Evolution and Consciousness Part I                                                   

Our scientific heritage from he nineteenth century has a double revolution, the repercussions from which persist as we in this century prepare to face the approaching twenty-first century. The ideas of evolution and the physics have been nothing less than spectacular in their consequences upon the Newtonian world view and society. These two concepts fell upon a world that was enamored of the optimism produced by the Enlightenment, an optimism that resulted from the idea of man as a progressive being the nineteenth century was characterized by material advances in the technical fields leading to an increased control over the forces of nature which gradually abridged space, economized time and increased bodily comforts. Technical inventions proceeded uninterruptedly. The educative opportunities in all branches of knowledge as well as the unparalleled expansion of industry and commerce "accustomed the least speculative mind to the conception that civilization is naturally progressive, and that continuous improvement is part of the order of things."[1]

 

PROGRESS AND EVOLUTION

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The concept of general progress was broadened and reoriented when it was combined with the notion of evolution. In the previous century, in the world of Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte and others, men understood that there were necessary laws of social development in history without viewing them, however, in terms of being a continuation of the same laws which prevailed in the subhuman realm. Now, in positing the emergence of the human species from nonhuman ancestry, Darwin's theory of evolution provoked inescapable questions regarding the origin and development of every aspect of human culture, not least of which were questions concerning man's ultimate significance. The solutions to these issues involved full-scale theories of social evolution, sometimes referred to as social Darwinism. [2]

 

Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) 1859 publication of the Origin of Species startled the world and produced considerable upheaval, for the biological theory that advocated progress through conflict was extended, fairly or not, to explain the origins of the entire universe as well as the progress and destiny of every aspect of human culture. People in every profession were arguing either for or against its plausibility. It seemed not only to confirm the concept of the Newtonian universe, but also enhanced the mechanistic understanding of life, for the notion of change and development was rooted in the contingencies of matter and could now serve as the basis of a law of evolutionary progress.

 

Darwin specifically rejected the notion, commonly accepted, that plant, animal and human species originated from a special act of divine creation which firmly fixed their forms forever.[3] Evolutionary change, he proclaimed, not immutability, is the law of life. All living organisms are the products of minute alterations which gradually extended throughout vast periods of time and traced their ancestry to ancient forms that were usually quite different from the current species. Darwin observed a ceaseless struggle taking place in the nonhuman realms in which organisms unable to adapt to changing circumstances failed to survive and left no descendants; those that were able to adapt to their environment survived and transmitted these favorable capacities to their progeny. This entire process became known as natural selection. In later editions of his book Darwin used the expression, "survival of the fittest" to explain this process, a term borrowed from his friend, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).[4] The entire process of evolution involves significant alterations in species that must be appreciated over eons of time, incorporating billions of random variations.

 

Actually, Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. Before him, philosophers and scientists had written about evolution in their speculations and theoretical hypotheses. Scientists like Lamarch (1744-1829), Buffon (1707-1788), Wells (1828-1898) and especially Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), Darwin's contemporary who had already written on natural selection, had proposed much the same notion without evoking starting results from their peers. But Darwin offered massive evidence. For almost twenty years he had carefully studied his specimens, reinforcing his accumulating knowledge with observations on animal husbandry. Just as farmers breed their herd for superior characteristics, he discovered, so does nature select the best organisms for survival. His reading of Malthus's theories, concerned as they were with the time when the increase in world population exceeded the available food supply, helped convince him that in the realm of nature the struggle for existence would allow only the fit to survive. Darwin mentions that "being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes one, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."[5] In an age of intense commercial expansion and competition, Darwin's assertion that the process of evolution is a struggle for the survival of the fittest seemed to make sense in every field of human endeavor. In its way, it gave a breath of insight into the creative and destructive sides of matter and life.

 

EVOLUTION AS A WORLD VIEW

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With the release of his new book, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin attempted to universalize his basic insight into the origins of life itself as well as give a complete summation of history. Its master idea brought man into the continuum of animal descent and origin; it claimed that human nature differed only in degree, not kind, within the animal kingdom.[6]Regarding sheer survival as a value in itself, evolution became the sufficient and pragmatic justification for every natural entity and its activity from astronomy and economics to religion and psychology. The inherent dynamics of survival through struggle and adaptation became, in much the same fashion as Newton's contributions to physics, an ultimate resolution to the riddle of existence. Biological evolution evolved into evolutionism. Controversy ensued.

 

In 1889, Alfred Wallace, considered the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, wrote a critique entitled "Darwinism" in which he challenged Darwin's inclusion of body and spirit in the pattern of common descent with modifications by natural selection.[7] He insisted that only biological evolution pertained to that realm, that man's psychosocial faculties derived from a different origin. And throughout his career he continued to write and disagree with a whole host of "Social Darwinians," among the more influential of which were Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), W.G. Sumner (1840-1910), and Herbert Spencer.

 

Huxley defined mankind as "conscious antomata," maintaining that "all vital action man ... be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it."[8] When the new field of sociology placed the drama of human life within an evolutionary context, Sumner announced that "we are convinced that this way of looking at things freer our treatment from a current tendency, which we regard as confusing and unproductive, to refer societal results to conscious, reasoned and purposeful action on the part of the individual."[9]

 

The biological confirmation of the Newtonian world seemed to explain the progressive temper of the age, enthralling and captivating, as Jacques Barzun remarks, "a generation of thinkers whose greatest desire was the get rid of vitalism, will, purpose or design as explanations of life, and to substitute for them an automatic material cause."[10] Darwin himself was quite aware of the cultural implications of his theory, for in the concluding chapter of the Origin of the Species he mentions, "In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."[11] For even before the publication of Origin, Spencer has espoused a total evolutionism, that incorporated the idea of progress. "The ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain" he wrote, "as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that all men will die. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all a piece the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower."[12] In other words, he felt that the perfect society results necessarily from man's biological adaptation to the laws of nature.

 

Spencer's optimism regarding the inevitable perfectibility of man seemed questionable on scientific grounds to many scientists, but the event that muted his theory in the eyes of many was the tragedy of World War I. While the fundamental social consequences of the industrial revolution were evident in the continual transformations taking place in cultural life, even Huxley was resisting a too-broad application of biological survival as the criterion of progress; he quickly recognized that if "improvement of any species means a higher advantage gained in competition in a given environment, then there is nothing to prevent one nation from trying to prove its fitness by  invading another country.[13] Although the concept of change and continuous development was becoming the scientific basis for interpreting reality, serious questionings of its universality brought up tensions and antinomies. Even Darwin discovered the curious irony underlying his belief in evolution. He speaks of the "impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man: and I deserve to be called a Theist....But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted with it draws such grand conclusions."[14]

 

Some scientists and theologians tried to equate the operation of natural selection with teleoogy, admitting that the evidence of biological and biological accounts forced a nonliteral belief in the events recorded in the seven-day account of creation in the opening chapter of Genesis. That process, while it might be attributed to God as the instigator, certainly took longer than seven days and was more complex than expressed in those simple biblical descriptions. But Darwin would have nothing to do with this explanation. He insisted that to posit each variation in nature as being providentially arranged makes natural selection entirely superfluous and effectively removes the presence of new species from the domain of science. For Darwin, the variations over time are due to "unknown causes, and are without purpose, and in so far accidental."[15] Adaptations to him, were final results rather than final causes.

 

Evolutionism was thus the climax to a trend that abandoned belief in God as a scientific principle, and for the nineteenth century, the watchmaker, Creator of the Enlightenment, has vanished. Since that time, with the advance of rational scientific accounts of how the world came into being, many religious men still believe in a Creator behind those long processes, but they do it on religious rather than on scientific grounds. For when the scientific explanation for the mechanistic world is now based upon evolution, a disquieting ambiguity emerges. In heralding an idea that unifies nature and society through the dynamism of change and progress, the scientific acceptance of evolution strangely reinforces the irrationality the Enlightenment attempted to overcome. For if material changes and higher life forms are the product of enormous numbers of spontaneous variations occurring entirely independently of each other, then the result is accidental and unpremeditated. The lawful regularity of nature and the design of the species are only temporal arrangements, temporarily appearing as order until their autonomous and mechanical forces randomly alter them once again. Thus, the function of reason is only a specific form of biological adaptation. Human culture now becomes a part of nature. The growth of mankind is the history of group struggle. This concept of evolutionary biology joined with the prevalent mechanization of reality in the nineteenth century influenced every aspect of culture. This influence has persisted into the twentieth century; it revealed in that thinking that regards human nature as not merely the deterministic consequence of mechanical laws, but also the random aggregate of laws whose foundation is blind chance.

 

But before examining further the philosophical implications of evolutionism that have become a part of twentieth century thinking, the parallel revolution in contemporary physics needs elucidation. Here, the mechanistic analysis of matter led to profound discoveries about reality that, as is the case with evolution, affected the ultimate understanding of man himself and thus became a universal issue. We will discuss this is Part II of this article.

 

 

[1] J. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: MacMillon, 1932), p. 332

[2] Matson, The Broken Image (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p/24-25; P.F. Bowler, Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865-1900. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969, ch. 3.

[3] Darwin was reacting against the taxonomy inherited from the previous century drawn up by the biologist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Hall points out that "the confidence with which he wrote as though personally present at the Creation was the more acceptable (in that, in all respects, it reassured the somewhat conventional religious conscience of the age) because it counteracted the scientific agnosticism of Voltaire and the French philosophies." Interestingly, later in his career, Linnaeus abandoned the idea of immutability of species, even though this argument continued to be prevalent into Darwin's period. Hall, op. cit., p. 295.

[4] C.R. Darwin, The Origin of the Species, by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. (1859) 6th ed. London: Oxford, 1902. P. 63; F. Darwin, op. cit., II, p. 229-30.

[5] F. Darwin, op. cit., I. p. 68.

[6] C.R. Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1871). ch. 3. Eiseley remarks that "Darwin postulated his theory and extended it to man without having available as evidence a single subhuman fossil by which, on the basis of his theoretical views, he could have satisfactorily demonstrated the likelihood of man's relationship to the world of the subhuman primates." L. Eiseley, Darwin's Century. New York: Doubleday, 1958. p. 256.

[7] A.R. Wallace, Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1889).

[8] T.H. Huxley, Methods and Results: Essays London: Appleton, 1893), p. 69.

[9] W.G. Sumner and A.G. Keller, The Science of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927, vol I, p. 40-41.

[10] J. Barzun, Darwin Marx, Wagner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), p. 69.

[11] Darwin, op. cit., p. 559.

[12] H. Spencer, Social Studies, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. (1850), New York: Appleton, 1865, p. 32.

[13] T.H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (New York: Appleton, 1896), p. 81-83.

[14] F. Darwin, op. cit., I, p. 282.

[15] As Bowler points out, one of Darwin's most formitable followers, Asa Grey, Harvard Professor of Natural History, who in 1860 wrote a stunningly favorable review of Origin, nevertheless, tried continually, despite the author's disclaimers, to place evolution within the context of teleology, Bowler, op. cit., p. 9-10.

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