Darwinism and Eugenics

Rob Iliffe

The Elements of Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (ENS)• 1. Age of the Earth/ Theories of Evolution/ Palaeontology - Work of

geologists ‘burst’ the limits of time, allowing evolutionists to emerge, while palaeontological records gave indication of how life forms changed over time;

• 2. Natural Theology – Tradition of Natural Theology explained in religious terms why the structure and function of an animal’s anatomy/physiology fitted it to the local environment.

• 3. Malthusianism - Malthus’s ‘Principle of Population’ would be crucial for theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace

Thomas Robert Malthus/Malthusianism

• Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was attempt to show that resources available to support life would never be sufficient (since animals tended to produce exponentially in each generation);

• In the case of humans, ingenuity in developing techniques to increase agricultural productivity would fail because

• (a) populations were either already too large; or if not,

• (b) populations would always grow to put pressure on or exceed available supply, creating poverty, suffering and death.

• Malthus’s work underpinned harsh state treatment of the poor, and led to the creation of workhouses in 1830s and 40s.

Charles Darwin (1809-82)

• 1825: went to Edinburgh to study medicine

• Listened to lectures of Lamarckian Robert Grant but medicine was unacceptable because sight of blood made him faint

• 1828: attended Cambridge to study to become a clergyman but was more interested in botany and natural history.

• Read William Paley’s Natural Theology and learned about fit between structure and function,

• Though he was already having doubts about traditional Christianity and the static natural world Paley described.

Beagle voyage (1831-36)

• Returned from a geological tour of Wales to find he had been offered a place as gentleman-naturalist on board the Beagle(with Robert Fitzroy as captain).

• Round-world voyage starting with Africa, then S. America (via Galapagos Islands in 1835), and then Australia and Africa.

• Major observations on palaeontology, zoology and botany.

• Reads Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, allowing him to think of using uniformitarian, gradualist principles.

• Amassed greatest collection of specimens thus far.

Galapogan Finches

• Darwin was not a transmutationist (evolutionist) on Beagle when he collected a group of finches from the Galapagos islands off Ecuador.

• Still assumed that ‘centres of creation’ posited by Charles Lyell followed extinctions.

• Back in England at start of 1837, he showed his birds to John Gould, ornithologist at the British Museum,

• who told him that his Galapagos birds were thirteen species of finches with finely graduated beaks, superbly adapted to their local environments;

• By looking at the islands as a whole, Darwin gradually determined that their distribution was result of branching evolution from one initial species.

After the Beagle

• Darwin (March 1837) now contemplated variation over time as an explanation of small changes between proximate species.

• In vol. 3 of Principles Lyell had posited limited modification and migration as responses to environmental pressure –

• This allowed for extinction and ‘centres of creation’, thus allowing room for a beneficent God to intervene from time to time

• Darwin moved beyond this -- July 1837 ‘B’ notebook contains famous branching diagram implying continuity of forms over time.

Tree of transmutation (from Notebook ‘B’)

If there was one ancestor and many resultant then extinctions had to be extremely common.

Darwin in London

Transmutational thoughts 1837-8• Now began to think that adaptive variation was potentially

unlimited and no inevitability of ‘progress’ (July/Aug. 1837)

• Major thought: environment pressures led to extinctions but also productively to evolution?

• Thoughts veered towards materialism, and Darwin asserted virtual identity of humans and animals.

• New notebooks equated consciousness with brain activity; asserted denial of freewill and monkey origins of morality.

• Appearance of insects with other senses more wonderful than appearance of ‘intellectual Man’ – animals had ‘minds’.

Marriage

• Darwin courted his first cousin, the devout religious believer Emma Wedgwood

• He confessed his ‘terrible secret’ to her (i.e. his transmutationstbeliefs), leaving her deeply unhappy.

• Darwin thought there was universal societal competition, inc.between races, exemplified in parlous condition of Fuegians and Aborigines.

• Concluded that races were in a struggle with each other, with some destined to become extinct.

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children —perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. —cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool:

Marry — Mary — Marry Q.E.D.

• Marry

• Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow.– Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music &. —female chit-chat These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time. —

• My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps —Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

September 1838

• S. American fossils had suggested that modification might not stop

• Other evidence pointed to common descent of species, with groups varying sufficiently over time to constitute new species (through interspecific infertility).

• Drew from his knowledge of the deliberate and guided selection of breeds of birds and farm animals,

• noting that this showed the plasticity of organic form,

• There was a natural analogue to breeding but what was the causal motor of adaptation – what was equivalent selecting entity?

Reading Thomas Malthus (late September 1838)

• In his Principle of Population (1798, 1803), Malthus argued that all living populations always threatened to outstrip the capacity of the environment to supply their needs.

• Darwin here was constant and unremitting environmental pressure, creating (as Darwin put it) equivalent to ‘100,000 wedges’ (‘cunei’) –

• Extinction created gaps where better adapted creatures could survive.

• Chance events conferred selective advantage – ‘Nature’ was the most gifted and relentless selector of ‘favorable’ traits.

• Possessors of ‘unfavorable’ traits would be destroyed

• Against optimistic and religious view of Paley, imbalance and suffering created order and beauty.

Beyond Malthus

• Malthus was concerned with industry and preparedness to work rather than with whether fittest (i.e. the most able) people gained advantages.

• In Malthus’s Principle Darwin found the notion of constant pressure on populations, which was relative to circumstances, and which constantly threatened local disharmony.

• Fitness was completely relative, so no progress –

• human beings were not the pinnacle of Creation, merely better suited to their environment.

The Evolution of the Origin of Species

• By 1839 Darwin had a theory ‘by which to work’

• Main work over next 15 years involved selective breeding, writing on geology and publishing elements from Beagle journals.

• Wrote ‘pencil sketch’ of theory in 1842 and longer ’Essay’ in summer 1844.

• Negative reaction to publication of Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Natural history of Creation at end of 1844 created major problem and contributed to a ‘delay’ in writing a fuller theory of ENS.

• Death of eldest daughter Annie in 1851 had major effect on his religious views.

The Co-discoverer of Evolution by Natural Selection: Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)

• Left school aged 14 and practised as a land surveyor 1837-43,

• But became interested in natural history when he was 18.

• Read Chambers’ Vestiges in 1845 and was fascinated by possibility of evolution;

• he went on a specimen-collecting expedition to South America in early 1848.

• Spent some years charting the Amazon and then in 1854 travelled to the ‘Malay Archipelago’ in Indonesia where he remained for 8 years, making many observations later used by Darwin.

Wallace’s ’Sarawak Law’

• 1855 paper, written in Sarawak (in Borneo), proposed ‘Sarawak law’, showing with reference to both living and extinct species that

• ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species’.

• While suffering from fever on island of Gilolo (in the Malay Archipelago) in February 1858, Wallace thought back to his earlier reading of Malthus

• Considering the selection pressures that effected the ‘constant destruction’ of the vast majority of organisms

• Answer was that the ‘best fitted’ survived -- he immediately wrote an essay on Natural Selection and sent it to Darwin.

Wallace’s Golden Birdwing Butterfly

Wallace’s StandardwingBird of Paradise

‘Wallace line’:

faunal boundary line (orig. drawn 1859) separating biogeographical regions of Asia and Australasia

The ‘Joint Publication’• Darwin received it in June, and hastily arranged the publication (in

August) of their ‘joint’ Linnaean Society paper of 1 July 1858 –

• Wallace had no awareness of this publication until much later

• ‘On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties, and on the perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural means of Selection’

• Example of independent, simultaneous discovery –

• Darwin took extract from an unpublished work on natural selection and published Wallace’s in full –

• Darwin was distraught by Wallace’s paper, telling Lyell that it was effectively a ‘short abstract’ of his own work

• and immediately expanded plans to write a big book on species, then called Natural Selection, including section on Man –

The Origin of Species (1859)• Darwin presented a gradualist account of ENS but retained belief in

Lamarckian processes –

• He took copious evidence from animal breeders concerning the plasticity/malleability of various domestic species.

• With a general and continuous Malthusian struggle centre-stage,

• death and reproductive capacity of individuals and groups now seen as a natural driver of variation and speciation

• through the survival of best adapted forms –

• there was no concession to progress except for the tendency for life forms to become more complex over time.

• There was only a brief nod to the origins of humanity, and he took this up in Descent of Man (1871).

Reception of Origin of Species

• Origin of Species generated unprecedented reaction, especially over religious implications –

• e.g. in Huxley-Wilberforce ‘debate’ at the Oxford in 1860.

• Many were outraged at Darwin’s support for evolution, which seemed to be an assault on organized religion.

• Others posed scientific critiques against his theory – including

• The lack of ‘transitional forms’ (why are there species?) either living now or in the fossil record

Wallace, Darwin and Man

• Darwin attributed differences between humans to sexual selection but Wallace did not include sexual selection in ENS, since it had no utility,

• Instead attributing many differences in colours between males and females to warning coloration.

• Wallace held that ENS stopped operating when there were no environmental pressures, e.g. humans in secure societies.

• Wallace also opposed Darwin’s materialism (ENS could not explain human consciousness) and turned to psychical (spiritualist) research.

• Finally, Wallace saw ENS as compatible with egalitarian socialism.

‘Social’ Darwinism

• Application of Darwinism or more generally biologism to society.

• Justified imperialism but especially laissez-faire capitalism;

• strongly opposed to state support for poor families/individuals.

• Key proponent was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who coined term ‘survival of the fittest’ in 1864.

• Darwin an adherent towards end of his life, claiming that large families of the poor and weak ‘must be injurious to the race of man’.

• Note sense in which Darwin’s theory could only have been written by a Victorian Englishman – could there be a more cooperative form of evolutionary theory?.

Eugenics and Malthusianism

• Widespread use of reproductive technologies, selective abortions, infanticide, designer babies etc. in late C20/early C21 have complex relationships with Malthusianism and eugenics.

• Former is manifested as a state policy e.g. China and India, though concerns are alleviated by growing female participation in the workforce.

• Latter is in many places a domesticated but more more powerful sort of eugenics, cutting across attitudes to abortion, traditional practices favouring boys, and strategies for dealing with ‘genetic defects’