Darwin's War of Nature
It seems that Darwin, first and foremost, saw all nature as engaged in unending war. In the opening line of his exposition to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, he began:
De Candolle, in an eloquent passage has declared that all nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature. Seeing the contented face of nature, this may at first be well doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it to be true.
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Charles Darwin. |
Yet, presenting a paper on the same day, Alfred Russel Wallace, the largely forgotten co-author of the theory of natural selection whose letter to Darwin setting out the theory had forced Darwin to publish, somehow felt it unnecessary to invoke any "war of nature".
In the last paragraph of his subsequent famous book, On The Origin of Species - which abounds with murder and extermination -, Darwin lends this war of nature a certain grandeur.
Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life...
(Darwin. Origin of Species. Ist Ed. Closing paragraph)
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley, Darwin's 'bulldog', tellingly hailed Darwin's work as:
‘a Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.’
For Huxley, Darwin's war of nature was reality, and the idea of nature being at peace was discounted as delusional.
You see a meadow rich in flower & foliage and your memory rests upon it as an image of peaceful beauty. It is a delusion... Not a bird twitters but is either slayer or slain and... not a moment passes in that holocaust, in every hedge & every copse battle, murder & sudden death are the order of the day.
(T.H.Huxley. Draft of Manchester address. 1887)
Huxley had fully signed up for Darwin's war.
Kropotkin
A rather more harmonious view of nature which prevailed prior to Darwin. Linnaeus, before Darwin, saw no competition in the natural world. Neither, after Darwin, did Kropotkin.
The idea which permeates Darwin's work is certainly one of real competition going on within each animal group for food, safety, and possibility of leaving an offspring. He often speaks of regions being stocked with animal life to their full capacity, and from that overstocking he infers the necessity of competition. But when we look in his work for real proofs of that competition, we must confess that we do not find them sufficiently convincing. If we refer to the paragraph entitled "Struggle for Life most severe between Individuals and Varieties of the same Species," we find in it none of that wealth of proofs and illustrations which we are accustomed to find in whatever Darwin wrote. The struggle between individuals of the same species is not illustrated under that heading by even one single instance: it is taken as granted; and the competition between closely-allied animal species is illustrated by but five examples...
(Kropotkin. Mutual Aid. Ch.2)
But one might ask other questions. If all nature is at war, the creatures struggling to exterminate each other, would we not clearly see this war all around us? Would we not see every variety of animal locked in combat? Would not all birds and insects and mammals be constantly attacking each other? Would we not see cattle goring each other? Would we not see trees sawing down their neighbours? Would not every plant and animal be equipped with an armoury of weapons with which to dispose of its enemies? And if we see none of these things, may we not discount this rumoured war?
Or again, if we are describe the natural world of plants and animals as being engaged in war, may we not equally also say that the sea is "at war" with the land, advancing here and retreating there, with islands and lakes as besieged fortress outposts in enemy territory. Or else describe rivers as marching armies, and rain as bombs dropped by circling fleets of clouds.
Thomas Malthus
The inspiration for Darwin, Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population, was an anti-utopian political tract that first appeared in 1798, which argued that rising human populations and insufficient food resources would forever ensure that no utopia would ever appear. Although his essay repeatedly touches on the natural world, Malthus did not see any "war of nature" either.
Although the Idle Theory of Evolution is a slight variation on Darwin's theory of natural selection, its tone and colour are quite different. It sees no reason to suppose that there is any war, any struggle for survival between the creatures, or for that matter very much competition. Instead, Idle Theory argues that in times of difficulty the creatures simply have to work harder. There is no war, no struggle, and no competition. When one looks on the placid face of nature, one sees it as it is.
In this Idle Theory returns to Malthus, whose Essay on Population gave both Darwin and Wallace the seed of the idea of evolution by natural selection. Malthus had argued that in times of difficulty in human society, wages fell, and longer hours of work needed to be done. And he argued that this led to a cycle - an oscillation - between times of difficulty and times of ease. To the extent that Idle Theory follows this argument, it is much more a Malthusian theory of natural selection than a Darwinian theory.
Darwin, in Idle Theory's view, skipped the mathematical logic of Malthus' Essay, and instead of arguing that multiplying populations brought increased work, proposed instead that multiplying populations brought increased conflict and competition. Whatever the merits of this logic, Darwin's fight for survival provided a gripping drama, a powerful myth. The Origin of Species is a work of art, a compelling fiction, larded with examples and observations from the natural world. It gave us the popular notion of evolution: armoured dinosaurs slugging it out in an relentless fight for survival, and "nature red in tooth and claw".
The Political Implications of the War of Nature
Yet since, in Darwin's system, each species was engaged in the most ferocious exterminatory conflict, and humans were another species of life, it followed that conflict, war, and extermination was natural and inevitable in human life - even if apologists like T.H.Huxley and A.R.Wallace refused to accept it. In short, Darwin's system had implications for human life. It provided "scientific" ammunition for anyone who saw human relations as combative or exploitative. It provided a justification for letting the weak and the poor go to the wall, because this was "nature's way."
With Darwin's war of nature, furthermore, any kind of altruism, or sympathy, or playfulness, vanished from the natural world. In Darwin's titanic struggle there was no place for sentimentality. It became impossible to see the natural world as being at play, or at peace, or in any sort of amicable state.
The modern genetic revolution, which began with the rediscovery, circa 1900, of Mendel's pioneering genetic experiments, and continued with the isolation of DNA in the 1950s, has not provided an alternative account of the process of natural selection. Neo-Darwinism is Darwin's theory of natural selection (i.e war) bolted onto modern genetic theory. The principal influence of modern genetics has perhaps been to slightly moderate Darwinian competition, and emphasize reproductive success. Apart from that, the Darwinian schema remains intact.
The Darwinian theory of evolution, Darwin's war of nature, the struggle for survival, the survival of the fittest, are long overdue for serious rethinking. There is no reason to suppose that simply because Darwin's vision was pessimistic that it must be right, or that a more optimistic or evenminded account of evolution should be discounted.
It is strange that the writings of a Victorian gentleman naturalist should carry so much weight 150 years later, when most of his contemporaries are largely forgotten. The answer, most probably, is that it was Darwin's skill as a writer in conveying the drama of his vision of a natural world engaged in a titanic struggle for existence which counted more than all the facts he had assembled.
Darwin was a writer, an artist, a wordsmith, much more than he was a scientist or naturalist. He used these skills to articulate a compelling fiction - his War of Nature. In this Darwin was a science fiction writer, and the skills he required were not those of a scientist or naturalist, but those of a novelist. Darwin should perhaps be ranked not with Newton or Einstein, but with H.G. Wells or Arthur C. Clarke.
In returning to Darwin's inspiration, Robert Malthus, Idle Theory sketches out a theory of evolution by natural selection in which Darwin's drama of war and struggle are absent. Idle Theory proposes that multiplying populations and dwindling food resources simply result in the creatures having to work harder to survive: not to become embroiled in an exterminatory struggle with their fellows. The resultant simplified theory of evolution is immediately free of some of the problems of Darwinism. For since there is no longer assumed to be any "war of nature", there ceases to be any requirement for any 'tough-minded', unsentimental acceptance of it. And in the same step, altruism, indolence, and play - largely banished from Darwinism - cease to be puzzling, and can make their return.
A child in a world at war
Charles Darwin was six years old when the battle of Waterloo was fought, and twenty-one years old when the Duke of Wellington, the English commander on the field, was Prime Minister of Great Britain. The young Darwin grew up in a world at war, in a countryside full of troops, and harbours full of men of war. Perhaps this experience infected his vision of the entire natural world.
For when Darwin looked at a grassy bank, with a few shrubs and nettles and brambles growing on it, he did not see a happy, tranquil, English scene. Instead he saw all-out war, with the serried green ranks of grass stems marching against the coiled defences of the brambles and the poisoned darts of the nettles. A thorn bush was a man of war, with a thousand green sails, clawing windward to engage the foe. And flowers were bright battle standards, held high to rally their surrounding troops.
In this colossal war of everything against everything else, there was no more place for pity, or compassion, or charity, than there had been on the field of Waterloo. Selfishness, murder, and xenophobia were Nature's only law. Hard-headed realists would have to learn to suppress any sentimental revulsion they might feel in the face of these grim facts of nature.
Wholesale struggle and murder was simply something that Darwin 'observed' in nature.
If turf which has long been mown, and the case would be the same with turf closely browsed by quadrupeds, be let to grow, the more vigorous plants gradually kill the less vigorous, though fully grown plants: thus out of twenty species growing on a little plot of turf (three feet by four), nine species perished from the other species being allowed to grow up freely.
(Darwin. Origin. Ch.3)
Note that Darwin states that the more vigorous plants "kill" the less vigorous. He does not explain how he drew this conclusion. He does not draw up a list of suspects, and conduct an enquiry. He does not interrogate slugs and snails and beetles on their whereabouts at the time. He does not state whether the plot of turf is shaded by trees, or protected from human or animal incursion. He does not give the composition of the soil on which these various plants grew. He does not give the season, the temperature, the rainfall. In short, he does not offer any reasons for discounting pests, disease, climate, and nutrient supply, as influencing factors. No, the more vigorous plants killed the less vigorous. It was murder, and Darwin knew it even before the deed was done.
And, for all Darwin's global travels, this is an example clearly taken from his own mown lawn at Down House. Darwin could probably see it from his window. What need was there to travel to Patagonia or the Galapagos, if the struggle for existence could be observed from the comfort of one's armchair. And if any English gardener could witness for himself this titanic war, how was it that so many of them, who had spent centuries watching and tending, had entirely failed to notice it.
They failed to see it because it was never there. Darwin's vision was a prejudice that he brought to the natural world, not an observation drawn from it. Darwin didn't see one plant killing another: Darwin knew that they did, and saw corroborating evidence everywhere he looked.
It is not astonishing that Darwin, growing up in a world at war, should have had his entire vision coloured by such experience. It would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise, and Darwin's Origin had been a hymn to all things bright and beautiful. Nor is it astonishing that his book was so well received by a generation whose experience was, after all, much the same as Darwin's. What is really astonishing is that this vision of nature, the projection of England's Napoleonic wars onto the entire natural world, should ever have been graced with the name of Science.