'Undoing Darwin' by Dick Frost

I HAVE written “Ten thousand years of Tyranny” to examine beliefs about evolution which are leading humanity to disaster. My aim was to show why the future of humanity depends on anarchism; this meant confronting Darwin's theory of evolution and that led me to speculate on the origins of civilisation and sin, the myth of scarcity, social power and much more.

My arguments depend on a claim that the world is rich in resources due to the energy arriving every day from the sun, which is far greater than all earth's creatures need, plus the fact that all species adapt to live together in their chosen environments. Scarcity is a myth; affluence is normal.

Because resources are not scarce life is not constant struggle; it is rather constrained and/or ritual conflict as individuals play out their evolved patterns of behaviour according to their species nature within the limits which eco-systems and the world as a whole impose on them.

Individuals do not live at the extreme. Each seeks to survive and reproduce as much as it can but through systemic interactions they evolve viable compromises at levels below their capacity: each gets the best it can. Behaviour, including conflict, is finely ritualised, exemplified by the swallows which fly to South Africa every year and return to the barn in which they were born.

Eco-systems are self-regulating wholes which produce balance and stability out of the complex interactions of their components. Systems stability ensures reliable behaviour and controlled populations: nothing could evolve or survive if everything around were in a state of flux.

Nature is not red in tooth and claw. Individuals evolve to live within the opportunities and limits of their environments according to their species nature; they adapt to and are adapted by what they need. They take what they must have: if they are sheep , then grass; if lions, then gazelles. None kills for fun; they kill for food or to defend themselves, a territory or their group. Hunting is often brutal and the prey, cuddly. Some ways of life look dreadful to human beings in soft-hearted mode but it is evolved behaviour; it's never personal.

The dense interactivity of individual behaviour in eco-systems inhibits change. It often seems to me that the eco-system is the key determinant of both stability and change: communalism,rather than the individualism of the selfish gene, shapes evolution.

Evolution is driven by random genetic mutation and environmental pressure to which individuals respond. Genetic variation is constant but mostly harmful and quickly rejected. Viable variations lie dormant until environmental change makes them useful; then they are “naturally selected”. Most evolutionary change outside crises is gradual and minor but can make a huge difference over the millennia; in any case each step has to be minimally disruptive in order to be acceptable to an eco-system. A dramatic event such as a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, an asteroid hit, climatic disruption etc. will destroy eco-systems and many species; then niches open for major selection and speciation.

Free from the (imagined) risks arising from (imagined) scarcity, life is a confusion of individuals each capable of variation. Variations which survive and prosper are not “fittest”: they are fit enough. They seldom struggle but survive because they fit a changed environment and universal affluence ensures them the energy they need.

Affluence makes possible the amazing variety of life and explains the profusion of behaviour and characteristics which are far from “fit” and do not help a a species to survive: the panda's diet is clearly a problem; as are the extravagant plumage of birds of paradise, the obsessive fighting of males for a mate; the bower bird's gardening, the wren's excessive nest building, the puffer fish's sand sculpture.

Affluence is the dominant factor in evolution; in h sapiens culture is also important. H sapiens is a culturally variable social species with the freedom to modify its way of life. It developed cultures by evolution and in response to the different environments into which groups moved, confronting new climates, food resources,natural conditions, hostile animals etc.

Like all social animals it evolved behaviours essential to the integrity of groups - the social virtues. All social animals are peaceful and egalitarian within their groups. Living in affluence, they do not need economic hierarchy. H sapiens was “the first affluent society” according to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins because everything it needed was freely available in its environments – but that is the same with all social animals – probably all life.

Individuals were benign and “good” in the sense of behaving in ways which sustained the group, family or clan. The forms culture took satisfied the social virtues: conformity, tolerance of hierarchy, mutual aid and hostility to “the other”. H sapiens did not know sin.

This “state of nature” and freedom in affluence lasted for more than a million years (including h erectus)and ended in the Neolithic revolution (after c11,000BCE} when chiefs or some form of elite power destroyed community cohesion and imposed oppressive exploitation on, eventually, the whole world.

Elite power arose from some conjunction of wealth, population pressure,climate change, resource depletion, war, mental instability and chance and the sad fact that the social virtues function as well in oppressive as in free societies. We are genetically programmed to conform to the mores of the group we are born into. Elite power is a mutation which throws off the normal limits of the species and uses the strength and ability of millions to ludicrous ends.

The outcome is the tyranny of civilisation, all its wonders built on ten thousand years of blood, sweat, toil and the tears of the masses. All civilised societies are controlled by elite power; all property,abuse,exploitation and war are manifestations of power. Sin is inevitable.

The book tries to show that anarchism is the genetic social organisation of h sapiens and makes the case for a return to small,voluntary, egalitarian groups enjoying the affluence of the commons.

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