What Did Darwin Really Mean?
Today, the New York Times reviewed the second volume of Janet Browne's biography of Charles Darwin. Among other things, the book seeks to place Darwin's ideas in the context of his time:
Although many Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction. For Marxists and capitalists, anarchists and imperialists, Christians and freethinkers alike, humans were to be the summit, the goal around which the world is organized and toward which life and history progress. Despite many attempts, no compromise was possible between this need for ideological affirmation and the logic of Darwin's worldview. As he explained, in a world governed by physics and selection, humans are a "chance," like other life forms "a mechanical invention"; there is no "necessary progression," so it "is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another." Most disturbing was his recognition that because natural selection gave a contingent, materialist explanation for the existence of the moral capacity, it removed any divine or cosmic endorsement of its products.
That's a nice summary of the implications that modern scientists have drawn from Darwin's writings, but how are we to reconcile the notion of reactive, aimless, and neutral change with the use of normative terms like "degeneration" and "injurious" in this passage from Darwin's Descent of Man:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The reviewer makes the claim that "no compromise was possible between this need for ideological affirmation and the logic of Darwin's worldview," but I think that we're living with that compromise now in the form of our shared cultural notion of Darwinism. Over and over, Darwin is invoked to describe a scientific process that leads to improvement, taking the scientific basis of his theories and using them to elevate humans to "the goal around which the world is organized and toward which life and history progress." Alas, we cannot have it both ways.
7:03:18 PM 
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