
Political Descent must
be situated historiographically in a longstanding debate among historians of
biology about the politics of evolution. Adrian Desmond, Robert J. Richards,
Janet Browne, Peter Bowler, and many others have had much to say on these
matters, and most historians readily accept Adrian Desmond’s assertion that
evolutionary ideas – particularly Lamarckian ones – were associated with radical politics. Hale’s contribution to this debate is to show firstly, as most
historians recognize, that Darwin’s discovery of a Malthusian mechanism for
natural selection, moved the politics of evolution into a more normative political
dialogue, while secondly showing, which most historians have missed, that a
strong tradition of anti-Malthusian, heavily Lamarckian thought persisted into
the twentieth century. The politics of evolution, Hale demonstrates in Political Descent, was thus much more
contested than historians have hitherto recognized.
In broad brush detail, Political
Descent tells a story that is about the formulation of theories of natural
law and the advance of secularization. It is a book about labor and industry,
individual struggle and social evolution, political norms and radical politics,
and the relationship between culture and biology. Famous ‘Darwinians’ and ‘evolutionists’
grace its pages – Spencer, Chambers, Wallace, Huxley, Kropotkin, Galton,
Weismann, and Pearson. There, too, however, are seemingly less likely figures
for a history of biology – Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Beatrice Webb, William
Morris, Herbert George Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Kidd, and many
others. All saw the question of whether natural selection acts on individuals
or groups to be essential to answer, and appropriately for our Neuro Times, most also recognized that
the answer would have immediate ramification for the study of mind, brain, and
human behavior.
Political Descent begins with Charles Darwin but places him in an ongoing debate
about the politics of evolution. Darwin had long reflected on both man’s moral
and rational character when he began writing his famous essay On the Origin of Species. Many of his
teachers and mentors had possessed differing opinions on this controversial
subject. On his famous voyage, Darwin had also witnessed the way the
environment could influence the behavior of human beings. It was clear to
Darwin that men had acquired the capacity for sympathy, and, in time, he had come
to believe that this was an evolved faculty but one potentially preempted by
harsh climates and primitive living conditions. His thoughts early-on about
these matters had drawn heavily upon the writings of Erasmus Darwin, his paternal
grandfather, and William Godwin, the most famous political radical of the late
1700s, an English Condorcet, and quintessential Enlightenment optimist, who
argued that the perfectibility of the individual led to the perfectibility of
society, and, echoing Condorcet, had proposed that any pressures that might
accompany improved life could be mitigated by human reason which increase our
power over nature. It was Godwin’s optimism that fell afoul of Malthus’ keen pen.
As Darwin read his brother’s sixth edition of Malthus’s essay on Population in 1838, he found there both
his mechanism for natural selection and also his source of departure from the
tradition of his grandfather and Godwin. Hale contends that in Malthus’s essay,
Darwin discovered a means for moving talk of the evolution of species from
radical politics into the normative, if Whig, mainstream.
After 1859 the question of the evolution and antiquity of human
beings acquired new political significance. If human beings were not divine,
then did it follow that they were Hobbesian creatures? Alfred Russel Wallace,
Thomas Henry Huxley, and others thought not, and they began to consider the
ways that natural selection might advantage such mental characteristics as
intelligence and sympathy. Wallace, for instance, argued that the lowest races
of man were significantly elevated above “the highest brutes”. Crass agitators,
meanwhile, implied against views like these that Darwin had justified “every
cheating tradesman,” while more refined religious commentators like the Duke of Argyll, George Douglas Campbell could only shudder at the
implications of the fall from God’s grace. Darwin would eventually respond to
his critics and friends in his 1868 Descent
of Man where he explicated further the ways his account of evolution could
explain “conscience, morality and ethics.”
![]() |
Punch's 1882 parody on the politics of evolution. |
Darwin’s ideas, of course, came into being in a rich context of
evolutionary ideas and political questions about the social character of human
beings. Darwin’s contemporary, Herbert Spencer, had suggested that human beings
had developed from some lower race. Unlike Darwin, Spencer had adopted
Lamarckian mechanisms of heredity early-on in his own philosophical and
scientific musings. He considered the environment a sufficient determinant of
population, and believed that civilizing processes which conquered
environmental challenges would lead to the eradication of the baser ancestral
instincts as well. Unlike many of his liberal contemporaries who saw a role for
the state in managing progress, Spencer expressed confidence that nature was
sufficient for bringing these circumstances about: nature would furnish
increasing human cooperation and social harmony. Spencer’s sanguine
functionalism thus saw in individualism a natural force rising a mutualist tide
through adaptation to circumstance. Where socialists saw evolution leading
naturally to collectivism, Spencer saw evolution leading to individuation
within a cooperative society. Where most liberals saw an increasing role for
the state, Spencer believed that the problems the state would seek to regulate
would naturally diminish without assistance. Evolution, always political, was
now central in debates about how best to organize society.
Liberals and socialists, Political
Descent makes abundantly clear, were not homogenous groups, a point driven
home by the array of evolutionary views held within these groups in the 1860s
and afterwards. Spencer, who adapted natural selection to serve his own broader
arguments about society and psychology, saw in evolutionary arguments
justifications for a laissez-faire approach to social progress. Other liberals,
such as Huxley, rebelled against these views, and began arguing that the state
was justified in educating people, nurturing scientific research, and promoting
vaccination. Of laissez-faire, Huxley could only sputter:
![]() |
Thomas Henry Huxley |
"Suppose that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell left free to follow its own ‘interest’ and laissez-faire lord of all, what would become of the body physiological." (Quoted in Hale, p. 170)
For liberals in the mold of Huxley, Hale writes, “science,
technology and education, as well as compassion, all worked to raise us above
the brute struggle for existence” (p. 171).
Darwin was sympathetic. For his part, Darwin’s own liberal views
had led him eventually to conclude that in-so-far as human evolution was
concerned, sexual selection was more important than natural selection or the
environment. Darwin thought that natural selection might easily account for
competition between individuals, but he argued that sexual selection –
especially for other-regarding attributes, intelligence, and ethical behavior –
could easily explain the appearance of group solidarity, cooperation, and other
differences among groups. On this point Hale is especially good – no one
historian I think has focused so much attention on sexual selection. Darwin’s
effort in his Descent of Man was
partially aimed at refuting the idea that natural selection endorsed every
cheating tradesman – natural and sexual selection could quite happily account
for the evolution of ‘other-regarding’ altruistic morals.
Socialists and anarchists – really a cornucopia of groups in the 1880s
and afterwards – pushed against these liberal differences of interpretation by
granting an even greater Lamarckian twist than Spencer would have countenanced.
Darwin’s economic metaphor was evident enough, but socialists saw the degrading
influences of capitalism as fundamentally habit-forming. For them, mutualism
assured human flourishing. Lamarck’s biology offered the possibility of new
forms of consciousness – healthy forms. Spencer, unlikely as it might seem,
would probably have agreed, although would not have thought the state capable
of fostering mutualism.
While the majority of socialists and anarchists
followed early radical critics in regarding Malthus
as an apologist for the status quo, Fabian socialists, who sought to impose
reforms incrementally and often by elite fiat, self-consciously accepted
Malthus’s natural laws and therefore advocated for policies that could
constrain population growth. Others, who were skeptical of Fabianism on
this point, William Morris among them, resisted
efforts to impose socialism and sought to dispel efforts to naturalize Malthusian
law. Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin similarly sought to reorient debate
about the biology of society away from Malthus
towards a deeper biological consideration of the struggles produced in
accommodating to new environments. In difficult environments, Kropotkin argued,
competition between individuals might not even exist because those conditions
would push creatures into mutual aid with one another. If this were true, then
industrial capitalism could be seen as a social pathology, degenerating the
instinct for individuals to help one another, and Malthus, in turn, represented
an ideology of species decay.
These tensions between Malthusian and Lamarckian worldviews came
to a fore around the question of civilizational degeneration. Many socialists
believed that work empowered human beings, and that as humans returned to
nature they would become freer from the injustices of industrialization. All
such views, however, were predicated on a faith that the environment mattered
in human flourishing and that good habits would be passed between generations.
This confidence collided with Friedrich Leopold August Weismann’s
studies which cast grave doubts on the Lamarckian hypothesis. Many concluded
from Weismann’s studies that human beings were tied to a deep history – that
they were in fact far closer to their primitive ancestors than had been
widely-accepted. Worse still was the possibility that the socialists might
achieve their aims. Weismann and others argued that without pressures on human
beings, humans would degenerate to the point where they could no longer be kept
to a standard. Mate selection mattered too: already there were signs of the
advance of degeneration in individuals, not least because social reforms had
mitigated the Malthusian struggle. Karl Pearson would eventually take this
further by pointing out that changing the environment for inherently weak stock
was Panglossian, for the degenerates would not be able to change their inherent
genetic weakness and feeblemindness. Such
a harsh view, when acquired by cultures and imperiums would become the stuff of
the twentieth-century, an Age of Extremes. And much violence and death would
follow.
Political Descent is a very good book. It is original and necessary. It tells a
fascinating story that is not at all well-known and thus it is well-placed in
an area of scholarship that at times feels like it has little left to say. There
are, however, curious oversights in the volume too – oversights which for me
have little to do with Hale’s approach and more to do with broader trends in the
history of biology. It is hard for me to see the names of John Ruskin or
Herbert Spencer appear in a text and not be drawn also to the more malignant
meanings of nineteenth-century European capitalism, namely the empires and
imperial politics of peoples who saw themselves as the natural rulers of the
globe. We pass over too quietly the significance of being able to pronounce and
pontificate upon the primitives, and while it is true that such condescensions,
conceits, and attitudes were typical of many Victorians, the preponderance of
such values in nineteenth-century biology does imply an even wider meaning for
the politics of evolution. Certainly, by the twentieth-century many of the
best-informed anthropologists were already turning away rather quickly from evolutionism
and other such apologetics for empire, preferring instead historical relativism
and cultural pluralism in their studies of people. That was not an accident. This
is not to say that Political Descent
should be held responsible for the limitations of the wider historiography. But
there surely is room for a second book called Imperial Descent too – and that is a book that will show Darwin and
Spencer, at the least, in a somewhat different light.
This quibble notwithstanding, Political
Descent is a revisionist and invaluable work of scholarship. It is also a
pleasure to read.
A thoughtful and well-researched book, in which Hale complicates historical and contemporary assumptions that Darwinian evolution and Malthusian competition necessarily went hand-in-hand. He carefully illustrates how in Victorian England, evolutionary theory was equally compatible with socialist interpretations of natural order. Worth reading!
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