Evolution in Modern Thought | Page 7

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 not in the paper the least hint that the author ever thought of generalising the remarkable sentence quoted above.
Of Mr. Patrick Matthew, who buried his treasure in an appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, Darwin said that "he clearly saw the full force of the principle of natural selection." In 1860 Darwin wrote--very characteristically--about this to Lyell: "Mr. Patrick Matthew publishes a long extract from