'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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Evolution, Stress & the Limits of Individualism

Some underlying problems in Chris Draper's theory

Through Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravin, shrieked against his creed...

Are God and Nature then at strife

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, LV-LV1

IN the Financial Times, sometime last year, Harry Eyres in his 'Slow Lane' column made a comparison between Castro's Cuba (see my review earlier this month on this Blog of Chris Draper's article in Anarchist Voices entitled 'Surviving Political Hypocrisy in Hard Times') and our own UK version of neo-liberalism; Mr. Eyres writes:
'If Castro's Cuba has been an exercise in stress-reduction, then the extreme versions of neo-liberalism unleashed over the western world, starting in the US and Britain in the early 1980s, could be seen as experiments in the maximisation of stress, both on people and the environment.'

Mr. Eyres explains further:
'Neo-liberals believe, in theory at least, in an unfettered market, with the minimum of regulation and of protections for workers and the environment, both viewed as resources to be exploited.'

Which system is best and which will survive?

Charles Darwin & the 'Escalator Fallacy'

The neo-liberals can, and often do, invoke evolution on their side, and the sociobiologist M.T. Ghiselin in 'The Economy of Nature & the Evolution of Sex' (1974) writes:
'The evolution of society fits the Darwin paradigm in its most individualistic form. The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. Understand that economy, and how it works, and the underlying reasons for social phenomena are manifest. They are the means by which one organism gains some advantage to the detriment of another.'

In fact, it seems that Darwin distrusted the idea of 'evolution' as an 'escalator' with life proceeding steadily upwards from lifeless matter through plants and animals to man: this he regarded as vacuous and avoided the term; conversely the concept was promoted by Herbert Spencer (quoted approvingly by Chris Draper in an essay on this NV Blog), who first coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', that was given currency by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at the beginning of the 19th century. Of Lamarck, Mary Midgley writes of what she describes as a 'Panglossian distortion' or 'Escalator Fallacy', in which she argues:  'It is the idea that evolution is a steady, linear upward movement, a single inexorable process of improvement, leading (as a disciple of Herbert Spencer's put it) "from gas to genius" and beyond into some superhuman spiritual stratosphere.'  Midgley claims Darwin was not convinced by this or what she calls a 'cosmic insurance policy to bail out the human race'.

And yet, this crude view has now been transformed into the 'Social Darwinist' idea, put forward by people like Ghiselin, that life has been scientifically proved to be essentially competitive, and in some respects exposing social feelings, altruism and mutual aid as more or less humbug and illusion. As a philosopher, Mary Midgley (see 'Evolution as a Religion' [1985]) claims this view of Ghiselin has often been shown to be nonsense:
'since many very successful species of social animals, including our own, have evolved these traits, have survived by them and continue to live by them their unreality cannot be the message of evolutionary theory.'  Yet, Ms. Midgley writes: 'because of of its strongly dramatic force, as well as its various political uses, this notion (survival of the fittest) persists through repeated attempts to correct it...'  Darwin saw no reason to put forward a law guaranteeing the continuation of any changes he noted, but Spencer hatched a bold picture of an 'evolution escalator' that has prevailed over Darwin's more complicated concept.  In the 19th century Spencer, with only a sparse acquaintance with biology, promoted the notion of the 'survival of the fittest' as a social ideal having the result in the United States of outselling every philosopher in his day.  Yet, it is not just Joe Public that is hooked on Spencer's oversimplified evolutionary escalator but also, Mary Midgley argues, it is often popular among scientists who ought to know its limitations.

Millionaires & Hitler's Table-Talk

Out of Spencer's seductive melodramatic concept of evolution in the United States and Europe came its political populisers, and Ms. Midgley quotes from one of Spencer's American disciples: 
'The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done... It is because they are thus selected that wealth - both their own and that entrusted to them - aggregates under their hands... They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get higher wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.' (William Sumner, The Challenge of Facts [1887])

Then Mary Midgley gives us a European example from Hitler's Table-Talk:
'If we did not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when wild animals would again devour us - then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except microbes... By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.' (Hugh Trevor Roper [ed] Hitler's Table-Talk [1963])

Mary Midgley insists that Darwin resisted this kind of thing, and in his The Descent of Man tried to show the difference between 'the kind of qualities which make it possible for a social group to survive over many generations, and those that might keep a single individual afloat for his lifetime.'

Cookbook Ideas Are No Answer!

Of Cuba, Harry Eyres in the FT writes:
'The political and economic regime of Fidel and now Raúl Castro's Cuba might have its severe limitations and its longueurs (not least the leader's own speeches, broadcast at interminable length on state television and quoted in the turgid official newspaper Granma) but it was designed to minimise certain kinds of stress, at least for those who were not vocal critics of the revolution.'

Of course we should be careful what we wish for here, as this kind stress reduction can equally apply to other dictatorships such as that of General Franco's Spain in the 1960s: in 1964, I was in the mountain town of Ronda just as the Franco régime was celebrating '25 años de Paz' ('25-years of Peace').  It is too early to say which political model, the Castro's Cuban/ Franco's 'stress reduction model' or the hectic US/ UK 'neo-liberal model', will triumph in the years to come but Mr. Draper, in so far as his article in Anarchist Voices represents a challenge to cookbook politics and stale thinking of the British left, is justified in making us aware of the dilemmas that confront us.