WAR FOR EVOLUTION’S SAKE

In its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the “made in Germany” stamp, so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser.

In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.

Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature’s principle is mutual fight and antagonism.

Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy. In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people; namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The Gott of the German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from Gott und uns; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.

I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was well illustrated by the conditions of the moment—and it was a memorable one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for existence,—and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its evolution in harmony with natural law.

But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.

First we can say of this natural law that it isn’t natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.

The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.

The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.

Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.

The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination. Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer formulations of the present and just passed centuries.

Even the essence of Darwin’s famous explanation of evolution by natural selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural conditions.

But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of any that has been offered.

Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, “the inheritance of acquired characters,” that is, the inheritance by the immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or “acquirements” which came to the parents during their life because of their special use or disuse of parts and their individual reactions to environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten away the flies.

Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very different explanation from Lamarck’s, and one also very plausible and logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck’s theory; but he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck’s explanation entirely, and accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.

What is this “natural selection” that we all know so well by name, and so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.

But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it. Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin’s time, the generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?

It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to have devised;—or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;—an explanation based partly on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be sufficient base.

The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.

On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves, they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble other individuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents success in the struggle for life.

More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those advantageous differences—this by the laws of variation as antidote needed just here for the laws of heredity—in even more marked degree than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous variations from the old or species type that make them especially “fit for the conditions under which they must live.”

Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences. This is “species transformation,” or the “origin of species” by natural selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle; extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.

There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeing an animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.

Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not be.

It was Weismann’s new facts and new theories about heredity that did much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible and absurd the German claims of the Allmacht of natural selection as evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of the potent causes and controls of evolution—if we may call that revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do not understand.

If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.

The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular literature.

But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the social or communal insects, the numerous instances of commensalism, or the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of different species—the various ants alone have more than a thousand known kinds of other insects living with them—and the innumerable observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects—all these had convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers that if natural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the present character and the future of the living world it was a very different natural selection from that so redly painted by the Neo-Darwinians.

It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others, he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck’s for certain cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and between species.

But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis of an alleged identity between the character and control of human evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy and war practise.

The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal descended, or ascended, from the lower ones—as he is—and if animals are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by virtue—or evil—of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle, out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human evolution is simple. Schluss with discussion!

But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the premises. They are wrong.

Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as “animal among animals,” and despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing, ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation, leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits, and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity; and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters, which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech, writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in the race.

This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today contains all the present expression and future promise of man’s higher evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man’s natural traits, and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its natural validity in the great strength it adds to man’s position in Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.

Now it is all this side of human evolution that the German natural philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.

The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one, would not care to live longer in it.

I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.

The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.

But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.