Political Descent

Political Descent Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England piers j. hale The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London 2014 You ask whether I shall discuss “man”; —I think I shall avoid the whole sub- ject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the high- est and most interesting problem for the naturalist. charles darwin to alfred russel wallace, 22 December 1857 You ask whether I shall discuss “man”; —I think I shall avoid the whole sub- ject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the high- est and most interesting problem for the naturalist. charles darwin to alfred russel wallace, 22 December 1857 Contents Introduction: The Politics of Evolution 1 1 Every Cheating Tradesman: The Political Economy of Natural Selection 24 2 A Very Social Darwinist: Herbert Spencer’s Lamarckian Radicalism 66 3 A Liberal Descent: Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Ethics 106 4 Liberals and Socialists: The Politics of Evolution in Victorian England 155 5 Malthus or Mutualism?: Huxley, Kropotkin, and the Moral Meaning of Darwinism 206 6 Of Mice and Men: Malthus, Weismann, and the Future of Socialism 252 7 Fear of Falling: Evolutionary Degeneration and the Politics of Panmixia 301 Conclusion: Political Descent: Anticipations of the Twentieth Century and Beyond 335 Afterword: Engaging the Present 352 Acknowledgments 355 Notes 359 Bibliography 401 Index 425 introduction The Politics of Evolution Human nature is a political problem as much as it is a philosophical one. However, since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, it has also become very much a question of biology. This remains controver- sial. Currently, sociobiology seeks to explain the evolution of social behavior, in man as well as in other social organisms, while evolutionary psychology offers insights into human cognitive choices. Both disciplines have met with objections from social scientists, who argue that we are a species that cannot be understood through our biology alone and that our culture and society are more than mere biological phenomena. Indeed, concerns abound that evolutionary accounts of human social behaviors are reductive and serve to falsely naturalize often disputed social relationships as well as to undermine human agency. The attempt to explain not only physiological but also psychological sexual differences in terms of Darwinian sexual selection is just one of the more contentious issues in this “biological turn”; critics maintain that sex and race, like class, are socially constructed categories that require social, cul- tural, and historical analysis beyond any insight that biology might provide. While there have always been those who have doubted the explanatory reach of evolutionary biology, the fact that today we find social scientists among them bucks a historical trend. From its birth in the middle of the nineteenth century, sociology was wedded to evolutionary explanation and practitioners of the other social sciences were no less enamored by the insights that evolution seemingly offered. The fact of our evolution was also taken to be of the utmost significance in nineteenth-century psychology, history, and political economy. In short, all aspects of the human experience were colored by developments in evolutionary biology. It was in this period that questions about the kind of beings we had become, about how we live and how we f igu r e i. 1. Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766–1834. (From Popular Science Monthly 74 [April 1909], 412; courtesy History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries) the politics of evolution 3 might live, became questions that were believed to have biological answers. These answers were disputed, of course, and not less hotly than they are today. At issue from the start was the question of which human behaviors were thought to have been “fit” in our evolutionary past and which were not, and thus which might remain so in the present. Of course, the tacit presumption in these debates, both in the past and in the present, is that what is “fit” in evolutionary terms is also “right” in moral terms; the study of human evolution has been and remains as much a prescriptive enterprise as a descriptive one. In this debate it has been a commonplace to derive an “ought” from an “is,” despite the objections to doing so that have been raised by philoso- phers from David Hume to G. E. Moore and that have been repeated by modern-day critics.1 This has occurred for compelling reasons. Competi- tion or cooperation, self-interest or altruism—across the history of our species, and certainly across the history of our study of our own evolution, these have become key issues in how we make sense of ourselves, of how we might live, and ultimately, of how we think about what it means to be human. Even among those who believe that biology does have a lot to contribute to how we understand our culture and society, there remains significant disagreement as to exactly what our evolution might mean for us. These debates revolve around which evolutionary processes should be invoked to explain certain behaviors, and while there is agreement that the roles that natural and sexual selection have played in our evolution are important, there remains disagreement about exactly what it is that is being selected in these processes. Further, in recent years, what has become known as the “levels-of-selection” debate in biology has become central to this question. This is a debate over whether natural selection acts upon, or selects, genes, individuals, or groups, and it has been taken to speak directly to the kinds of evolutionary behaviors that have become natural to us and—most significantly—to whether humans have evolved the capacity for genuinely altruistic behaviors or whether we are essentially self-interested beings, open at best to what the theoretical biologist Robert Trivers has termed “reciprocal altruism.”2 Ever since the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary explanations of altruistic behaviors have proven particularly problematic because selfless- ness seems to go against the very essence of natural selection. If natural selection works in such a way as to favor the individual that is the best equipped to prevail in a struggle for existence, then it seems only logical that any or- ganism that is altruistic—that gives up some of its own resources to benefit another—will be at a disadvantage. All things being equal, one would expect that altruistic organisms would very quickly be driven to extinction. The sug- gestion that selection worked upon individuals made it logical to conclude 4 introduction that only self-interested behaviors of one sort or another could be fit behaviors. However, such conclusions have not gone unchallenged, and ever since Darwin, defenders of the idea that genuinely altruistic behaviors can indeed evolve have appealed to various theories of “group selection” in which organisms are presumed to have acted not for their own good but for the good of the group—or of the species—as a means by which altruistic behaviors might have become established as evolutionary stable strategies. Most histories of group selection highlight the work of the English ornithologist Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards. As the historian Mark Borrello has pointed out in Evolu- tionary Restraints, his own study of the contentious history of group selection, Wynne-Edwards recognized that many of the birds in the populations he studied did not reproduce in a given year even though they were sexu- ally mature. Wynne-Edwards explained this phenomenon in his 1962 book, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, as being what he called an “epideictic” behavior that resulted from group selection.3 He suggested that during flocking individual birds were able to assess the size of their nesting group in relation to the availability of resources and limit their reproduc- tion accordingly. This behavior, Wynne-Edwards argued, had developed because it worked for the overall benefit of the species. Wynne-Edwards’s views were initially well received; the emphasis upon cooperation and collectivism resonated with prevailing political sentiments and also appeared to explain observed phenomena. However, only shortly after the publication of Ani- mal Dispersion, a number of critics attacked the basic presumptions Wynne- Edwards had made about the processes of evolution that informed his work. In 1963 and 1964, the theoretical biologist William D. Hamilton published two very significant papers under the title “The Genetical Evolution of Social Be- haviour” that quickly set mainstream biology at odds with theories of group selection. Describing a gene-based theory of selection, Hamilton’s papers set a new norm in theoretical biology that prevails to the present. Describing what has subsequently been termed a “gene’s-eye view” of evolution, he argued that what appeared to be genuinely altruistic social behaviors were in fact the product of natural selection targeting the genes that coded for the behaviors that would ensure that those genes would make it into the next generation. From this perspective, Wynne-Edwards’s views were simply naive. Hamil- ton’s conclusions coincided with those of a number of other theorists—the American mathematician George Price, the English biologist John Maynard Smith, and the American evolutionary ecologist George C. Williams, in par- ticular. In 1966 Williams had published Adaptation and Natural

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