Evolution is Not a Morality Play

This is not about the Masters, but it actually sort of made me a bit angry so I thought I should comment on it. The background is that President Obama used the term "social Darwinist" to refer to the currently prevalent Republican philosophy in an economic speech a few days ago, and some Republicans objected. Jonathan Chait then wrote a blog post defending the use of this term. Aside from the point I'm about to mention, which is not a political one, it's a good post making sound points that deserve making. But at one point he says that the "social Darwinist" label is supposed to suggest that certain kinds of right-wing laissez-faire economics "treated the market the way Darwinists treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards." Later, he says that conservatives might object to the label because "because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce."

There's a gigantic problem with these descriptions: they act like Darwinian evolution by natural selection is supposed to be a morality play! This is simply false. Evolution is not right any more than it is wrong, in the moral sense: it simply is. It's also not about "distributing rewards" in any meaningful sense; the point is just that the genes of those who accrue the rewards of survival and reproduction will tend to dominate the gene pool of future generations. That it! The "social Darwinist" label describes someone who thinks it morally correct to set up human civilization on a slightly misunderstood version of the principles of natural selection, i.e. a Hobbesian war of all against all in which the strongest prosper, for a time anyway, and for the rest of us life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (And yes, that's a misunderstanding of actual natural selection: life is often like that, but not necessarily and not always.) One could level a similar charge against one who believed it was good that lions go around slaughtering gazelles.

Incidentally, I think this whole confusion has to do with a kind of projection on the part of the early opponents of Darwinian theory. As they tended to be people who freely conflated how they thought the world should be with how the world is, they assumed that Darwin and company were doing likewise. But the Darwinians, or most of them anyway, had a proper scientific mindset.

(As an aside, most serious Darwinians, starting with Darwin himself, don't think that natural selection is the exclusive mechanism of evolution; sexual selection can also play a substantial role. But I don't think that part makes a particularly good analogy to Republican policies!)