Evolutionary mistakes

Paul Johnson continues to use his supposedly historical column to deliver lectures about secularism. Since his ideas on that subject are long since fixed, there is little value in each new column, and I miss his reflections on history. Still, it is interesting to read arguments that are elements of who I thought I was, worn and familiar as an old blanket. Johnson dislikes and rejects Darwinism for the same reasons I did, primarily because of perceived moral and social consequences, mixed with a vibrant dislike of scientific dogmatism (more often brash, philosophically naive confidence than actual dogmatism, but it feels much the same if you do not sympathize with it).

The temptation to bow before scientism is given an extra edge by the current deification of Darwin, who finds himself, poor fellow, in the role of the anti-Christ, with his natural selection as an alternative to Christianity. Some people might argue that the survival of the fittest is a sound principle. Indeed that was the principle underpinning Hitler’s race-theory and other manifestations of social Darwinism. I believe it will lead rapidly and inevitably to the self-destruction of the human race. The crisis in the world economy, and the great war it seems likely to promote, make all these issues highly topical.

I need to read some Spencer (I read a little once for class, without retention), but I trust Jonah Goldberg when he says this use of Social Darwinism is inaccurate. The reductio ad Hitlerum, sadly, has come to subtract from an argument. What is really interesting here is the category error at the center. "Survival of the fittest" cannot be considered a "sound principle" because those two phrases belong to distinct categories, and the meanings of the words in "survival of the fittest" are different in each category. Principles make use of moral vocabulary, because a principle is a basis for moral action, while Spencer's phrase is meant to use scientific vocabulary, which freely eliminates secondary meanings from words or invents new words and meanings to serve a technical purpose.

If "survival of the fittest" is used as a principle, it becomes an implicit metaphor, with "survival" and "fittest" both changing meaning. In biology, survival only means the propagation of a genome (or perhaps individual genes, per Dawkins) and fittest only means "most able to propagate." So, "survival of the fittest" is a technical reduction, re-casting survival in the barest terms. In moral terms, however, the phrase evokes the "the flourishing of the best," which does leave room for nasty ideas like lebensraum and a master race. In moral terms, survival implies many additional things; it is in the moral world that man does not live by bread alone. Equally, "fitness" in the moral world has in view the entire organism of a man with all his behaviors, verging on "worth." The connection between the two uses of "survival of the fittest" is no more sound than the connection between chaos theory as in mathematics and chaos theory as used in Jurassic Park, where the words slide into their popular meanings, as though it were "science says [theory] that complexity is unpredictable [chaos]."

I am not trying to get at the is-ought problem here. Converting descriptive biology to prescriptive morality requires additional premisses, certainly, but in this case the conversion is by slipperiness of language. The is-ought problem would only arise if someone were arguing that evolution meant he had a moral obligation to spread his genes.

Update: Michael Shermer has an article in Scientific American making a similar point.