Darwin and Mein Kampf

Among the lies we are all taught in school is that bit about “Social Darwinism.” You remember it, don't you? As we were solemnly taught, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were cursed with an unfortunate pseudo-scientific misapplication of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the idea that humans and human societies continue to develop along the lines of natural selection. But of course, this is wrong, right? Evolutionary pressures no longer apply in human society, right?

In fact, it is not a misapplication at all. It is an integral part of the original theory, as argued by Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man, Darwin claimed in so many words that “social qualities” were acquired through natural selection, in a competion of tribe against tribe, race against race, natio n against nation.

Darwin accordingly asserted with the perfect scientific objectivity of history's greatest biologist that the “western nations of Europe ... immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization.” He also assumed that “at some future period, not very distant ... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

A rather brutal concept of Empire, surely. Obviously, for Darwin himself, evolutionary pressures continued. But the picture was a bit more complicated than it might first appear. As a Briton, Darwin was no doubt at least a bit concerned by the thought that victory was not always to the most civilized per se, but to the fittest. Civilization had its obvious benefits, but it could be carried too far—in fact, Darwin argued explicitly against allowing evolutionary pressures to cease to apply to human society, on the grounds that any human society that permitted this would eventually be doomed.

“If we do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” he warned, “the nation will retrograde.” A younger, more vital, less principled nation might supplant it. Continued advancement required that human beings “must remain subject to a severe struggle.”

The fact of Darwin's own “social Darwinism” has been suppressed, of course; as well as his arguments for it, which unfortunately seem to meet in advance the arguments against natural selection applying in human society: if they do not for one society, so much the worse for it in the end!

This, of course, is because it is only too obvious that Darwin's theory leads directly to the Nazi and Fascist theories of racism, amorality, and the virtues of war and conquest. Everything they asserted, believed, and did, follows directly from Darwin. Germany, Italy and Japan saw themselves as just the sort of young and vital nations to take out the old, “decadent,” “plutocratic” England and France in the evolutionary struggle. Hitler's “Kampf,” as in “Mein Kampf,” was a Darwinian reference. The future belonged to them, of a scientific certainty—unless, that is, they let the Slavs develop far enough to jump them from behind.

Hence an obvious problem for the powers that be: it would seem that either a) Hitler was right, or b) Darwin was wrong, and not just about Social Darwinism, but Darwinism itself. Not wanting to accept either contention, they have essentially suppressed the issue, looked away, chucked the relevant evidence as much as possible down the memory hole.

It was, for example, not because of some fervent belief in a literalist interpretation of Genesis that William Jennings Bryan fought Clarence Darrow over the teaching of evolution in the Scopes “monkey trial.” Bryan, after all, was a politician, not a preacher. He feared that the general acceptance of Darwin's views would destroy liberalism, not Christian fundamentalism—though Bryan quite rightly understood that liberalism depended on a Judeo-Christian foundation.

And Bryan was proved dramatically right, within just a few years.

Unfortunately, the attempt to simply suppress and ignore the issue inevitably leads to the same deductions from Darwin being made all over again, over time. Elements resurface in such movements as feminism, postmodernism, and the new atheism; given enough time, on this path, a full-blown rerun of Nazism is probably inevitable.

But there is another way to look at it. Arguably, World War II itself tended to disprove Darwin. Certainly, there were too many variables to make the experiment truly valid, but Hitler and his allies did everything Darwin suggested they should, and the result went decisively against them.

More broadly, Darwin's fears about the future decay of developed “decadent” nations in which more or less everybody survives and breeds have been proved wrong in an important way. In the absence of survival pressures, the more so with modern social security and health care, according to Darwin, each subsequent generation in the most developed countries ought to be a little less intelligent, and a little less physically able, than the last. “The rich get richer and the poor get children.”

Yet what has actually been happening? Leaving aside the performance of schools, which has apparently been generally declining for independent reasons, we discover that the average IQ, in the most developed countries, has been increasing in recent times by about three percentage points each generation. Meantime, Olympic and other sports records have been falling at regular intervals over the past hundred years, most often to athletes from more developed countries.

This is the opposite of what Darwin's theory predicts. Without natural selection, this general tendency towards physical and mental improvement (i.e., survivability) of the species and the tribe ought to have stopped, then reversed. Darwin's theory, and Darwinian evolution, the idea of “natural selection of random mutations” has thus been demonstrated not to be predictive. In proper scientific terms, it has been proved false.

These data argue instead for an intelligent design: an evolution that is not random, and is not powered by a struggle of all against all.