In its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man
is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean
measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its
incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting
and degrading methods of its conduct bear the "made in Germany" stamp,
so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear
the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg
gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of
his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of
German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the
conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall
explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in
beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to
the winner, nothing to the loser.
In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are
the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among
these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a
constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest
like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its
increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the
peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of
longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning,
wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the
other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.
Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and
the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis
of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the
whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God
that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting
and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all
those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an
artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to
human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted
is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the
principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature's principle is mutual fight
and antagonism.
Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly
repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed
foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy.
In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they
needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people;
namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of
scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The _Gott_ of the
German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German
success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from
_Gott und uns_; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.
I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in
a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second
impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of
the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was
well illustrated by the conditions of the moment--and it was a memorable
one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the
land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in
tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and
cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for
existence,--and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No
wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought
to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its
evolution in harmony with natural law.
But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German
logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy
justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst
and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at
the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of
freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged
natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he
deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his
philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many
educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their
Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.
First we can say of this natural law that it isn't natural law.
Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural
selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle
is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth
and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute
evolution.
The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of
biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal
that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant
part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and
results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our
realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of
evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.
The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can
be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done
the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more
than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.
* * * * *
Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.
The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on
the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination.
Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the
evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the
first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer
formulations of the present and just passed centuries.
Even the essence of Darwin's famous explanation of evolution by natural
selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic
philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who
conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of
kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable
organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as
successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural
conditions.
But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first
expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable
form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly
plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation
remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of
any that has been offered.
Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of
indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, "the
inheritance of acquired characters," that is, the inheritance by the
immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or
"acquirements" which came to the parents during their life because of
their special use or disuse of parts and their individual reactions to
environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it
otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks
by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The
young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp
muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use
of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten
away the flies.
Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very
different explanation from Lamarck's, and one also very plausible and
logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck's theory; but
he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and
they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck's explanation entirely, and
accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient
cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of
the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He
had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.
What is this "natural selection" that we all know so well by name, and
so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more
widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with
little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as
something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific
doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally
known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural
selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of
evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable
contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable
naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual
contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its
influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.
But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection
dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and
dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and
sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is
difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal
explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond
reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most
people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it.
Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin's time, the
generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?
It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to
have devised;--or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the
fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it
is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;--an explanation based partly
on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical
elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be
sufficient base.
The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too
many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in
most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too
many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and
death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences
among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight
advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical
conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.
On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The
selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young
of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves,
they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble other
individuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the
survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly
differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of
heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations
which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents
success in the struggle for life.
More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those
advantageous differences--this by the laws of variation as antidote
needed just here for the laws of heredity--in even more marked degree
than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less
degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular
young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this
generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them
new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous
variations from the old or species type that make them especially "fit
for the conditions under which they must live."
Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual
shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an
ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences.
This is "species transformation," or the "origin of species" by natural
selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle;
extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And
just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the
different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or
ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.
There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality
and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the
logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove
it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeing
an animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and
relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a
world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No
wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a
clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready
for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a
scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.
* * * * *
Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific
dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are
many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things
cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt
them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but
loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many
people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that
many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most
certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as
yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific
man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster
and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to
know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man
knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not
be.
It was Weismann's new facts and new theories about heredity that did
much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational
Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an
insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now
it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete
knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible
and absurd the German claims of the _Allmacht_ of natural selection as
evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of
the potent causes and controls of evolution--if we may call that
revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The
factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others
are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do
not understand.
If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist
and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest
scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.
The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary
increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since
the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the
seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection
explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton
of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises
for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its
superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge
of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection
was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although
but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when
the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining
of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only
occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular
literature.
But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the
whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous
ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only
relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation
indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the
lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the
social or communal insects, the numerous instances of commensalism, or
the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of
different species--the various ants alone have more than a thousand
known kinds of other insects living with them--and the innumerable
observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as
those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers
resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the
needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects--all these had
convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers that
_if_ natural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the
present character and the future of the living world it was a very
different natural selection from that so redly painted by the
Neo-Darwinians.
It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such
utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In
all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to
the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when
it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a
ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others,
he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck's for certain
cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among
these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and
perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly
called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and
between species.
But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with
the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection
extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to
bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune
conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis
of an alleged identity between the character and control of human
evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the
Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy
and war practise.
The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always
contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in
line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted
pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It
is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal
descended, or ascended, from the lower ones--as he is--and if animals
are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by
virtue--or evil--of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle,
out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully
qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human
evolution is simple. _Schluss_ with discussion!
But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the
premises. They are wrong.
Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the
chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the
chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier
life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as "animal among animals," and
despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape
ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing,
ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human
nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and
especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure
mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of
every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation,
leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our
seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have
begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely
long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all
to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition
in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection
into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of
elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning
days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that
we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical
characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits,
and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity;
and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made
possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but
concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters,
which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech,
writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one
generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in
the race.
This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of
the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid
principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly
swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today
contains all the present expression and future promise of man's higher
evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man's natural traits,
and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its
natural validity in the great strength it adds to man's position in
Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of
human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of
natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate
into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance
and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.
Now it is all this side of human evolution that the German natural
philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out
of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social
evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the
sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and
viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to
be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly
and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible
to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of
military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological
advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal
and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.
The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are
being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their
thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their
defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They
have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor
at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said
that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to
work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the
artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be
restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at
least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a
world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the
probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were
fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and
biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare
possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility
came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one,
would not care to live longer in it.
I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of
biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But
there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not
only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do;
they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition
is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as
long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with
promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are
too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility
of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has
suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.
The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this
war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies
have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany
but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will
not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon
with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But
there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men
who have sacrificed them in vain.
But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who
have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and
that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to
be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with
them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the
Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful
philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands.
And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger
of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.