by A. N. Wilson
17
Mutual Aid
ON 21 SEPTEMBER 2015, at Bonham’s Auction House in New York, a short note, written by Charles Darwin to a complete stranger, was put up for auction. It was expected to fetch between $70,000 and $90,000. In the event it was sold for $197,000. That is over $4,800 per word, scribbled by an old man on a piece of paper on 24 November 1880.
The reason for the excitement in the saleroom, however, was obvious. Since the mighty Darwin Project had begun in Cambridge (England), nearly all Darwin’s correspondence has been gathered up and put into print or online. A letter which had slipped through the net was a great rarity. This, moreover, short though it be, is no ordinary letter. Ever since he had published The Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin had been secretive, as far as the public was concerned, about the true nature of his religious beliefs. More than that, he had been secretive about the extent to which ‘his’ theory was conceived as an alternative metaphysic, a substitute for the Christian view of the world. Perhaps Darwin had not set out, from the first keeping of notebooks on the species question, to undermine religious belief, but from a fairly early stage it had become clear to him that this was what he was doing, and certainly by the time that Annie had died in Malvern in 1851 he had turned implacably against the religion which his wife so persistently kept.
Instead of a Creator God, there was an inexorable process of blind nature. Rather than it being Love which ruled the sun and other stars, evolution could take place only as a result of a struggle, of warfare. ‘It has been truly said that all nature is at war; the strongest ultimately prevail, the weakest fail . . . the severe and often recurrent struggle for existence will determine that those variations, however slight, which are favourable shall be preserved or selected, and those which are unfavourable shall be destroyed.’ So Darwin, in 1868, in Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. While preparing the book for publication, he had mulled over the question of whether to come out as a non-believer. Asa Gray, his American admirer, had expressed the belief that there was a benignity in nature. Darwin, in Variation, rejects this belief, and so by implication rejects the loving God of Christianity. ‘It is foolish to touch such subjects,’ Darwin wrote to Hooker, ‘but there have been so many allusions to what I think about the part which God has played in the formation of organic beings that I thought it shabby to evade the question.’ Nevertheless, he did, in effect, evade the question. It would be hard, in his published writings, to find an outright admission that he considered ‘his’ theory incompatible with Christian belief.
Then, out of the blue, towards the close of 1880, when Darwin was past his seventieth birthday, he received a letter from a young lawyer named Francis McDermott. It was not a trick letter. It came from an obvious admirer, and it asked, ‘If I am to have the pleasure of reading your books, I must feel that at the end I shall not have lost my faith in the New Testament. My reason in writing to you is to ask you in writing to give me a Yes or No to the question, Do you believe in the New Testament?’
Perhaps the very simplicity of the question, placed by one whose profession it was to pose questions in a court of law, prompted in Darwin an uncharacteristic candour. Perhaps, having reached old age, he knew he had nothing really to lose. So Darwin wrote back: ‘November 24, 1880 – Dear Sir, I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Yours faithfully, Charles Darwin’.1
One hundred and thirty-five years after he wrote these words, Darwin’s letter was sold for a sum which would buy one of the more modest village houses in Downe. The reason is clear. Darwin, both as a figurehead manipulated by twentieth- and twenty-first-century admirers, and in his own person, was the one who felt most concern to bring matters of religious belief into the very core of what he was proposing as a scientist. This is what makes Darwin such an unusual figure in the history of science. Galileo was attacked by the Church for his astronomical observations, but he had not intended his confirmation of Copernicus’s calculations as an assault upon the faith. Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein have both used the word ‘God’ in their scientific writings. Their theories do not stand or fall, however, by their theology. Many have believed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity without endorsing the letter he wrote in April 1929 to Rabbi Goldstein: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists.’2
Darwin is different. His two-pronged theory, what he called ‘his’ theory, was believed, by himself, to be a refutation not so much of previous science as of Paley, an extremely minor theologian. Not surprisingly, the neo-Darwinians in our day still refer to Paley’s analogy of the watch discovered by the walker in a field. Darwin’s afterlife, especially in our own day, has been intimately connected with the central questions of religion – whether it makes sense to speak of a God, whether nature does reveal a heavenly harmony of the kind seen by Einstein, whether ethics, as understood since the times that Plato and Aristotle discussed them four centuries before Christ, make any sense in the face of a pitiless, purposeless ‘river of life’; whether kindliness and co-operation and unselfishness have any role to play as we all elbow one another out of the way, driven by our selfish genes, in the scramble up Mount Improbable.
Hence the fact that, although it is not absolutely necessary to choose between Darwin and God (most modern Christians have subscribed to the Darwinian theory of evolution), it has come in the early years of the twenty-first century to look like that. Darwinism or Intelligent Design? Evolution or creation? Darwin or God? Make your choice. Hence the excitement, the box-office appeal, the saleroom value of Darwin’s candid expression of disbelief in the inspired word of the Scriptures, and in the divine Sonship of Jesus.
Let us go back six years before Darwin wrote that letter to a young lawyer. In 1874, while Horace Darwin was graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, while Francis, at Down House, helped Charles Darwin with his voluminous correspondence and with a revised edition of The Descent of Man, Prince Peter Kropotkin (Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin), a thirty-four-year-old Russian intellectual, was being incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg for subversive activity against the state. Although he was treated comparatively gently on account of his high birth, Kropotkin was to spend two years in prison before he escaped. It gave him time to catch up on his reading. Kropotkin was a gentle communist-anarchist who believed that human societies progressed by mutual co-operation, rather than by the autocratic repression practised by the tsars, or by the ruthless market capitalism practised in Victorian England. His primary academic interest, apart from political philosophy, was geography. He had explored the glacial regions of Finland and Sweden for the Russian Geographical Society, and in his prison cell he was allowed to work up his papers on the Ice Age. He also gave his mind to the Darwinian theories.
In particular, Kropotkin was influenced by an article which he read in prison by the Dean of St Petersburg University, a zoologist called Professor Karl Kessler. What Kessler proposed was that co-operation played a larger role in evolution than did competition.3 When Kropotkin eventually came to live in England, he wrote a series of essays in the periodical the Nineteenth Century in which he expounded his evolutionary ideas, and in particular his responses to Huxley’s robust articles, in the same periodical, on the struggle for existence. Kropotkin’s study of animal life in the Arctic extremes of Sweden and Finland had persuaded him that animals are not in a state of perpetual competition with one another. Species might be so, but individual members of species co-operate in innumerable ways, and this is one of the reasons that they survive. In 1902, Kropotkin worked up his essays into a book entitled Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its widest Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer me
ans of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species . . . in which the individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits . . . and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development . . . are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.4
Kropotkin was the recipient, in his lifetime, of adulation and derision in almost equal measure. After the Revolution of 1917, despite his detestation of Bolshevism, he returned to Russia in the hope of better days. The crowds who came out to greet his return to Mother Russia numbered tens of thousands. When he died of pneumonia on 8 February 1921, Lenin grudgingly allowed a public funeral and, again, crowds of thousands massed. It was the last great anarchist demonstration in Russia, with demonstrators carrying anti-Bolshevist banners.
What of his opinions from a purely scientific point of view? His views have seemed ever more plausible with the years. Stephen Jay Gould, while having some reservations about individual points in Mutual Aid – in particular Kropotkin’s reliance on the naturalistic fallacy in contradicting Social Darwinism – was by no means wholly dismissive.5 Perhaps even more striking has been the conversion of Edward O. Wilson to the notion of mutual aid as a factor in evolution.
Wilson’s retraction of belief in the ‘selfish gene’, however, did not come without cost. Indeed, his apostasy was condemned by Richard Dawkins in Prospect magazine as ‘an act of wanton arrogance’.6 Dawkins claims that Wilson has muddled two concepts. One is the fact that individuals benefit from living in groups. ‘Of course they do,’ Dawkins replied. ‘Penguins huddle for warmth. That’s not group selection: every individual benefits. Lionesses hunting in groups catch more and larger prey than a lone hunter could; enough to make it worthwhile for everyone.’
This, according to the orthodox neo-Darwinism of Dawkins, deriving from the work especially of W. D. Hamilton in the 1960s, is to miss the truly ‘Darwinian’ thing about genes. Genes are, if viewed in this light, the ‘units of natural selection’ and it is within the individual that these genes are fighting for mastery.
Darwin and Huxley, largely guided by Herbert Spencer rather than by scientific observation, depicted a world at war, with pine trees, sheep, garden songbirds all furiously in conflict, with weaker versions of themselves like the ruthless Victorians’ social striving for bigger carriages, richer wives and larger share portfolios. Observation – sheer common sense – eventually saw that this might have been the way that a very strange, indeed anomalous, social group in British history behaved, but it is not how nature works. Ah, reply the neo-Darwinists, you are confusing co-operation – which is in any case enlightened selfishness – with the way in which living organisms themselves actually operate. It is inside us that the struggle is going on. The Kingdom of Darwin is within you. The genes themselves which determine whether you have red or brown hair, whether you are a nice person or a nasty person, are at war, and it is the selfish genes which win. The discoveries of genetics, in the Hamilton–Dawkins thesis, show us in microcosm the old Victorian struggle, with the strong driving out the weak.
Wilson’s reply to Dawkins that his original thesis, made in Nature in collaboration with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, is that the old kin-selection theory – in which fit genes are competing against unfit – needs drastic modification. ‘The central issue of the book, which he urges others not to read, is the replacement of inclusive fitness theory (kin selection theory) by multilevel selection theory (ie, individual and group selection combined) . . .’ Wilson claimed that they had demonstrated ‘that while inclusive fitness theory sometimes works, its mathematical basis is unsound, and inclusive fitness itself is an unattainable phantom measure. Multilevel selection is mathematically sound, analytically clear, and works well for real cases – including human social behaviour.’ He adds, ‘The science in our argument has, after 18 months, never been refuted or even seriously challenged – and certainly not by the archaic version of inclusive fitness from the 1970s recited in Prospect by Professor Dawkins.’7 John Hands, in his magisterial Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe (2015), put it well: ‘When it was discovered in the 1970s that some 98 per cent of the human genome did not consist of genes, defined then as protein-coding sequences of DNA, this was referred to as “junk DNA”, which seemed a bold, if hubristic, view to take of the vast majority of our DNA that didn’t fit the model.’8
We start to see that the debate is concerned less with specific facts about genes and more with the concept we entertain of science itself. Followers of Hamilton, and to a smaller extent of Dawkins, are likely to seem simplistic in their accounts of human behaviour, with their hope of identifying specific genes which will somehow ‘explain’ all the complexity and sheer capriciousness of human behaviour, including human baseness and the heights of imaginative genius or altruistic unselfishness. While genetics might explain the human propensity to pass on, let us say, spina bifida, it could never explain more nebulous but palpable and recognizable qualities such as courage or enterprise, or the sheer intuitive quick-wittedness which enables human beings to make genuine scientific discoveries. These things are mysterious. If someone tried to explain, in purely genetic terms, why Arthur Rubinstein or Alfred Cortot were incomparably better pianists than, say, their siblings or their parents, you would know that they understood neither science nor music. To believe that there is a ‘Rubinstein’ gene which enabled one person to play Beethoven sonatas better than another person is not borne out by any scientific inquiry.
Between Dawkins and Wilson there lurks a deep divide; and it is expressed by their attitudes to Darwin. Partly in his own person, and partly as conveyed to the world by Thomas Huxley, his representative on earth, Darwin is the man who laid the groundwork for a purely materialist concept of human science, a way of explaining humanity to itself without resort to any words like mystery or genius or character, let alone resort to supernatural pictures of the world.
There is some paradox here, of course, since the ardent neo-Darwinians are not troubled by the fact that the real Darwin said very little about any of these things. To this extent, the neo-Darwinians bear a close, and almost pathetic, resemblance to those Christian fundamentalists who believe that the historical Christ had strong views about, let us say, homosexuality, when no record survives of his ever having spoken upon the subject. Clearly, Darwin lived before the science of genetics had properly speaking got going and he did not know the pioneering work of Mendel. But, beyond that, he said very little – even in The Descent of Man – about what science could plausibly tell us about human beings. Still less did he tell us very much about what science can tell us about the origins of the human race. Indeed, the more one reads Darwin, the more paradoxical it seems that he, rather than the author of Vestiges or Spencer or Huxley, should have been chosen, by some process of selection, natural or otherwise, to be the torch-bearer of the modern branches of human life-sciences. If he were merely the hero of pigeon-fanciers or of earthworm specialists, you would understand it. As the man who helped human beings understand who and what they are, he wrote almost nothing and, to give him his dues, it is not even clear that he would have considered important such debates as were so acrimoniously played out between Dawkins and Wilson. Coexistent in his costive and paradoxical character was a variety of positions and viewpoints. The towering ambition which wanted to be a universal genius lived side by side with the simple naturalist-clergyman he never quite became; beside the overpowering ambition to promote ‘his’ theory come what may, there existed humility and honesty, and a despondent readiness, if contrary evidence proved overwhelming, to say, ‘Adi
os theory!’
‘Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read [The Selfish Gene] would scarcely recognize his own original theory in it.’9 So Richard Dawkins in 1976.
Scientific theories, however, stand or fall by science. As we return to the Natural History Museum and confront Boehm’s monumental statue of Darwin seated on the grand staircase, are we looking at one of the great scientists such as Newton, Einstein, Mendel, Watson and Crick whose discoveries altered the state of human knowledge?
The truthful answer is no.
Was he as comprehensive in his vision of science and of science in its place in the whole human story as Goethe, or Alexander von Humboldt, or even William Whewell or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? Definitely not. Was he even as broad-ranging, or as humane, in his understanding of the implications of science as Alfred Russel Wallace? Not at all. Was he as incisive as Thomas Huxley in defending his own ideas? No.
Was Charles Darwin one of the greatest naturalists who ever lived? Undoubtedly! Did his collection of specimens, made as a young man while voyaging with HMS Beagle, hugely expand the possibilities of taxonomic and geological research in a vast range of fields? Beyond question. Did he enrich for ever the study of barnacles, pigeons and earthworms? Indubitably. Is he the man who ‘discovered’ evolution? Absolutely not.