Darwin's dangerous ideas

Why evolutionary biology creates a problem for the Right

By PHIL GASPER

DO YOU believe in evolution? That was one of the questions posed to the ten white men currently seeking the Republican presidential nomination during their first debate, held at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley on May 3, 2007. Three of the candidates—Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado—raised their hands to indicate that they do not.

Did this public display of scientific ignorance illustrate the continuing influence of Christian fundamentalism on American politics, or does the fact that seven of the candidates kept their hands down, show that the religious Right is in decline? Your guess is as good as mine, but a few days later, the New York Times ran an article detailing the sharp debate that has emerged in conservative circles in recent years about what to say about Charles Darwin.

According to the Times report, “For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor.” Driven largely by religious motivations, members of this group advocate old-fashioned Biblical creationism or new-fashioned intelligent design (which posits a designer for at least some components of living things without explicitly using the label “God”).

For the past thirty years or so, the Republican Party has depended on an alliance with the religious Right to win elections. The latter were given the opportunity to promote their reactionary social agenda, while the party bigwigs and their corporate sponsors pushed through economic policies that sharply increased inequality and benefited the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. But the alliance has always included contradictory elements and the squabble over evolution reported by the Times exposes one of them.

Simply put, the religious fundamentalist attack on Darwin’s ideas amounts, in effect, to an attack on the scientific method itself. Rejecting evolutionary biology means rejecting along with it large portions of physics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, and other sciences, which provide evidence for evolution or employ similar methods. But capitalism depends on the accumulation and exploitation of new scientific knowledge. In the short term if religious anti-evolutionists are successful in a particular locality, they can do serious damage to science education, deter researchers from accepting university positions, and create a climate hostile to high-tech industry and investment. In the longer term they can pose a threat to scientific reason itself. Because of this, opposition to creationism and intelligent design has emerged within the conservative movement itself.

Science aside, some conservatives also think that social Darwinism—the idea that the “fittest” rise to the top in human societies—is a useful ideological tool. As the Times notes, “Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.”

The split among conservatives, and the claims by some of them that evolutionary thought offers support to the status quo, is simply the latest recapitulation of a debate that started 150 years ago and should long since have been put to rest. When Darwin first published The Origin of Species in 1859, he correctly expected that there would be fierce opposition from defenders of traditional religious ideas, who saw evolution as an attack on both religion and morality, and thus a threat to the established order. But within a few years, some bourgeois ideologists had embraced evolutionary theory.

The so-called social Darwinists, for example, attempted to defend nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism on the grounds that the misery, poverty, and death that it caused would result in the survival of the fittest and thus, ultimately, the general improvement of the human race. Social Darwinism is utter nonsense since, among other things, success in a competitive social and economic system has nothing to do with the notion of biological fitness, and the workings of such a system—as is becoming more and more apparent—may produce an ecological catastrophe that would threaten our species’ very survival.

Social Darwinism is only one way in which conservatives have attempted to use (or, rather, abuse) Darwin’s ideas for their own purposes. The argument that capitalism is in some sense natural because of the way that evolution has shaped human psychology has been another popular gambit for almost as long. Political science professor Larry Arnhart offers a recent version of this argument in his 2005 book Darwinian Conservatism. Among other things, Arnhart claims that evolutionary theory shows that humans instinctively seek power and the accumulation of wealth, and offers support for organizing human societies as male-dominated hierarchies based on the supposedly traditional nuclear family. On this basis he argues not just to keep gays but also women out of the military. He narrowly avoids making the argument that women should also be denied the right to vote.

It is almost embarrassing to have to engage with claims of this kind, which are based not on real evidence, but on speculative hypotheses and a highly selective misreading of the historical record. The speculative hypotheses consist of attempts to show that it may have been advantageous for our early human ancestors to have developed certain psychological characteristics (such as an instinct for power), which may then have become hard-wired into our brains. But speculative hypotheses need evidence to be taken seriously, so here enters the selective misreading of history. Find historical examples of the characteristic in question being exhibited, ignore all counter-examples in which the characteristic is apparently missing, and then argue that the characteristic is genetically programmed into our psyches. It’s certainly easy to find examples of humans ruthlessly seeking power or dominating and humiliating others, for instance, and if you ignore all examples of cooperation and solidarity, you can then conclude that human beings are naturally power-hungry and domineering.

But, in fact, examples of cooperation and solidarity abound, and the best available archaeological and anthropological evidence strongly supports the view that the earliest human societies were not based on competition, inequality, and hierarchy. According to the anthropologist Richard Lee, for example,

Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality [about 5,000 years ago], people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalized reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.