THE VERY FIRST blog post that I ever wrote in January of 2008 about my ever growing conviction that natural selection is nothing more than an ideological theory which has no knowable or, I hold, credible existence as a force in nature started this way:
EVOLUTION is long. Really, really long. It encompasses the entire duration of life on the planet Earth. Most commonly that is thought today to be a period of more than three billion years. That’s a number we are all familiar with hearing but getting your mind around what even one billion - 1,000,000,000 - years really consists of is impossible. What could a billion years mean to a person? What would the first, the last and all of the varied unknown and unrecorded days, seasons, years and ages in between years one and one billion mean. They are incomprehensible in their vast duration and compass of possible experience in terms of even the longest human life span. We have no frame of reference.
And not only is EVOLUTION (upper case) long, it is also large in numbers, encompassing, literally, all of the lives of all of the organisms that have ever existed. All of the organisms which have reproduced or been produced. That number is of many magnitudes larger than even the incomprehensible billions of years already mentioned. Consider, just as a sample of the complications, the known time periods between generations of living species of rodents, and of one-celled organisms. Consider the number of fertile eggs some species of plants, insects and mollusks produce in one reproductive cycle. Each of the surviving, reproducing individuals was and is a variation, many have the possibility of having an effect on future generations. Leaving the entirely relevant question of individuals aside, imagining even the number of what we might classify as species, each comprising subspecies, varieties, and other sub groupings is incomprehensible.
Now it’s necessary to make a distinction between EVOLUTION, the actual fact of life in both its ancient and contemporary diversity and numbers, and the human science of evolution (lower case), which attempts to study the mechanisms and artifacts of all those lives and to understand many different aspects of them, including the attempts to make general assertions about them. Let’s allow the conventional beginning of the science of evolution as the publication date of The Origin of Species, 1859. In that case, evolution as a formal, scientific, study has been going on for about a hundred fifty years.
That is describing what might be called the macro-scale of evolution, what would have been there for Charles Darwin to see, perhaps measure and cite (and in many cases make up or conflate or subject to reification) in creating his theory of natural selection. He knew nothing of genes, though he theorized - made up - little particles he called "gemmules" to serve his Lamarckian theory of inheritance, so he didn't really consider what Richard Lewontin, a notable geneticist, was talking about in that all-important quote I took from him again yesterday, dealing with what he took as the micro-scale of things.*
In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.
I'll start by noting that not only is there "no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak," Lewontin was not being as incisive as he was when he talked about other problems in such biology, there is no possibility of discerning if such "selective forces" are real or just imagined. And, since that is the case, their role in governing evolution may well be just as imagined. That is certainly given away in the next sentence in which he admits there "is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." He might be seen to contradict himself, first talking about the weakness of those selective forces, so weak they can't be measured (or, I'd say, their existence even being verified) and then talk about "how strong those forces were," even while admitting there was no way to decide which scenarios that are imagined by evolutionary biologists that are alleged to explain their consequences in speciation are real.
Lewontin certainly was aware of Marx's second comment on Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, in which he accused Darwin of inverting the inspiration of his theory. Darwin admitted that Thomas Malthus's clearly ideological, Brit-aristocratic theory of scarcity and austerity and the desirability - from an aristocratic POV - of harrying the poor into an early grave inspired his creation of natural selection. After writing to Engels that Darwin's theory was very useful to their ideological program of promoting dialectical materialism, he thought about it more critically and noted that Darwin had taken Malthus's theory, distorted its essential feature that human societies were UNLIKE what happened among animals and so human populations grew, supposedly outgrowing the possibility of producing enough food to feed them all, and then applied Malthus's human economics to the entirety of nature.
In my criticism and rejection of the theory of natural selection I am always at pains to point out that in so far as belief that species evolved over billions of years from other species, I'm a convinced evolutionist. In citing Marx I have to also point out that I am not a Marxist and have never been, I think his co-opting of socialism and contributing to its discrediting is a tragedy on the same scale as its co-optation by Hitler. Egalitarian democracy is the only legitimate form of government and the only political framework under which socialism can be a good. I will point out that capitalism, which works on the basis of inequality is incompatible with legitimate governing and any kind of democracy worthy of the name.
I will restate that, while I think Marx as a creative thinker was a tragic disaster to the subsequent history of humanity - communism has been, along with capitalism, racism, fascism, one of the competing engines of murder, oppression, enslavement and misery in the 20th and 21st centuries, his power as a critic is among the greatest of anyone in the 19th century. This letter of Marx's colleague Friedrich Engels to P.L. Lavrov, which I just found online, containing an elaboration of the relevant critiques is fascinating to read AS ARE THE FOOTNOTES AT THE SITE, WHICH I'LL LEAVE IT TO YOU TO READ WHERE IT'S POSTED.
London, 12th Nov., 1875.
My dear Monsieur Lavrov,[1]
Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise.[2]
(1) Of the Darwinian theory I accept the theory of evolution but only take Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection)[3] as the first, provisional, and incomplete expression of a newly-discovered fact. Before Darwin, the very people (Vogt, Buchner, Moleschott, etc.) who now see nothing but the struggle for existence everywhere were stressing precisely the co-operation in organic nature – how the vegetable kingdom supplies the animal kingdom with oxygen and foodstuffs while the animal kingdom in turn supplies the vegetable kingdom with carbonic acid and manures, as Liebig, in particular, had emphasised. Both conceptions have a certain justification within certain limits, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. The interaction of natural bodies – whether animate or inanimate – includes alike harmony and collision, struggle and co-operation. If, therefore, a so-called natural scientist permits himself to subsume the whole manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and meagre phrase, “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can only be taken with a grain of salt, such a proceeding is its own condemnation.
(2) Of the three convinced Darwinists cited, Hellwald alone seems to be worth mentioning. Seidlitz is only a lesser light at best, and Robert Byr is a novelist, whose novel Three Times is appearing at the moment in By Land and Sea – just the right place for his whole rodomontade too.
(3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):-
The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished – (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) – the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.
(4) The essential difference between human and animal society is that animals are at most gatherers whilst men are producers. This single but cardinal distinction alone makes it impossible simply to transfer the laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible that, as you justly remark, “Man waged a struggle not only for existence but for enjoyment and for the increase of his enjoyments ... he was ready to renounce the lower enjoyments for the sake of the higher.” Without contesting your further deductions from this, the further conclusions I should draw from my premises would be the following: – At a certain stage, therefore, human production reaches a level where not only essential necessities but also luxuries are produced, even if, for the time being, they are only produced for a minority. Hence the struggle for existence – if we allow this category as valid here for a moment – transforms itself into a struggle for enjoyments, a struggle no longer for the mere means of existence but for the means of development, socially produced means of development, and at this stage the categories of the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now come about, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater abundance of the means of existence and development than capitalist society can consume, because capitalist society keeps the great mass of the real producers artificially removed from the means of existence and development; if this society is forced, by the law of its own existence, continually to increase production already too great for it, and, therefore, periodically every ten years, reaches a point where it itself destroys a mass not only of products but of productive forces, what sense is there still left in the talk about the “struggle for existence?” The struggle for existence can then only consist in the producing class taking away the control of production and distribution from the class hitherto entrusted with it but now no longer capable of it; that, however, is the Socialist revolution.
Incidentally it is to be noted that the mere consideration of past history as a series of class struggles is enough to reveal all the superficiality of the conception of that same history as a slightly varied version of the “struggle for existence.” I should therefore never make that concession to these spurious natural scientists.
(5) For the same reason I should have given a different formulation to your statement, which is substantially quite correct, “that the idea of solidarity, as a means of lightening the struggle, could ultimately expand to a point at which it embraces all humanity, counterposing it as a solidarised society of brothers to the rest of the world of minerals, vegetables and animals.”
(6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the war of every man against every man was the first phase of human development. In my opinion the social instinct was one of the most essential levers in the development of man from the ape. The first men must have lived gregariously and so far back as we can see we find that this was the case.
* * *
17th November. I have been interrupted afresh and take up these lines again to-day in order to send them to you. You will see that my remarks apply rather to the form, the method, of your attack than to its basis. I hope you will find them clear enough I have written them hurriedly and on re-reading them should like to change many words, but I am afraid of making the manuscript too illegible.
With cordial greetings,
F. ENGELS.
This is already a hell of a lot longer than I expected it to get when I started writing this piece so I won't comment on Engels, agreeing and disagreeing with things he said. I do intend to use the word rodomontade as soon as possible, it is so useful in the epoch of Trump II.
* Lewontin conventionally talked about "traits" as if those could really be teased out and honestly considered apart from the very different organisms that would, then, be said to share them. I'm very skeptical that such a reduction is honestly made or its meaning honestly reduced to a simple issue to consider. I hold that in any context but certainly within the context of conventional Darwinism, natural selection is the mother of all n-factorial problems.
I don't know how much Lewontin knew of the work of James Shapiro or Dennis Nobel who have shown, decisively, that genetic inheritance is far, far, far, more complicated, far less cut and dried and far, far from the only source of significant inheritance, overturning the mid-20th century neo-Darwinian synthesis that is still the conventional view of most biologists. One of the best illustrations of the problem of considering only the genes in that regard was when the ultra-Darwinist (Stephen J. Gould's word for them) Richard Dawkins claimed, while debating with his thesis advisor Nobel, that he could take Nobel's DNA, store it for ten thousand years and use it to recreate Nobel. Nobel pointed out that much more than his DNA would be needed to "recreate" his body because his body AND EVERYONE ELSES is directly and decisively the product of the egg cell from which his body developed. It's one of the most fascinating and mind blowing thing about these new discoveries that they have demonstrated, experimentally, through denucleating an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of another species, that in the very rare instances where they have produced a living organism from it, it will have physiological features of the species that provided the egg cell for the experiment not found in the organism that provided the nucleus. Needless to say, what my generation was taught as biological truth in that matter - and is still the ruling ideology of conventional biology - was vastly oversold. That's not unusual, it's typical of science dealing with such vastly complicated phenomena.
In the piece I wrote about the crushing complexity of such stuff, I did note there was good news for the biologists in what, no doubt, many of them would take as bad news.
While that fact has the good news for biologists that they will never have nothing left to figure out, that there will be no “end to Biology,
I doubt they'll be replaced by "AI" or their profession become a remnant of academic classicism. In short, lots of them will always be able to find a paying job.
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