Cassandra Voices

Tag: Charles Darwin

  • Public Intellectuals: Charles Darwin

    In a court case in Kent recently I detoured to the small village of Down near Orpington where I had the privilege of visiting the Home of Charles Darwin. This is the residence where he wrote both The Voyage of The Beagle (1839) and The Origin of The Species (1859). It is a symptomatic of the controversy his name still arouses that my avowedly religious taxi driver expressed scepticism as to why anyone would entertain a trip to visit the house of The Great Satan, and proceeded to quiz me as to my belief in the bible.

    In fact, Darwin publicly indicated one could be both a theist and an evolutionist in 1879. Shortly before shuffling off this mortal coil he defined his position as an agnostic.

    Since these were not times an atheist would be put to death or socially shunned for declaring themselves there was no overwhelming need to abide by Victorian convention. Further, as is remarkably clear from the visit, he and his family were hugely influential and well connected. They were creatures of the enlightenment. Charles Darwin was a kind of evolutionary apotheosis of his clan.

    The crucial point to appreciate – as I explained to the taxi driver who maintained his vain attempts at spiritual conversion – is that Darwin is and was right. It remains one of the few works of science that has stood the test of time. The qualifier, an idea as old as Lamarck the spiritual father of genetics, is that the environment leads to genetic alterations and random mutations that generate the gene sequence for natural selection to act. Thus, our environment can influence DNA by altering phenotypic and genotypic variation. This is called epigenetics. Nature. Nurture. Genetics. But the citadel stands.

    His ideas evolved gradually. And common design was very much part of the reflection and collection exercise that was The Voyage of The Beagle, which occurred in spite of the reservations of his wealthy father, who funded the trip. On returning he was lionised, becoming a national hero. That almost five-year trip – particularly his observation on the different types of tortoises and mockingbirds and how certain species became extinct – led to the theory of evolution and the notion of the transition of the species. Thus, The Voyage nurtured the fundamental ideas, based on empirical findings of live specimens and fossils in South America.

    He published extensively on his return, but there is a paradigm shift in 1837 In July, with the development of his famous evolutionary drawing The Tree of Life, immortalising his notebook, which I viewed at first hand. The tree is prefaced in his bold handwriting with the words: I THINK.

    Watercolour by the Beagle’s artist Conrad Martens,

    Cartesian

    Well Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is the foundation of all human elevation. Centuries later, freedom of thought was central to Clarence Darrow’s famous speech in defence of Darwinism the Scopes Trial of 1925. Such thought distinguishes us, he said, from the sponge or the amoeba. In defending Darwin Darrow said:

    Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance are forever busy and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we will be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

    That seems like a description of what is being done in America and elsewhere in God’s name and, indeed, in the name of secular political correctness.

    After many papers and an exhaustive study of barnacles, Darwin developed the crucial idea of a homologue or variation, for it is variation and adaption that are crucial to evolution. His greatest work was only ultimately published after his fellow scientist Russel wrote to him with the same idea. He did not want to be gazumped, intellectually speaking. This led to a joint paper shortly followed by the bestselling masterwork, The Origin of The Species, which has became a secular bible.

    The book refutes completely creationism, the beautiful poetry of genesis as Darrow called it in The Scopes Trial that the world was created in seven days. Darwin was clearly right, but we are no longer in a secular age. All of this might have seemed trite and taken as accepted fact, save for the recrudescence of evangelical Christianity worldwide, which is creating a new auto de fe and inversion of the truth.

    Harvard Yard.

    The Trump administration is now defunding the academy. Harvard, in a last gasp of American liberalism, is fighting back. Yet its corporate sponsors resile. We are entering a new dark age. In the list of prohibited books of the future I expect The Origin of The Species to appear every bit as much as Nabokov’s Lolita or Joyce’s Ulysses. In the legendary American science fiction writer Ray Bradburys novel Fahrenheit 451 books are burned by firemen. Now we have a social media and controlled media auto de fe,

    Regarding the theory of evolution, it seems that the initial idea may have in genesis in his grandfather Erasmus. In 1794 his polymath grandfather book Zoonaamia made the same point, so the idea was implanted early:

    Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the great first cause with animality with power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities …….and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity.

    In fact, the entire family, represented by a tree on the wall in the museum, had a significant influence. Another grandfather, Josiah Wedgewood was one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution.

    The Darwin Museum is also littered with quotations, including the most obviously true about how one singular fact, or mutation, can lead to survival or the decline of a species, or an individual. In that respect let us confront the gorgons head and assess whether he bears responsibility for what has been done in his name. By that I mean Social Darwinism, the most centrally awful vogueish evil idea of our age.

    Erasmus Darwin.

    Social Darwinism

    Darwin drew a crisp distinction between his ideas as a scientist and social commentator. He never expressed the idea that evolutionary theory was a good idea for social policy. He also argued particularly in The Descent of Man that feelings, or social instincts, such as sympathy for one’s fellow man, and moral sentiments, were intrinsic to society. This is an important, if scientifically detached, concession

    On the other hand, he associated with various people including his cousin Martineau who were proponents of Malthusianism, the strict regulation of breeding and the need to confine the unfit in prisons and insane asylums. Swifts earlier A Modest Proposal (1729) demonstrates the absurd cruelty of these ideas.

    Social Darwinist ideas led the American business caste, including the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, to advocate for the triumph of the fittest, and apply selection criteria and concepts of struggle to the world of business, despising the weak and the defenceless. Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought actually coined the phrase Social Darwinism. He used it to attack unregulated greed, oligarchical capital and racism. He also, in a subsequent book, equated it with populist ignorance. This reaches an apogee of awfulness with the quasi-scientific ideas of Ayn Rand, in books such as The Fountainhead (1943).

    Darwin’s half cousin friend, the polymath Francis Galton was the founder of eugenics, and in effect he argued for the coupling of superior minds. He also came perilously close to condoning genocide in arguing for the extinction of inferior races, though he did not consider other races as intrinsically degenerate. He believed immigration was needed and welcome, depending of course on the immigrant. The sense of falsetto superiority is clearly apparent. Such nonsense led to even the legendary socialist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v, Bell (1921) – who was cited in the defence in the Nuremberg Trials – upholding the compulsory sterilisation of a mental defective, saying that three generations of imbeciles are quite enough.

    Darwin himself was quite specific that his theory of evolution did not apply to social policy and was undesirable. The Nazis endorsed social Darwinism One key high command proponent Alfred Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg.

    The Decline of the West

    Perhaps the most influential text of Social Darwinism came with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926), which suggested that much of the blame for the decline of European civilisation could be blamed on the Slavic and other ‘degenerate’ races.

    The counterpoint of the argument was that Aryan blue blood, whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon, was the emblem of purity and that the other races had corrupted the gene pool. Spengler influenced Hitler, and the snowball of fascism led to the extermination of those undesirable races and the nightmare of the Holocaust.

    Such matters were hitherto of historic concern, which until recently seemed like a distant epoch, but regrettably this form of Social Darwinism is back in fashion, as a new corporatised Shoah of economic liquidation and segmentation beckons, accentuated by the effect of lockdowns and the rise of the far right. In an age of chaos and uncertainty, the power grab of the strongman is evident for all to see.

    Intellectual ideas that gain traction are not necessarily good ideas. Social Darwinism and Malthusian ideas are back in vogue. But do not blame Charles Darwin at least exclusively.

    If forced or available for comment, what would he say I wonder. A contemporary scientist, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics wrote:

    I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All our cousins are already extinct. What is more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.

    The late great Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preached tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice.  Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s legacy is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican. He died several hours after meeting Mr Vance. Darwin would, I suspect, also have approved of Pope Francis but felt the ideas of Mr Vance deeply inappropriate.

  • The Implications of Evolution

    Evolution by natural election is the ‘greatest idea ever’ — a view which has been well set out by Julian Huxley (1961, 1964) and which I share. It is, In my view, the greatest idea as it provides a key concept to make sense of us and our world. In its essence it is simple, but breathtaking in its subtlety.

    It is accepted by biologists and by those in many other disciplines. In other words, evolution is a key ‘organising principle’ for many branches of knowledge. More than that, — as Huxley argued — an evolutionary world-view offers a coherent view of our world and our future and therefore is of fundamental importance to humankind.

    In this article I attempt to do two things: first, to set out the main features of the process of evolution by natural selection and why it is so widely accepted; second, to summarise its implications for our view of ourselves, our societies and our future.

    Of course, many excellent writers have described the workings and wonder of evolution, most notably Richard Dawkins (2009) in The Greatest Show on Earth.

    Charles Darwin in 1868.

    Not Just His Theory

    Before I discuss the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, as described by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1859) and modified in the light of later knowledge, let me dispose of one false idea which is used to try to undermine the concept of evolution.

    ‘Theory’ does not mean that it is not accepted; it is not ‘only his theory’, as I once heard it described. In science, a tentative idea is referred to as an hypothesis or conjecture.

    ‘Theory’ means that the idea has survived repeated testing and it is now the consensus. ‘Theory’ replaces the older idea of natural ‘laws’, fixed and immutable. (In science all theories are formally tentative and liable to change in the light of new evidence.) The strength of any theory depends on three things: the rigour of the testing it survives, the number of phenomena it accounts for and the accuracy of the predictions that arise from it.

    Sea shells, Rosses Point, County Sligo, Ireland.

    Variation in Living Things

    Variation in living things is the basis of all evolution, so I want to briefly explain the sources of variation. There are two main sources: genetic variation and ‘environmental variation. Genes provide the basic instructions for the assembly and function of living things. An individual’s genetic endowment comes from their parents. Sexual reproduction involves the shuffling of the parents’ genes so that each individual gets a virtually unique combination of genes. Genes are subject to chemical changes or mutations, which may alter their function. (On average we each have about 150 genetic mutations compared to our parents.)

    The degree of genetic control varies greatly. In some conditions it approaches 100% (sickle-cell trait, blood groups), but in many other conditions hundreds or even thousands of genes are involved in a particular trait (intelligence, height). In the latter case each gene has only a minute effect on the trait. Genetic instructions are also fairly general. For example, in brain development genes ‘direct’ a particular bundle of nerve fibres to connect to a particular group of nerve cells; but which individual fibre goes to which individual cell is not specified. The precise connections during development at that local level are a matter of chance (Mitchell, 2018).

    But the ’environment’ is also a major source of variation and plays a huge part in the ultimate results of the genes. By ‘environment’ I mean the environment inside cells where genes are ‘translated’, the environment within the developing body, and also the environment in which the living creature exists. For humans this includes all life experience from family, education, illness, social interactions and everything else.

    What is Evolution?

    Evolution means the adaptive changes in living things which fit them to their environment. This is quite distinct from the development of the embryo or its voguish use for any change over time. Charles Darwin spent decades gathering evidence to support his idea of evolution by natural selection. Just like any other idea it has undergone changes to fit in with new knowledge, but Darwin’s description remains at the core of evolutionary thinking.

    Essentially, Darwin proposed five key ideas, summarised by Ernst Mayer (1991) in One Long Argument. I’ll summarise each in turn.

    Evolution/Change: Darwin had to overcome the contemporary view that the world was recently created and species were unchanging. In the 19th century it was becoming clear that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old. We can have great confidence in this idea because it is established using several completely independent measures, which all show that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old (Dawkins, 2019).

    This great age of the Earth is crucial to evolution because vast periods of time are necessary for genetic changes (mutations) to occur and for their consequences to be tested in the real world by ‘Natural Selection’. This vast expanse of time also evens out the effects of random events so that major trends can predominate. Just think of the thousands of seeds produced by a single plant: perhaps only one will end up in a spot that is suitable to allow it to reach maturity and produce offspring. Over an extended time period the best adapted to the local conditions will come to predominate. That’s how randomness works: a huge numbers of opportunities arising over long periods of time.

    During the 19th century the discovery and examination of fossils showed that some species had become extinct while others had evolved and left modern descendants. These studies also showed that different vertebrate species shared a common body plan, albeit significantly modified in some cases. For example, compare the human forelimb with that of a horse or bat. The plan is the same, but each is massively modified to adapt the animal to  its way of life (Huxley, 1863). Darwin also used evidence from the ‘artificial selection’ by animal and plant breeders of his own time, which showed that living species could change significantly at a much greater rate than could occur by chance in nature.

    Common Descent: Darwin called this ‘descent with modification’, so that offspring resemble their parents but are not identical. (Darwin had no knowledge of the mechanism of inheritance and mutation.) The genetic differences arising from mutation and genetic shuffling during sexual reproduction are the basis of evolution. Differing circumstances will favour certain genetic variants over others, leading to differential distribution of genes throughout the population.

    Descent with modification implies that all organisms come from a single common ancestor. The more closely related two species are, the more recent is their common ancestor.

    Natural Selection: Darwin inferred this from descent with modification and the fact that there are generally far more offspring than are needed for mere replacement of the population, leading to competition for resources and mates, so that over vast time spans the offspring best ‘fitted’ to their circumstance tend to survive and reproduce. In this way favourable mutations persist and become distributed through a population. This comes about by natural selection acting on variations that occur by chance.

    Natural selection is the most important element of evolutionary theory and perhaps the hardest to grasp, so I’ll present the example of the evolution of human skin colour in some detail. The earliest humans in Africa had dark skin which gave protection against strong sunlight. (Apart from sunburn, strong sun can also cause mutations which might lead to skin cancer.) In that environment dark skin clearly has an adaptive advantage. However, as human populations migrated northwards — over tens of thousands of years — darker skin became disadvantageous because it is less able to synthesise vitamin D, which requires sunlight. (Vitamin D is required for heathy bone growth.) Darker skin was no longer adaptive but had a selective disadvantage while paler skin was advantageous. In genetic terms, genes which altered  the skin to a lighter hue were favoured and became more widespread in the population as a whole. In other words, those with paler skin were better adapted to thrive and pass on their genes to the next generation.

    Species Multiply: A species is usually defined as a group of organisms that commonly interbreed and rarely, or never, interbreed with other members of related species. The simplest mechanism for forming new species is geographical isolation — by oceans or mountains for example — so that interbreeding is no longer possible and the separate populations diverge by adapting to different foods or acquiring different mating behaviours — adaptations which are inherited. Eventually the populations become so different that they can no longer interbreed, even if reunited.

    ‘Darwin’s Finches’ in the Galápagos islands are a classic example. When the Galápagos islands were formed by volcanoes they were colonised by a single species of finch from the South American mainland. They diverged over thousands of years acquiring mutations affecting, for example, beak shapes which adapted them to consume new foods. Eventually the differences were so great that they became different species incapable of interbreeding.

    Gradualism: There are no sudden leaps in evolution; new types do not suddenly arise, but are formed by the gradual accumulation of beneficial mutations and adaptations.

    ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’. Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973) American Biology Teacher, 35 (3): 125–129.]

    This summary of the main processes of evolution by natural selection shows that the workings of random processes with no purpose result in increasing levels of adaptation of living things to their environment. This is based on the fact that individuals vary and much of the variation is inherited. In competition for resources any slight advantage will be retained and spread through successive generations. In this way small changes can pile up to lead to large changes and eventually to new forms and new ways of life.

    Julian Huxley in 1922.

    The Modern Synthesis 

    In Darwin’s time there was no understanding of the mechanism of heredity which makes it all the more remarkable that he was able to take his ideas so far. Gregor Mendel first published his work in 1886 in an obscure journal and showed that heredity was in discrete units which were passed down the generations and combined in consistent ways (you can find a summary here). His revolutionary work was not rediscovered until the early years of the 20th century when the mechanisms of mutation and the spread of variant genes through populations were clarified. This work was brought together into a coherent whole by Julian Huxley (1942) in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, generating what is sometimes called ‘Neo-Darwinism’. At that time this book was described as ‘the outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps the century.’

    Daniel Dennett in 2008.

    Implications of Evolution by Natural Selection: Here we explore some of the main implications of what Daniel Dennett (1995) called ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’ for our understanding of ourselves and our world. We’ll consider the wide application pf evolutionary thinking in a variety of fields of human endeavour, then outline its impact on religion. After that we’ll look at ‘man’s place in nature’ and the special features of humans which result in our responsibility for the future evolution of ourselves and other living things on Planet Earth.

    Applications of Evolution to Different Fields of Learning. One of the tests of an idea is how widely it serves as an ‘organising principle’, helping to examine and explain a wide range of phenomena. The evolutionary principles of variation and differential survival are considered essential in many disciplines outside biology from astronomy and cosmology to philology. (Indeed, philologists, who study the origins of words and languages, were ‘early adopters’ in the 19th century and nowadays some even use genetic models to build family trees of languages.)

    In the sense that all fields of learning — indeed all human activities — are products of living things, namely humans, it is not surprising that the concept of evolution has proved so useful. It is all Biology after all (see Cultural Evolution below).

    Religions: The earliest supporters of evolution recognised that there would be conflict with religion for two main reasons. First, because of the demonstration of the extinction and change of species, contrary to the belief in a single creation of fixed species. Second, evolution by natural selection is sufficient to explain both the ever more refined adaptation of organisms to their environment and also the intricacy of structure (Dennett’s ‘engine for complexity’). Hence it removes both the need for a creator god and the argument from design which asserts that intricate structures must have had a designer.’ Hence it removes both the need for a creator god and an argument for intelligent design which asserts that intricate structures must have had a designer. Some religious groups will accept most evolutionary ideas but insist that humans are special in that they have separately and divinely created souls. We will see that humans are special, but we can account for this in purely evolutionary terms.

    ‘Man’s Place in Nature’; (The title of an 1863 book by TH Huxley, that fierce 19th-century supporter of evolution.) The principle of descent with modification leads to the idea that all living things (including humans) are related. We are not separate from nature; we are part of nature, another type of animal, descended from other animals. (The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things was about 3.9 billion years ago; the last common ancestor of the human species was about 250,000 years ago.) In evolutionary terms that makes us all practically cousins and we should strive to co-operate. As Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (1995) wrote: ‘…remember your humanity and forget the rest…’

    Dublin, Ireland.

    Uniqueness of Humans — Cultural Evolution

    Although we are undeniably part of the living world, an animal among other animals, we are however, special — indeed unique — in that we have the most complex brains, advanced language and writing. These qualities move us out of the two slow earlier phases of evolution recognised by JS Huxley sixty years ago. The first, Inorganic phase took billions of years for the formation of stars and the larger atoms, such as iron, carbon etc. The second, Organic phase took hundreds of millions of years during which the more complex molecules were formed until eventually some could reproduce themselves. Essentially this is the forming of the first living things which increased slowly in their complexity (under the influence of natural selection) until humans appeared.

    In a few thousand years humans have evolved within Huxley’s Psychosocial phase of evolution in which change is extremely rapid: humans can rapidly transmit ideas of all kinds: technology, social structures — in short, all the cultural products of human societies. (I prefer the term cultural evolution for this process and I suspect that Huxley only called it ’psychosocial’ because he was addressing psychologists at the time.)

    Cultural evolution means that humans can understand their place in the world, determine desirable goals and set a course towards those goals. For Huxley the next great evolutionary advance will be humanity’s agreement about its ‘destiny’, based on rational scientific thought and evolutionary principles. Our understanding of cultural evolution has profound consequences for our view of ourselves because we can see that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions including their effects on other living things and on our environment. This in turn has implications for our view on the value of the individual and hence for the way we organise our societies. We will explore these aspects in the rest of this article.

    ‘Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.’ Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1981). Cosmos McDonald & Co, GB

     The Value of the Individual

    This is the great existential question for humans. An individual’s life of a few decades is as nothing on a cosmic time-scale of billions of years. In the face of this fact it is easy to feel daunted and despairing. Throughout human history many religions have addressed this question by promises of a blissful after-life or the suggestion that we are serving some supernatural being’s purpose — which is often depicted as unknowable and beyond question. Such views are unsupported by any useful evidence; they are matters of faith.

    However, the evolutionary view described above — what we may call evolutionary humanism — gives a much more optimistic perspective. On this view every individual has value precisely because we are the ‘agents of evolution’. Each individual human has the potential to contribute to the betterment of our species, all living things and our environment. The evolutionary view is supported by all the weight of modern biology, the fact of evolution and our knowledge about ourselves.

    In evolutionary humanism every individual is valued for two main reasons. First, in any evolutionary view diversity is prized in and of itself. As we have seen, diversity, or variation, is the stuff of evolution; without it evolution ceases. A population with a narrow range of possibilities and no variation is likely to become stranded by changes in the environment, unable to adapt — an evolutionary dead-end.

    Second, we cannot know what problems lie ahead of us and what skills and aptitudes will be required to survive. Happily, humans are wonderfully diverse. Every individual should be encouraged to seek personal fulfilment to the highest possible degree. This is not a recipe for hedonistic self-indulgence, but rather a strategy for fostering the widest range of skills and aptitudes as a kind of evolutionary insurance policy.

    Oslo, Norway.

    Implications for Societies

    Recall that variations in the effects of an individual’s virtually unique genetic endowment can occur during development and as a result of the ‘environment’ inside cells and the life-experience of an individual. Developmental effects are beyond our control, as is the genetic predisposition (at any given the moment). But the environment can be manipulated to produce optimum development of individuals. By environment I mean  all experiences throughout life. This includes nutrition, exposure to infection and many other factors. For humans, perhaps the most important environmental factor is education (in its broadest sense). This is where we gain much of our knowledge of the wider world and learn how to think. It is in education that there is the most potential for enhancing our super-powers of abstract thought, communication and planning our goals and working out how to get there.

    Given this knowledge of our development and an evolutionary overview which values each individual, we can get some clear pointers about how we should organise our societies for the best results on an evolutionary scale. In a society organised on the principles of evolutionary humanism, all individuals will have support and opportunities according to their needs so that they can maximise their potential. This means reducing poverty, providing efficient healthcare and the opportunities for education according to ability and attitude. As J. S. Huxley pointed out, our environment should include beauty and wonder. (George Orwell’s novel, 1984, shows how to do precisely the opposite.)

    Societies are extremely complex but evolutionary humanism provides a set of general guidelines to help work out the details at a local level. For our present purposes, it is sufficient to say that this is extremely important work and it will draw on many strands of human thought.

    Afterword: In attempting this summary of evolution and its implications, I am aware that almost every paragraph could be a topic for further detailed discussion of this fascinating and complex subject. Let the last words be those attributed by Francis Crick to Leslie Orgel: ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are.’

     Acknowledgements

    I am grateful to David McConnell and Tom Miniter for commenting on early drafts.

    References

    Bashford, A (2022). An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family. (An excellent account of JS and TH Huxley and their intellectual and personal milieux.)

    Dawkins, R (2009). The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

    Dennett, DC (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.

    Huxley, JS (1961). The Humanist Frame (See the essay of the same title.

    (1964). Essays of Humanist

    (Much of JS Huxley’s work is now out of print although some of it can be read online, and scanned copies are available.)

    Huxley, TH (1863). Man’s Place in Nature and Other Essays. (Often reprinted but now out of print; available in scanned versions.)

    Mayr, E (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought.

    Mitchell. K (2018) — Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Makes Us What We Are.

    Russell, B & Einstein, A (1995). The Russell-Einstein Manifesto. https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/ [accessed 8/5/23]

    Feature Image: Fossil, Rosses Point, County Sligo, Ireland.

  • Do Not Resuscitate

    Holy Gawd, we’re back to Charles Darwin and his  interpreters.

    In the mid-19th century Darwin was recognised as a superb recorder of natural history and the inventor of evolutionary theory. He pointed to adaptation as a species’ key to survival. If an animal couldn’t adapt to new circumstances it faced extinction – like the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, or the elderly to-day.

    Unfortunately Darwin’s innocent findings on adaptation were used to rationalise the superiority of young, thrusting people (early entrepreneurs), and the inferiority of lazy people (the old, the sick, the unemployed and immigrants). Opportunists were bright enough to see gaps in the market and could exploit such arbitrary classification.

    However, Darwin  wasn’t an entirely objective scientist: he thought Tasmanian natives were inferior humans, that is to say, not useful, who could, justifiably, be annihilated. It was, after all, the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment and the Tasmanians were untutored in the philosophies of Smith, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza et alia; nor had the natives the ability to defend themselves.

    The fact that neither they nor the vast majority of European working class and peasants had familiarised themselves with Enlightenment ideas was insignificant. Their ignorance was noticed by the Imperial mindset and  the Tasmanians were duly culled, wiped out. Closer to home that mindset facilitated the Irish famine. The poor, the old, the weak, the lame were a drag on the fast moving herd bosses.

    In these tortured times the same insight is best represented by President Trump’s sociopathology. He illustrates the simple logic of big business: if you can’t adapt to our commercial imperatives (Big Pharma, for instance), you go out of business, i.e you die.

    Thus, if you cannot get on your bike, have not realised there is no such thing as society, not become an entrepreneur, not risen early in the morning, you are disposable.

    The crude American and U.K. analogies of a ‘war’ against the present disease have also proved subliminally useful. Idealistic youth was once considered ‘collateral damage’ in our just wars, million-fold sacrifices to preserve freedom and the status quo, including ours.

    Now apply the concept of a war to the present pandemic. In every conflict, certain leaders weigh the collateral damage against potential victory. How many body bags as against how much ground gained? In this case, political ground. It is a suitable coincidence that anyone over 65 is ‘non-productive’ and less to be cherished. Are they not a proper sacrifice in the ‘war’ against Coronavirus?

    I am biased, an 84-year-old artist, outrageously healthy and still productive but, by actuarial estimates, superfluous. So, with clichéd thoughts and prayers, dispose of  me. Do not resuscitate. All is well and all manner of things will be well. Darwinism rules.