July 1, 2009
Dear Colleague:
This year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the scientific world is marking the occasion with seminars, conferences, papers, and books, all praising the great man for his superb achievement. Part of the celebratory fervor is an attempt to extinguish the continuing criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution on the part of religious believers and a few philosophically minded scientists as well. I wish to suggest that when people raise objections something more than ignorance and bigotry is at stake. The problem at a deeper level lies with the word "man," as in The Descent of Man (1871). Suppose Darwin had stopped with the Origin of Species (1859) and so not bring the status of man so prominently into the foreground? For the status of man is not just a scientific issue. It is also very much a political issue, and therefore one in which every adult of sane mind has the right to have an opinion—at least, in a democratic society. The questions that Darwin raised and, in particular, Darwinism continues to raise are: What is man? Is he just an animal or does raising the question in itself make him something more? What is a man worth? What are his rights and obligations?
In contrast to theories in the physical sciences, such as Newton's on gravitation and Einstein's on relativity, which were not by any means bandied about in the societies of their times, Darwin's theory was very much in the air in his time. Among poets and literary figures, there was Alfred Lord Tennyson, among social thinkers, Thomas Malthus, among philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, among earth scientists, Charles Lyell, and among biologists, Alfred Russel Wallace, who actually came up with the same idea of biological evolution, with supporting evidence gathered in Brazil and the East Indies, in the same year, 1858, as did Darwin. More generally, the elites of English society were fearful of the rising tide of poverty and of the poor in the 1800s, culminating in the Irish Famine of 1844 at England's doorstep. Malthus came to the rescue with his grim theory of population, which salvaged the conscience of the elites by arguing, in effect, that the poor and the sickly deserved to die, as the embodiments of unfavorable "variations." Darwin read Malthus and immediately recognized the applicability of Malthusian theory to his own work on biological evolution, above all, the principle that the struggle for existence would tend to preserve favorable variations (that is, the strong) and destroy the unfavorable ones (that is, the weak).
Does this line of thinking imply progress? As a scientist, Darwin didn't believe in evolutionary progress, but as a man of his time he did, and in a form that can only be called racist. As Darwin saw it, "At a future period, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the apes [those closest to man] will also be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest kin will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some apes as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro and the Australian and the gorilla" (The Descent of Man). Not much of a gap for now, but think of the future when, with all the lesser human races and the higher apes either exterminated or put in ethnic ghettos and zoos, the gap will be between just two poles—the highly civilized Caucasian and the baboon!
Well, as a true Darwinist, buying into everything Darwin and Darwinists say about the status of man, how will you vote on all the social and economic issues of our time?
Best wishes,
Yi-Fu
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