Evolution in Modern Thought | Page 7

average than that of more civilized peoples. It then

occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually
acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much
more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these
causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each
species, since they evidently do not increase regularly from year to year,
as otherwise the world would long ago have been densely crowded with
those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and
constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the
question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly,
that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the
most healthy escaped; from enemies the strongest, the swiftest, or the
most cunning; from famine the best hunters or those with the best
digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this
self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in
every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the
superior would remain--that is, the fittest would survive."[27] We need
not apologise for this long quotation, it is a tribute to Darwin's
magnanimous colleague, the Nestor of the evolutionist camp,--and it
probably indicates the line of thought which Darwin himself followed.
It is interesting also to recall the fact that in 1852, when Herbert
Spencer wrote his famous Leader article on "The Development
Hypothesis" in which he argued powerfully for the thesis that the whole
animate world is the result of an age-long process of natural
transformation, he wrote for The Westminster Review another important
essay, "A Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of
Animal Fertility," towards the close of which he came within an ace of
recognising that the struggle for existence was a factor in organic
evolution. At a time when pressure of population was practically
interesting men's minds, Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer were being
independently led from a social problem to a biological theory. There
could be no better illustration, as Prof. Patrick Geddes has pointed out,
of the Comtian thesis that science is a "social phenomenon."
Therefore, as far more important than any further ferreting out of vague
hints of Natural Selection in books which Darwin never read, we would
indicate by a quotation the view that the central idea in Darwinism is
correlated with contemporary social evolution. "The substitution of

Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is
currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by
a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what
has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the
anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth.
For the place vacated by Paley's theological and metaphysical
explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and
Wallace by Malthus in terms of the prevalent severity of industrial
competition, and those phenomena of the struggle for existence which
the light of contemporary economic theory has enabled us to discern,
have thus come to be temporarily exalted into a complete explanation
of organic progress."[28] It goes without saying that the idea suggested
by Malthus was developed by Darwin into a biological theory which
was then painstakingly verified by being used as an interpretative
formula, and that the validity of a theory so established is not affected
by what suggested it, but the practical question which this line of
thought raises in the mind is this: if Biology did thus borrow with such
splendid results from social theory, why should we not more
deliberately repeat the experiment?
Darwin was characteristically frank and generous in admitting that the
principle of Natural Selection had been independently recognised by Dr.
W. C. Wells in 1813 and by Mr. Patrick Matthew in 1831, but he had
no knowledge of these anticipations when he published the first edition
of The Origin of Species. Wells, whose "Essay on Dew" is still
remembered, read in 1813 before the Royal Society a short paper
entitled "An Account of a White Female, part of whose skin resembles
that of a Negro" (published in 1818). In this communication, as Darwin
said, "he observes, firstly, that all animals tend to vary in some degree,
and, secondly, that agriculturists improve their domesticated animals by
selection; and then, he adds, but what is done in this latter case 'by art,
seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature,
in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which
they inhabit.'"[29] Thus Wells had the clear idea of survival dependent
upon a favourable variation, but he makes no more use of the idea and
applies it only to man. There is