Vernon Kellogg Encounters German Darwinism During The Great War

Vernon Kellogg was a distinguished American biologist of the early 20th century.  He is most remembered today for "Headquarters Nights,"  his memoir of a sort of peace mission-fact finding trip he made before the United States entered the First World War, especially for what he found out about the beliefs of the German military.  What he discovered about their motives and beliefs shocked him so much that he abandoned his fully believed in pacifism and came back advocating that the United States enter the war because he became convinced that Germany, under the influence of prevailing thinking, was extremely dangerous.

Of course, with what I've been posting lately, Darwinism figured into that.  Kellogg was no opponent of evolution or of Darwin, he cited Darwin very favorably in a number of his books and papers and wrote what was probably one of the more serious texts on evolutionary biology at the time.  There is no way to paint his horror of what he already called "neo-Darwinism," as being opposed to either evolution or even natural selection.  Though, as can be seen, since both Darwin and Huxley gave their full endorsement of Haeckel's and other originators of the ideas that shocked Kellogg, there was nothing "neo" about it.   All of the things Kellogg recounts as having been said by his pseudonymous colonel-professor von Flussen were present in Haeckel by 1870, certainly by the time of Haeckel's somewhat ironically named,  "Freedom in Science and Teaching" which both Darwin and Huxley gave their fullest endorsement.

Haeckel was still alive at the time of Kellog's trip and, from what I've read, still the most influential voice in matters Darwinian, in Germany.  By this time the influence of his students, such as Plotze and Rudin and also such people as Schallmeyer were also important.  I believe both Haeckel and Schallmeyer died in 1919.   Any "neo-Darwinism" that Kellogg encountered in the German establishment would certainly have been influenced by them, though Darwin was also widely read and his natural selection was the basis all of it, directly taken from him or not.


Well, I say it dispassionately but with conviction: if I understand theirs, it is a point of view that will never allow any land or people controlled by it to exist peacefully by the side of a people governed by our point of view. For their point of view does not permit of a live-and-let-live kind of carrying on. It is a point of view that justifies itself by a whole-hearted acceptance of the worst of Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural selection applied rigorously to human life and society and Kultur. 

Professor von Flussen — that is not his name — is a biologist. So am I. So we talked out the biological argument for war, and especially for this war. The captain-professor has a logically constructed argument why, for the good of the world, there should be this war, and why, for the good of the world, the Germans should win it, win it completely and terribly. Perhaps I can state his argument clearly enough, so that others may see and accept his reasons, too. Unfortunately for the peace of our evenings, I was never convinced. That is, never convinced that for the good of the world the Germans should win this war, completely and terribly. I was convinced, however, that this war, once begun, must be fought to a finish of decision — a finish that will determine whether or not Germany's point of view is to rule the world. And this conviction, thus gained, meant the conversion of a pacifist to an ardent supporter, not of War, but of this war; of fighting this war to a definitive end — that end to be Germany's conversion to be a good Germany, or not much of any Germany at all. My 'Headquarters Nights' are the confessions of a converted pacifist. 

In talking it out biologically, we agreed that the human race is subject to the influence of the fundamental biologic laws of variation, heredity, selection, and so forth, just as are all other animal — and plant — kinds. The factors of organic evolution, generally, are factors in human natural evolution. Man has risen from his primitive bestial stage of glacial time, a hundred or several hundred thousand years ago, when he was animal among animals, to the stage of to-day, always under the influence of these great evolutionary factors, and partly by virtue of them. 

But he does not owe all of his progress to these factors, or, least of all, to any one of them, as natural selection, a thesis Professor von Flussen seemed ready to maintain. 

Natural selection depends for its working on a rigorous and ruthless struggle for existence. Yet this struggle has its ameliorations, even as regards the lower animals, let alone man. 

There are three general phases of this struggle: — 

1. An inter-specific struggle, or the lethal competition among different animal kinds for food, space, and opportunity to increase; 

2. An intra-specific struggle, or lethal competition among the individuals of a single species, resultant on the over-production due to natural multiplication by geometric progression; and, 

3. The constant struggle of individuals and species against the rigors of climate, the danger of storm, flood, drought, cold, and heat. 

Now any animal kind and its individuals may be continually exposed to all of these phases of the struggle for existence, or, on the other hand, any one or more of these phases may be largely ameliorated or even abolished for a given species and its individuals. This amelioration may come about through a happy accident of time or place, or because of the adoption by the species of a habit or mode of life that continually protects it from a certain phase of the struggle. 

For example, the voluntary or involuntary migration of representatives of a species hard pressed to exist in its native habitat, may release it from the too severe rigors of a destructive climate, or take it beyond the habitat of its most dangerous enemies, or give it the needed space and food for the support of a numerous progeny. Thus, such a single phenomenon as migration might ameliorate any one or more of the several phases of the struggle for existence. 

Again, the adoption by two widely distinct and perhaps antagonistic species of a commensal or symbiotic life, based on the mutual-aid principle — thousands of such cases are familiar to naturalists — would ameliorate or abolish the interspecific struggle between these two species. Even more effective in the modification of the influence due to a bitter struggle for existence, is the adoption by a species of an altruistic or communistic mode of existence so far as its own individuals are concerned. This, of course, would largely ameliorate for that species the intra-specific phase of its struggle for life. Such animal altruism, and the biological success of the species exhibiting it, is familiarly exemplified by the social insects (ants, bees, and wasps). 

As a matter of fact, this reliance by animal kinds for success in the world upon a more or less extreme adoption of the mutual-aid principle, as contrasted with the mutual-fight principle, is much more widely spread among the lower animals than familiarly recognized, while in the case of man, it has been the greatest single factor in the achievement of his proud biological position as king of living creatures. 

Altruism — or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much consciousness in it — is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly self-regarding, exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors. 

Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the Allmacht of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema. The mutual-aid principle is recognized only as restricted to its application within limited groups. For instance, it may and does exist, and to positive biological benefit, within single ant communities, but the different ant kinds fight desperately with each other, the stronger destroying or enslaving the weaker. Similarly, it may exist to advantage within the limits of organized human groups — as those which are ethnographically, nationally, or otherwise variously delimited. But as with the different ant species, struggle — bitter, ruthless struggle — is the rule among the different human groups. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its desirable natural evolution. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage as regards internal organization and form of social relationship is best, and should, for the sake of the species, be preserved at the expense of the less advanced, the less effective. It should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization — its Kultur — on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them. 

This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters - argument logically constructed on premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter — by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.

Of course, Kellogg's hope that Germany could be defeated and converted to giving up neo-Darwinism was shattered by the falling of the Weimar government, the rise of the Nazis, the adoption of eugenics and its extension into industrial scale murder of the kind that what can only be called degenerate intellectuals had been fantasizing about since the beginning of the century.  All of that began in the imaginations of people, the belief in a biological elite, the danger to it of a biological underclass, both defined by class and ethnicity, and the right of the superior to keep them from, first breeding, and then living.  All of that was present in Darwinian terms by the turn of the century, beginning with Haeckel in Germany and much of it even in such Darwinians as Galton and Huxley by the 1870s.  Darwin added his voice with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1872.   Whatever excellence Kellogg found in the papers of Darwin on entomology and other topics - he seems to cite mostly Darwin's papers - he must have been aware of his second most important book.  Why he overlooked that, I don't know but scientists and intellectuals who don't agree with it have been overlooking it consistently since, now, the 1910s.

Update:  From Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching: English translation, 1879

"Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats. 

"That tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist."   And this was a book that Thomas Huxley wrote a preface and Darwin wrote to Haeckel, praising it and saying that he agreed with all of it.   Note Haeckel's pretty disgusting turn around of the concepts democracy and aristocracy at the end of the paragraph.  It's no wonder that by the time of Kellogg's trip the German elite was already giving people reason to worry in this way.