A CLASH OF PERSPECTIVES?o

Human beings are part of nature. We are primates, mammals, animals. Animals, in turn, are nothing but very complex biochemical systems. So humans are biochemical machines, though extraordinarily complex ones. That complexity ensures that it will rarely be practically possible to predict future human behaviour, or explain past human behaviour, through a fine-grained molecular understanding of human bodies. But, in principle, a detailed enough understanding of the physical and chemical processes internal to an agent would suffice to predict and explain all of that agent's behaviour. A full list of the complete physical, natural facts about an agent is all the facts there are. The natural story is the whole story. So, at least, the sciences of physiology, morphology, neuropsychology and the like suppose.

But humans are also conscious agents. We are aware of ourselves and our world. In Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, there is ‘something that it is like’ to be a person. What is more, we are rational agents. We are not, of course, perfectly rational. We make errors of reason and judgement. Most of the time, however, our beliefs about our immediate environment are sound, and our actions are rational in the light of those beliefs and our goals. My belief that good coffee is available in the student union may be false, perhaps even unreasonable. But given that I have that belief, and that I aim to have an espresso, my taking myself off to the union is rational. My colleagues, knowing these facts about me, can use that knowledge to predict my future actions and to explain my past ones.

AMBIVALENCES AND INFLUENCES

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are disputed.

This chapter examines the views held by Darwin himself and by later Darwinians on the implications of his theory for social life, and it assesses the social impact made by these views. More specifically: section II discusses the debates about human evolution in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).3 Sections III and IV analyse Darwin’s ambiguous contribution to these debates. Sometimes celebrating competitive struggle, he also wished to moderate its effects, but thought restrictions on breeding impractical and immoral. Sections V and VI see how others interpreted both the science and social meaning of Darwinism. Darwin’s followers found in his ambiguities legitimation for whatever they favoured: laissez-faire capitalism, certainly, but also liberal reform, anarchism and socialism; colonial conquest, war and patriarchy, but also anti-imperialism, peace and feminism.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Darwinism has long been in the thick of science-religion debates, and never more so than today. Among the latest of a series of American states to legislate in a manner unfriendly to Darwinism is Oklahoma, insisting that science textbooks carry an explicit statement that 'human life was created by one God of the Universe'. Not all religious believers feel so threatened by evolutionary ideas, of course. Pope John Paul II - hardly a man to take doctrine lightly - has sent out a letter endorsing not just evolution per se, but modern theories of organic change. In the same spirit, Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, speaks of natural selection as a 'simple and extremely fruitful theory', and goes on to say that there is 'every reason to think that a scientific evolutionary account and a religious belief in a guiding creative force are not just compatible, but mutually reinforcing'. Nevertheless, even liberal Christians often feel the need to supplement the theory of evolution through natural selection with other special mechanisms.

For their part, many of those on the science side of these debates think that Darwinism sounds the death knell for Christianity and other theistic systems. Writing with the passion of Savonarola, the well-known Darwinian Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) regrets that a ‘cowardly flabbiness of the intellect afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions’. As a Darwinian, he wants no compromise or mutual embrace. ‘Given a choice between honest to goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic Church on the other, I know which I prefer.’

HUMAN EVOLUTION THROUGH HUMBOLDTIAN EYES

From the beginning of his theorising about species, Darwin had human beings in view. In the initial pages of his first transmutation notebook (Notebook B), he observed that 'even mind & instinct become influenced' as the result of adaptation to new circumstances.Considering matters as a Lyellian geologist, he supposed that such adaptations would require many generations of young, pliable minds being exposed to a changing environment. After all, Captain FitzRoy had attempted to 'civilise' the Fuegian Jemmy Button by bringing him to London and instructing him in the Christian religion; but back in South America, Button reverted to his old habits, demonstrating, in Darwin's words, that the 'child of savage not civilized man' - transmutation of mind was not the work of a day. Darwin had nonetheless quickly become convinced that over long periods of time human mind, morals and emotions had progressively developed out of animal origins. As he bluntly expressed it in his first transmutation notebook: 'If all men were dead, monkeys make men. - Men make angels.' Presumably the transmutation of human beings into those higher creatures remained far in the future.

From July 1837, when he jotted these remarks in the first few pages of his Notebook B, to the early 1870s, with the publication of his Descent of Man and Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin gradually worked out theories of the evolution of human mentality that, in the main, we still accept. In the case of moral behaviour, he produced a theory of its evolution that stands as a most plausible empirical account, and displays the range and subtlety of his thought. These theories merit close examination in their own right.

GENTLEMANLY GENERATION

In the summer of 1838, Charles Darwin considered marriage. The disadvantages included losing the 'freedom to go where one liked', while staying single would mean avoiding 'the expense & anxiety of children'. But then, he reflected, 'only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps'. Not to mention an 'object to be beloved and played with. better than a dog anyhow'. Wedlock won; within months he was engaged and then married to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. The pairing brought anxieties, however, especially over whether marriage between such close relatives would issue in unhealthy children.

As a philosophical naturalist, Darwin had long been interested in reproduction or ‘generation’, to use the term of the day. Generational issues would eventually lead him to study subjects as diverse as barnacles, flowers, pigeons and domestic animal and plant breeding. His hypothesis of pangenesis, probably first formulated in 1841 but only published in 1868, was an attempt to give a unified account of all kinds of generation, from the healing of wounds in trees, to propagation by buds and grafting, to sexual pairings and fertilisation. Moreover, in Darwin’s view, since sexual pairings – whether decided by male combat or female choice – were selective, they enabled a selectional evolutionary process separate from, and sometimes in tension with, natural selection. His theory of sexual selection argued that something like a peacock’s tail, while lowering the peacock’s chances of survival, might give him a reproductive advantage as long as peahens choose the males with the finest tails.

Valéry's 'Variation sur Descartes' excellently evokes the vanishing act that has haunted philosophy ever since Darwin overturned the Cartesian tradition. If my body is composed of nothing but a team of a few trillion robotic cells, mindlessly interacting to produce all the large-scale patterns that tradition would attribute to the nonmechanical workings of my mind, there seems to be nothing left over to be me. Lurking in Darwin's shadow there is a bugbear: the incredible Disappearing Self. One of Darwin's earliest critics, Robert MacKenzie, saw what was coming and could scarcely contain his outrage:

This ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ promises – or threatens – to dissolve the Cartesian res cogitans as the wellspring of creativity, and then where will we be? Nowhere, it seems. It seems that if creativity gets ‘reduced’ to ‘mere mechanism’ we will be shown not to exist at all. Or, we will exist, but we won’t be thinkers, we won’t manifest genuine ‘Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill’. The individual as Author of works and deeds will be demoted: a person, it seems, is a barely salient nexus, a mere slub in the fabric of causation.

FROM THE BEAGLE YEARS TO THE LAWS OF LIFE

In March 1837, five months after returning from the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled in London. He was to live in the capital for five years. They were by far his most productive years intellectually. During them, he formulated almost all the main theories later published in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s: his theory of the origin of species - natural selection; his theory of generation or reproduction and heredity - pangenesis; his theory of the origin of the moral sense in man from ancestral animal social instincts; and his interpretation of the expression of the emotions in man and animals. Of his prominent intellectual productions only two - the theory of sexual selection and the principle of divergence of varieties and species - came later, and they were conceived as elaborations of the theory of natural selection.

In these five London years, two periods were quite exceptionally consequential: the spring and early summer of 1837, immediately after his move to London, and the summer and early autumn of the following year, 1838. At each of these times Darwin made vast escalating moves in his thinking and his theoretical ambitions. By mid- September 1838, indeed, his ambitions had reached a peak never later to be surpassed. One can therefore read the rest of his life as so many sequels to the brainwork of these months.

The work was mostly done in a series of small leatherbound notebooks. In or about July 1837, Darwin opened two notebooks. One, ‘A’ as he labelled it, was devoted to geology; the other, ‘B’, was headed ‘Zoonomia’ and devoted to the laws of life.

An event that cannot be anticipated, an occurrence we might call a random happening, is inevitably a source of uncertainty, if for no other reason than we do not know when it will occur. At a personal level, we may be familiar with many such events: an automobile accident, a fire or burglary at home, the sudden death of the family breadwinner, and sadly, even a surprise terrorist attack. But there are other misfortunes that can occur on a regional or even global basis, equally sudden, equally catastrophic. We are familiar with such events also, although perhaps not through direct personal experience: a flash flood, a widespread power failure, a devastating earthquake, a major volcanic eruption. Whether personal or more widespread, all are events that we fervently hope never to experience. Yet we know that on any given day there is a small, but not infinitesimal, probability that our lives may be touched by one or another of such events. Accordingly, we have developed some common strategies to deal with their consequences. The mechanisms we employ to cushion us from the consequences of these unwanted and unanticipated events include emergency preparedness and insurance, both examples of our tendency to look to the future with caution.

EMERGENCY AND DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

In the immediate and personal environment of our home, we often take steps to forestall catastrophe.

Science, as Rachel Carson observed, is a part of the very fabric of life. It has its strengths and weaknesses, its successes and failures, its doubts and uncertainties. As scientists attempt to understand how a cell malfunctions to produce cancer, how a gene transmits information to guide an organism's development, how an ecosystem responds to urban sprawl, or how the entire Earth responds to long-term changes in the chemistry of its atmosphere, these investigations are enveloped with uncertainty at every stage. The uncertainty arises in many ways, and the nature of the uncertainty may change through time, but the scientific endeavor is never free of uncertainty.

Has science been debilitated by uncertainty? To the contrary, the successes of science, and indeed there are many, arise from the ways that scientists have learned to make use of uncertainty in their quests for knowledge.

At a fundamental level, scientific uncertainty begins when we make measurements. What do we use to make a measurement? How well can that tool accomplish a measurement? To what precision can we determine the size or mass or temperature of an object? If we repeat a measurement many times, how closely will the individual measurements agree with each other?

Professor Paulos' comment about measuring bacteria was made in an unusual context that I will tell you more about later. The remark underscores, however, the importance of selecting a measuring device appropriate to the task at hand. One does not need the experience of a laboratory scientist to recognize that the likelihood of obtaining an accurate measurement of the length of a bacterium using a yardstick is intrinsically low. The smallest subdivision of the yardstick, usually 1/16 of an inch, a little less than two millimeters, is so much greater than the dimension of a bacterium (actually about 10,000 times greater) that, on the one hand, one cannot say much more about the length of a bacterium other than it is very much smaller than 1/16 of an inch. On the other hand, a yardstick could, in principle, estimate the length of five million bacteria lined up end to end.

Most textbooks of physics or chemistry introduce uncertainty in the context of measurement.

Predicting the future … how enticing a prospect. Predicting the future has become a business for many. We can find, with only a little effort, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, palm readers, astrologers, mystics, seers, psychics, and many others who will gladly reveal the future, for a price. But we all should be more than a little skeptical that any of these occult practitioners have special access to the future. Even economists and professionals who use less mystical tools – climatologists, actuaries and pension fund managers – find the distant future obscure and the pathway to it full of potholes. A principal theme of this chapter is that the future is a moving target, that divining its characteristics is always tough, and that it gets tougher the further ahead one tries to see. My philosophy for dealing with such uncertainty is to develop a long-term vision and make plans to move ahead – but to be prepared for many course corrections along the way, as the future unfolds quite differently than you have anticipated.

We all have heard that the only things certain about the future are death and taxes. This favorite adage surely captures the truism that most of the future is filled with uncertainty. The uncertainty is not uniform, however, and some aspects of the future are clearer than others.

The historical sciences such as archeology, geology, and astronomy are burdened with a special form of uncertainty known as non-uniqueness. When trying to understand why something happened the way it did, these scientists must try to reconstruct the circumstances of the event, and make hypotheses about the processes that governed the event. But as we try to reconstruct an historical event, we deal with an incomplete record. And with an incomplete record of an only partially understood process, there may be more than one way that the evidence can be explained. In other words, we must live in the shadow of non-uniqueness. At any given time, the incomplete evidence may admit many interpretations, and at a later time, additional evidence may eliminate some of those possibilities.

Dealing with uncertainty about the past is a way of life with geologists, who in their work of reconstructing natural history are always working with half a deck or less. Nature is not a mindful conservator, and the inevitable consequence of time is that the record of what happened long ago becomes degraded and fragmentary. In their efforts to understand and interpret incomplete information, geologists always work with a handful of provisional scenarios relevant to explaining their observations.