Feb 23 JDN 2460730

Impressed by the incredible usefulness of evolutionary theory in explaining the natural world, many people have tried to apply it to ethical claims as well. The basic idea is that morality evolves; morality is an adaptation just like any other, a trait which has evolved by mutation and natural selection.

Unfortunately the statement “morality evolves” is ambiguous; it could mean a number of different things. This ambiguity has allowed abuses of evolutionary thinking in morality.

Two that are particularly harmful are evolutionary eugenics and laissez-faire Darwinism, both of which fall under an umbrella I’ll call ‘naive moral Darwinism’.

They are both terrible; it saddens me that many people propound them. Creationists will often try to defend their doubts about evolution on empirical grounds, but they really can’t, and I think even they realize this. Their real objection to evolution is not that it is unscientific, but that it is immoral; the concern is that studying evolution will make us callous and selfish. And unfortunately, there is a grain of truth here: A shallow understanding of evolution can indeed lead to a callous and selfish mindset, as people try to shoehorn evolutionary theory onto moral and political systems without a deep understanding of either.

The first option is usually known as “Social Darwinism”, but I think a better term is “evolutionary eugenics”. (“Social Darwinism” is a pejorative, not a self-description.) This philosophy, if we even credit it with the term, is especially ridiculous; indeed, it is evil. It doesn’t make any sense, either as ethics or as evolution, and it has led to some of the most terrible atrocities in history, from forced sterilization to mass murder. Darwin adamantly disagreed with it, and it rests upon a variety of deep confusions about evolutionary science.

First, in practice at least, eugenicists presumed that traits like intelligence, health, and even wealth are almost entirely genetic—when it’s obvious that they are very heavily affected by the environment. There certainly are genetic factors involved, but the presumption that these traits are entirely genetic is absurd. Indeed, the fact that the wealth of parents is strongly correlated with that of their children has an obvious explanation completely unrelated to genetics: Inheritance. Wealthy parents can also give their children many advantages in life that lead to higher earnings later. Controlling for inherited environment, there is still some heritability of wealth, but it’s quite weak; it’s probably due to personality traits like conscientiousness, ambition, and in fact narcissism which are beneficial in a capitalist economy. Hence breeding the wealthy may make more people who are similar to the wealthy; but there’s no reason to think it will actually make the world wealthier.

Moreover, eugenics rests upon a confusion between fitness in the evolutionary sense of expected number of allele copies, and the notion of being “fit” in some other sense, like physical health (as in “fitness club”), socially conformity (as in “misfits”) or mental sanity (as in “unfit to serve trial”). Strong people are not necessarily higher in genetic fitness, nor are smart people, nor are people of any particular race or ethnicity. Fitness entails the probability of one’s genes being passed on in a given environment—without reference to a specific environment, it says basically nothing. Given the reference environment “majority of the Earth’s land surface”, humans are very fit organisms, but so are rats and cockroaches. Given the reference environment “deep ocean”, sharks fare far better than we ever will, and better even than our cousins the cetaceans who live there. Moreover, there is no reason to think that intelligence in the sense of Einstein or Darwin is particularly fit. The intelligence of an ordinary person is definitely fit—that’s why we have it—but beyond that point, it may in fact be counterproductive. (Consider Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, both of whom were geniuses and neither of whom ever married or had children.)

There is milder form of this that is still quite harmful; I’ll call it “laissez-faire Darwinism”. It says that because natural selection automatically perpetuates the fit at the expense of the unfit, it ultimately leads to the best overall outcome. Under laissez-faire Darwinism, we should simply let evolution happen as it is going to happen. This theory is not as crazy as evolutionary eugenics—nor would its consequences be as dire—but it’s still quite confused. Natural selection is a law of nature, not a moral principle. It says what will happen, not what should happen. Indeed, like any law of nature, natural selection is inevitable. No matter what you do, natural selection will act upon you. The genes that work will survive, the genes that fail will die. The specifics of the environmental circumstances will decide which genes are the ones that survive, and there are random deviations due to genetic drift; but natural selection always applies.

Typically laissez-faire Darwinists argue that we should eliminate all government welfare, health care, and famine relief, because they oppose natural selection; but this would be like tearing down all skyscrapers because they oppose gravity, or, as Benjamin Franklin was once asked to do, to cease installing lightning rods because they oppose God’s holy smiting. Natural selection is a law of nature, a fundamental truth; but through wise engineering we can work with it instead of against it, just as we do with gravity and electricity. We would ignore laws of nature at our own peril—an engineer who failed to take gravity into account would not make very good buildings!—but we can work with them and around them to achieve our goals. This is no less true with natural selection than with any law of nature, whether gravity, electricity, quantum mechanics, or anything else. As a laser uses quantum mechanics and a light bulb uses electricity, so wise social policy can use natural selection to serve human ends. Indeed, welfare, health care, and famine relief are precisely the sort of things that can modulate the fitness of our entire species to make us all better off.

There are however important ways in which evolution can influence our ethical reasoning, which I’ll talk about in later posts.