Was Hitler a Darwinian?

Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory

Robert J. Richards

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226059099
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In tracing the history of Darwin's accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most scholars agree that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master's German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. In this collection of essays, Robert J. Richards argues that this orthodox view is wrongheaded. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. The book takes up many other topics—including the character of Darwin's chief principles of natural selection and divergence, his dispute with Alfred Russel Wallace over man's big brain, the role of language in human development, his relationship to Herbert Spencer, how much his views had in common with Haeckel's, and the general problem of progress in evolution. Moreover, Richards takes a forceful stand on the timely issue of whether Darwin is to blame for Hitler's atrocities. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is intellectual history at its boldest.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The past refuses to remain stable. This is due to its strange kind of existence—or rather, nonexistence—since past events no longer exist. Only the present exists, and, of course, the future is yet to be. So what kind of thing is the past? Is it merely what the actors of the time understood about their present—the objects, events, and individuals they experienced and thought about? Some historians maintain it is anachronistic to describe the past in terms other than those familiar to the persons of the period. This kind of practice would limit historians to what earlier individuals were aware of; scholars would thus be restricted to a narrow range of events and objects, only those falling under the actors’ purview. Historians certainly want to discover how earlier individuals experienced their world. But, of course, some events of the past would not have been perceived correctly—at least, correct by our lights. Should we not try to get a handle also on those elusive events, articulating them, where appropriate, from the perspective of modern science?¹ Consider the Hippocratic physicians of the ancient period. They discriminated some three kinds of fever: those that spiked every other day, every third day, and every fourth day. Around those perceptions the ancient physicians draped an elaborate medical theory we no longer accept. While scrutinizing the features of that theory, might we be inclined to dismiss the observations of periodicity, thinking those early individuals to be under the sway of some numerical fantasy? We might so reject their observations, if we did not know that malaria was endemic to Greece and that there are three strains of microorganism, each causing fevers to peak in the way the physicians described. It would be foolish not to use our contemporary knowledge as a way of determining what those past actors might actually have experienced, to show that the periodicity they ascribed to fevers was not completely tangled in the web of an antique imagination.

Then again, if we limited our descriptions to what individuals of the time might have recognized, we must ask: Which individuals? Were there millions of pasts but no single past? Presumably historians have the task of weaving together the experience of the world as lived by the pertinent players—and, at times, adjudicating: judging which historical individuals had a better grasp on the world and which deviated because of particular social, political, or religious convictions, or, in the case of naturalists, stumbled because of faulty instruments, poorly conceived experiments, or unconstrained imagination. Consider some of the organisms pictured in Serpentum et draconum historiae libri duo (1640), the posthumous work of the extraordinary, sixteenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). The first book provides illustrations of snakes of various sorts, some of monstrous birth (e.g., two-headed serpents); the text describes the earlier literature that had discussed a particular kind of serpent, the etymology of its name, its habits, medical uses, and so on. The second book describes, under similar headings, different kinds of dragon and includes illustrations of their many types (figs. 1.1 and 1.2). We know that dragons, those monsters of legend, don’t exist, and it’s foolish not to admit that. Our current knowledge allows us to explore the evidence that might have suggested the existence of dragons. It seems fairly certain that the creature in figure 1.1 is an African python—dragon-like enough. The small, two-footed dragon in figure 1.2 may well be based on the skeleton of a large, Indian fox-bat or the fossil remains of a pterodactyl. Aldrovandi had a collection of fossils in his cabinet of curiosity, so his belief in the mythical monsters he so naturalistically illustrated might well have had substantial grounds in direct observation—and the historian should lay out these possibilities, since they allow us to better understand the history of those times and the mentality of its individuals.² We are left only with traces of the past, but as Marc Bloch observed, “we are nevertheless successful in knowing far more of the past than the past itself had thought good to tell us.”³ The blanket proscription on the application of contemporary considerations to understand the past would only produce a crippled world, one in which the actors would hardly be recognizable as of our species.

FIGURE 1.1 “Pythonic dragon.” From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum (1640).

FIGURE 1.2 “Aethiopian dragon.” From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum (1640).

The past comes into articulate existence only when historians gather evidence for events that no longer exist, when they construct those events in their accounts. But as new evidence becomes available and more reliable constructions are advanced, then the past, as we know it, changes, becomes other than it was. It’s not just that interpretations of some perfectly articulated past time change. Rather, the only existence that the past has—as a creation of the historian—changes with new evidence or a richer understanding.

Though I am using the language of creation, bringing into existence a new past, I would not wish to deny an anchor for evidence and theory about the past. The situation is, I believe, much as the neo-Kantians have argued: there is a reality beyond the constructions of the human mind, but our only access to that reality is through the application of concepts to make events humanly tractable—the elusive shadow is made flesh through evidence and theory. The actors of the past deployed a web of concepts to grapple with nature and to bring it into living experience; historians, in their turn, also apply theory and evidence to bring not only the actors’ experience into their narratives but also events beyond the actors’ ken. Some evidence and concepts about past events will be better than others, will provide a more reliable guide in the construction of the past; and since the world—whether the social world or the natural—is not made of tapioca, the objects, the events, and the individuals with which historians deal will resist faulty constructions, which will then tumble to the ground when more adequate evidence and theory are advanced and slammed into place.

Though some historians may ignore these few historiographical principles, most simply follow them without much reflection on their epistemological import. And most historians of science, at any rate, conceive science as a special phenomenon, growing in accuracy and power as we approach the modern period. But what sets science history apart, distinct, at least, from the history of the arts, politics, and philosophy? And should we assume that it is so distinct? What is the evidence? The argument is simple and has been generally accepted, with some recent, notable demurs.

The historiographic assumption that there exists an extra-mental reality that provides stability to scientific endeavors is based on the inductive observation that scientific ideas (and historical constructions more generally), while changeable, are not radically so, as a naïve reader of Thomas Kuhn might come to believe. The Darwinian revolution, for instance, appears more like a Darwinian evolution when examined more closely. Some historians who would be loath to make this inductive conclusion to incremental advance contend there is nothing inevitable about scientific development. It has been argued that modern science, for example, need not have privileged experimental method, that the experimental method of contemporary science was merely the consequence of certain political and social processes in the seventeenth century. We could thus have had a modern science that used methods radically different from the experimental.⁴

Following the preceding line of thought, Gregory Radick, in an insightful, if objectionable, essay, considers whether Darwin’s theory of natural selection was “inevitable.”⁵ Radick distinguishes two senses of this question: if Darwin had not read Malthus and had not held the social position he did, would he have come up with the idea of natural selection? And, if Darwin had not come up with natural selection, would it nonetheless have been eventually discovered and consequently have shaped our contemporary science? Put another way, could we have a contemporary biology that remained ignorant of natural selection? Of course, Darwin might not have proposed the principle of natural selection; he could have died on the Beagle voyage or simply lost interest in natural history. So Radick answers no to the first question; Darwin might have followed his original plan and become a country parson, perhaps retaining his enthusiasm for earthworms but never having a thought about natural selection. Radick leaves the second question unanswered but hints at the answer he deems plausible. He maintains, similar to many social constructivist historians, that “people cannot be said to accept a theory because it is true. They may accept it because they believe the evidence shows the theory to be true, or because the theory is more parsimonious than its rivals, or because it fits well with prior beliefs and attitudes.”⁶ This view seems to imply that science floats on a cloud of beliefs not tethered to reality, a network of concepts that, in the case of modern biology, need not have included natural selection. Of course the historian may well ask—as in the case of Aldrovandi—why did the scientist believe the evidence and thus the theory to be true. It is perfectly arbitrary, after all, to allow unanchored beliefs to have causal potency and extra-mental nature to have none. Could it be that the evidence for a theory hooks onto those extra-mental structures, at least with elastic cords? Without that anchor, it seems perfectly inexplicable why scientific theories should work to the extent they do, or why historical development should appear more like an evolution than like a revolution. Even Kuhn came to recognize that evolution was a better model by which to explicate the history of science.⁷ In their evolution, species respond to very different kinds of environment; mutatis mutandis, the evolution of scientific ideas would respond to the social, conceptual, and extramental environments. So according to this understanding, natural selection lay in wait, as it were, ready to be discovered. This consideration does not at all deny the potency of previous beliefs and the contributions of the social milieu. Rather it suggests that the source of scientific belief will usually be a matrix of causal vectors stemming from the social, the psychological, and the natural. In any particular instance the historian will be obliged to parcel out these vectors as best as he or she can.

The essays that follow attempt to create a new past, pivoting around questions thought to have been settled in the history of biology. In constructing that past, I will not hesitate to deploy our contemporary understanding of certain features of a past of which the actors might have been only partially aware, or not aware at all. I will attempt, however, never to force a contemporary understanding on the actors; rather my effort will be to recognize the manner in which they understood events or applied certain concepts to nature, but also to bring causal analyses to explain why they likely construed events in the way they did, analyses that they themselves might not have been in a position to appreciate, indeed, accounts they might have rejected. So, for example, I will show that Darwin formulated his principle of divergence, a principle he thought as important as that of natural selection, in a way inconsistent with other aspects of his theory and that he was led down this shaded alley by his own practices as a pigeon fancier. I will point out that Darwin’s principle, as he formulated it, and the auxiliary ideas associated with it, ill conform to our present knowledge of evolution. I will argue that Darwin’s original principle of natural selection also had features that an older and less sanguine Darwin would likely have rejected—had he been fully cognizant of them. The essays in this volume, I have no doubt, will not be the last word on the questions pursued, and so they are offered as disputed questions in the history of evolutionary theory.

For contemporary ears, “disputed questions” sounds anomalous. Isn’t it the answers to certain questions that are disputed? The phrase has a venerable history, characterizing as it does the mode of debate in medieval universities. In the quaestiones disputatae (investigations in dispute), a thesis would be posed by a master, and then two students, one denying the thesis (the opponens) and another affirming it (the respondens), would engage one another in vigorous debate. The master would sum up the merits of the arguments and make a decision as to the winner (the determinatio).⁸ In the essays that follow, the role of the respondens will generally be played by those representing established scholarship on the theses considered. As opponens, I will try to show why closer analysis and evidence grounded in the texts under review will yield a determination rather different than that usually assumed—the results being, if I am successful, that a new past will swim into view.

Most canonical accounts take for granted that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into the explanation of biological phenomena, with the result that nature gradually became drained of intelligence and moral value. Darwin, it is supposed, constructed an indifferent, materially neutral nature, one no longer posing as a surrogate for God and thus now become teleologically vacuous: man was dethroned from the center of the cosmos by Copernicus and now has slipped from the peak of a divinely constituted nature. Hasn’t it been well established that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection has rendered human beings a lot less than the angels, indeed, no better than animals? As a consequence, can it be surprising that Hitler’s extermination program adopted the idea of struggle for existence as a guiding principle? Hasn’t it been made clear that Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s German disciple, conducted a fraudulent science, abetted the degradation of human beings, and contributed to the ideology of the Nazis? In the essays that follow, I will show that the appropriate answer to these questions is no.

The aforementioned are among the more contentious questions that the essays in this volume undertake to reexamine. Their resolution depends on more fundamental issues in the historical scholarship of evolutionary theory in the early period, also presumptively settled: the character of Darwin’s chief principles of natural selection and divergence; the logical connection of his conception of natural selection to that of common descent; his dispute with Wallace over man’s big brain; the role of language in human development; his relationship to Spencer; and the general problem of progress in evolution. In the case of Ernst Haeckel, the settled view has been that he committed fraud in the depiction of his thesis of recapitulation and that his artistic practice contributed to rendering his science decidedly subjective, whereas the more forward looking scientists of the period introduced modes of mechanical objectivity in their depictions of nature.⁹ These too will be issues I reexamine.

Several of the essays in this volume will pursue the question of the moral character of evolutionary theory. I will attempt to show that Darwin did not regard the natural process of evolution as morally neutral. He wielded his device of natural selection in the Origin of Species, I will argue, to fix nature with a moral spine, a nature that, as depicted in the Descent of Man, has produced an animal that can make authentically moral choices. The evolutionary ethics that Darwin elaborated in the Descent captures what we intuitively understand of conscience and ethical behavior. This conception of Darwin’s accomplishment runs against the grain of orthodox assumptions. Scholars such as Richard Dawkins, Michael Ghiselin, and Michael Ruse represent Darwinian man as always self-aggrandizing, always selfish in behavior—beneath the shell of other-regarding virtue, a core of original sin. Other critics, especially those of a politically or religiously conservative inclination, claim that this presumptive Darwinian construction of human nature was appropriated by Hitler with horrific consequence. I will dispute these conclusions and draw some unexpected, if limited, support from a recently published book by Peter Bowler, who in most respects adheres to an orthodox conception of Darwin’s accomplishment.¹⁰

Bowler, like Radick, tries to imagine what the biological world would have been like had Darwin not lived. He recognizes that evolution as a branching phenomenon would have likely taken hold in the biological community of the mid-nineteenth century, but that Darwin’s principle device of natural selection would not have emerged until quite a bit later, after the development of Mendelian genetics in the early twentieth century. Yet, bereft of Darwin, according to Bowler, the ethical outcome often attributed to him—the social Darwinism and eugenics that played through America, Britain, and especially German...