Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Richards and Lewontin, Darwin & Progress - The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005

In his review of Michael Ruse’s Evolution– Creation Struggle and Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone [NYR, October 20], Richard Lewontin offers typically insightful analyses of the conflict that has arisen between creationists and IDers on the one hand and evolutionary biologists on the other. As well, he offers salutary cautions about the application of general models of cultural change based on evolutionary theory. He may be quite right that a deep fear of meaninglessness urges many individuals to fly to higher, governing powers and to reject the Darwinian slough of chance. Though Lewontin seems to agree with Ruse that some scientists mount the pulpit in trying to extend evolutionary considerations into all corners of human life, he yet chides him for locating the nub of the dispute in two different notions of progress, that characterizing Darwinism and that endemic to the old-time religion—the one leading nowhere in particular, the other to the ultimate transformation.

Lewontin supposes that Darwin kept the ideology of progress from sullying his own theory. He offers as an index of Darwin’s freedom from taint the presumed fact that the word “evolution” (which in the embryological domain had been used to describe a predetermined unfolding) is absent from the first edition of the Origin. Well, not exactly. Rather famously the last sentence of the book hits the rhetorical high mark with “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Later editions do not shy from use of the noun form of the word, nor does the Descent of Man.

But more importantly, Darwin’s deeply ingrained sense that his theory explained progress in organisms permeates his text. In the first edition, he does not hesitate to say: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (p. 489). And elsewhere he affirms that “in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancients; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms” (p. 337). The embryo of more advanced creatures, he believed (though couldn’t prove), displayed “a sort of picture, preserved by nature, of the ancient and less modified condition of each animal” (p. 338). In the Descent of Man, he had the task of explaining why the reprobate Irish seemed to be winning in the struggle for life by leaving more offspring than the virtuous Scots and English, certainly more progressive types. After analyzing the problem he concluded that since the profligate suffer greater mortality, perhaps natural selection had not been thrown out of gear. Darwin concluded that while progress was not inevitable or the result of any innate tendency, it was general and the somewhat chancy product of the manifold operations of natural selection. To render Darwin’s theory as bereft or antithetic to the notion of organic and social progress is to make him into a thoroughly modern neo-Darwinian, which he certainly was not.