The general debate

Darwinism has often been blamed for encouraging the idea that humankind is essentially pugnacious and competitive, and that war is therefore a normal part of the human condition. The logic of this argument varies, but it is possible to analyse within it certain recurring constructs, most notably those referring to Darwin's ‘conflict paradigm’ and the theme of ‘animal reductionism’. The conflict paradigm is said to underlie Darwinism. The concept of natural selection, however it was derived – we shall look at its historical derivation soon – emphasised the relentless struggle of superfecund populations for limited resources. This was the precondition for evolutionary change and adaptation, for ‘survival of the fittest’ (in Herbert Spencer's evocative, if dangerously evaluative, term). Struggle and competition, violence, bloodshed and cruelty were the filtering mechanisms, crude, chancy, wasteful, by which species change and natural progress occurred. It was this side of natural selection that allegedly struck the nineteenth-century imagination, the idea of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ (although Tennyson's line predated The Origin of Species by almost a decade). The ‘law of the jungle’ was offered as the harsh ruling principle governing not only animals in their habitat but humans in their cities and societies. This law became (it is said) a vivid justification for rampant capitalism and uncontrolled individualism, doctrines praising survivors and victors and damning the unfit. T. H. Huxley condemned it as ‘the gladiatorial theory of existence’, embodying a naturalistic ethic that was a form of ‘reasoned savagery’.