Yet other, less "internal" concerns may also have been involved; after all, both Huxley and Wallace addressed similar scientific objections without turning to Lamarckism.

The recourse to Lamarckism, however ambivalent, enabled Darwin, as it did for so many of his contemporaries, to mitigate the horrors of natural selection and thereby to diminish the moral and religious problems posed by his work. Because Lamarckism accounts for the origin of heritable variations by the habits of the organism, the effects of use and disuse of various traits, the direct action of the environment on the population, and the organism's own striving to adapt, beneficial variations cease to be fortuitous and the importance of intraspecific conflict is greatly reduced. Lamarckism thus helps guarantee that in this world progress will be necessary, continuous, and peaceful—a far more attractive and reassuring view of nature and the human prospect.

Both Huxley and Wallace could afford to remain staunch Darwinists and opponents of Lamarckism because both rejected, though in different ways, the adequacy of biological evolution as an explanation and guide for human evolution. Wallace did so by denying the role of natural selection in the development of human intellectual and moral qualities and by claiming that only the intervention of some supernatural agency could account for the yawning gap between ape and man (Wallace 1870; Himmelfarb 1967, pp. 375—76). Huxley did so, in his famous Romanes lecture of 1893, through reference to an extrabiological, "ethical process" that seeks to check the morally abhorrent "cosmic process" of organic evolution at every step (1899, p. 81). Human life, for Huxley, was still a never-ending moral struggle against "the innate depravity of man" and "the essential vileness of matter" (Huxley, quoted in Moore 1979, p. 349).

The resources of Wallace's supernaturalism and Huxley's "scientific Calvinism" were philosophically unavailable to Darwin. Instead, Darwin, in his conclusion to the Origin, borrowed from Paley's natural theology a reassuring faith in progress as a solution to the problem of ...