In being a critic of natural selection it is not that common but somewhat inevitable that someone will bring up the most famous of those atheist-materialist patches put on the Darwinism that atheist-materialists liked because it was a weapon to use against some common - and rather naive - views of Judeo-Christian religion. The more informed of them will bring up the Mutual Aid theory of Kropotkin which is the model of all such false-fronts put on what is inevitably the brutality of Darwinism. Those false fronts started with Darwin, as soon as he started getting criticism of the brutality of his theory as applied to the human species. His own ass covering was transparent and it was obviously meant for PR to the general public, not something to be taken seriously by his fellow Men of Science, and the men of science never did take those false-fronts seriously.
That can be seen rather clearly in the fascinating article that the critic of scientific racism, eugenics and Darwinian fundamentalism of Sociobiology and Evo-psy, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an interesting article about the biggest and most often cited - though among scientists, generally ignored or discounted - such patch, the Mutual Aid of the anarchist utopian, Petr Kropotkin who obviously expected biology to replace religion, he being a typical anti-religious 19th century ideologue.
That was something he shared with Gould whose late-in-life accommodationist non-intersecting magestria proposal was his equally uninfluential attempt to be nicer about rejecting religion while keeping it away from his atheist-materialist religion but which has worked about as badly as Kropotkin's patch up job for Darwinism. I met Gould once, he was a nice guy and he certainly was nicer than most Darwinists in rejecting scientific racism and eugenics, but he had to be as dishonest about Darwinism and Darwin, himself, to do that as putting a false front on that requires. And even he couldn't bring himself to present Kropotkin as credible:
I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly idiosyncratic, if undeniably well meaning. He is always so presented in standard courses on evolutionary biology – as one of those soft and woolly thinkers who let hope and sentimentality get in the way of analytic toughness and a willingness to accept nature as she is, warts and all. After all, he was a man of strange politics and unworkable ideals, wrenched from the context of his youth, a stranger in a strange land. Moreover, his portrayal of Darwin so matched his social ideals (mutual aid naturally given as a product of evolution without need for central authority) that one could only see personal hope rather than scientific accuracy in his accounts. Kropotkin has long been on my list of potential topics for an essay (if only because I wanted to read his book, and not merely mouth the textbook interpretation), but I never proceeded because I could find no larger context than the man himself. Kooky intellects are interesting as gossip, perhaps as psychology, but true idiosyncrasy provides the worst possible basis for generality.
I would recommend reading the entire article because Gould being Gould, he had some interesting observations, though most of those flow from an article I haven't been able to read, Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought: 1850-1917 by Daniel P. Todes. Mostly it was presenting what different species of Darwinists came to think of it as a product of the Darwinist's environment, the difference between Darwin and A. R. Wallaces' experiences in the biologically abundant tropics and how that, informed by their reading of the brutal Malthus led to their theory and the experience of Russian intellectuals in the vast wilderness of Russia with its relative lack of abundance. I would note that his explanation of how different intellectuals came to say things differently doesn't do much of anything to support Kropotkin's attempt to make Darwinism less brutal, I concluded reading the article by thinking it was a rather subtle attempt to explain away his thinking by use of the genetic fallacy. Though one that works as well to explain away his own and Darwins' theories which had their own origins.
My major objection to Gould's article is that he, as is always done, variously presents natural selection as articulated by Darwin and his closest friend-colleagues such as Huxley, Galton and Haeckel as a law of nature and, when they want to deny the brutality in that "law" as a mere "metaphor". As Gould demonstrates, anyone wanting to do that double-speaking two-step can start with Darwin, himself, covering his own ass in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, even as his later editions of that work and his major work on the application of natural selection, The Descent of Man proves that Darwin had no intention of his theory being taken as a mere metaphor but as a basis of actual human action, military, social, legal and medical. His endorsement of Haeckel and Galton all through that later book as well as of Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" as being exactly what he meant by "natural selection" in the last two editions of On the Origin of Species.
Gould certainly had read at least The Descent of Man and he was certainly aware of the brutality of Haeckel and Galton. Gould himself said of Darwin's chief promoter in Europe:
[His] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism. [Ontogeny and Phylogeny]
Every single statement Gould made about Haeckel could be made of Darwin if you change out "English" for "German" and we know that because in The Descent of Man Darwin, himself, said that Haeckel perfectly and in more detail elucidated his own thinking on natural selection as it was relevant to the human species. In letters we now that Darwin eagerly anticipated the British doing in places other than Europe, what the Nazis did in Europe. He, himself, described the British genocide of the Tasmanians in such terms.
When does a "scientific metaphor" encouraged as a basis of social, medical, legal and military policy stop being a "metaphor" and become an ideological assertion? I can answer that, as soon as Haeckel, Galton, George and Leonard Darwin, and yes, Charles Darwin start proposing it as such and all of them did during Charles Darwin's lifetime and with his support as a scientific expert.
Kropotkin was typical of the atheist-materialist presented with the theory of natural selection, whether or not they understood the alleged scientific basis of it, they saw it as confirmation of their atheism and materialism and as scientific proof against the existence of God and if not proof, useful propaganda to win over the naive, the ignorant and gullible masses for anti-religion. That, I will assert, is the primary motive of his use from the beginning, his use in evolutionary biology, allowing them to pretend they had a universal explanation for the phenomenon of evolution - no doubt something like what Newton and his successors had given physics and which chemistry was attaining in atomic and molecular theories when it was certainly not that. Gould, himself, didn't really believe it even as he remianed a champion of Darwin, rather stupidly claiming that natural selection was the greatest theory in the history of science, at one point. He said such things even as he knew they couldn't be true, as other mechanisms to compete with natural selection were gaining credibility and even as his own professional work weakened its universality. In the article he says:
But Todes identifies a far more interesting reason in the immediate experience of Russia’s land and natural history. We all have a tendency to spin universal theories from a limited domain of surrounding circumstance. Many geneticists read the entire world of evolution in the confines of a laboratory bottle filled with fruit flies. My own increasing dubiousness about universal adaptation arises in large part, no doubt, because I study a peculiar snail that varies so widely and capriciously across an apparently unvarying environment, rather than a bird in flight or some other marvel of natural design.
If he'd said that during Darwin's lifetime, I'll bet he'd have waged the kind of dirty campaign - through others - that was his typical response to serious criticisms of his theory. Just as his more orthodox champions waged in Gould's time against him and other critics of ultra-adapatationists who won that battle and who hold influence, now. As I said yesterday, that will always be the case as long as natural selection is retained as the ruling ideology of biology.
As someone who cringes every time I hear the word "meme" an invention by one of Gould's enemies, Richard Dawkins, to try to patch up his absurd theories and which pretty much no serious scientist ever adopted, I was struck that the body of Gould's article claimed a kind of memetics that didn't want to be called that. Attributing different spins on natural selection to the predilections caused by environment, culture and field of research probably has some validity, though I think that's a sign of the basic theory, itself, being nothing but a product of the artificial conditions of the British class system and not anything that has any kind of existence in nature. It's not shocking, at all, that the little thug that Boris Johnson dumped his neo-Darwinist racism and eugenics when the opposition got too hot. Darwinism was born of the same Brit class system that Boris Johnson and his fascist allies want to retain and intensify. It is no shock that the neo-Nazis in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britian, Germany, etc. speak in such terms. It wasn't any shock when, stripped of the Marxist veneer it had on it, that such stuff isn't taking hold in neo-Soviet Russia where fascism and neo-Nazism are the variation on gangster government that has control, now. I don't think you need "memes" to explain that, they're thugs and gangsters like Britain has always been ruled by. The kind of thing that will arise whenever there isn't a strong egalitarian democratic government that levels things so such corruption can't take control. And that never happens except in a very specific kind of religious context which is the opposite of Darwinism. As Darwin's good buddy, Haeckel put it in Freie Wissenschaft und Freie Lehre a book Darwin said he agreed with, entirely,
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.
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