Why Darwin Matters

The Decisive Battle in the Accidental War on Humanity

In “Masters and Possessors”, I described the beginning of what I call the accidental war on humanity. The first battle, initiated by Copernicus but won by Descartes, was over the existence of the cosmos. In place of a cosmological vision of the world—a vision in which the world is an organic, harmonious whole, a unity in which things have a proper place, an orderly thing in which relations between things signify and organize and give meaning to individuals—Descartes offered an alternative vision of a universe—a mere collection, a more or less random arrangement of parts.

A cosmos unfolds and develops by virtue of its telos, its purpose, the end toward which it is naturally headed. There are other forces at work in a cosmos, but telos is at the heart of them all. Not so for a universe. The unfolding of a universe is a function of two things: the initial arrangement of its fundamental bits and the laws that govern the bits’ movements. Crucially, there is no baked-in meaning or purpose. A universe is governed by no intentions, there is no purpose toward which it moves.

If a cosmos is an orderly whole, a universe is a dis-unified collection of small things bumping.

The battle against the cosmos was just the first of many battles in the accidental war. In time, I’ll come to other battles. Battles over whether our minds are mirrors or makers, over whether science is meant to cultivate wonder or give us tools to wield, over whether goodness is divine or rooted in desire. Perhaps we’ll go back even from Copernicus to skirmishes in the buildup to war over the relationship between God’s mind and His will, or the role of tradition in understanding.

Not today, though. Today, we skip to the end.

The final battle in the accidental war was started and won by Charles Darwin. Darwin (1809-1882), the famed English naturalist, is the father of evolutionary theory, and that progeny has made Darwin perhaps the defining intellectual of the past two centuries. Without Darwin, one simply cannot understand the contemporary world.

On top of it all, Darwin had a great—and I mean great—beard. Just look at this:

Two aspects of Darwin’s theory are best known: natural selection and common descent. Darwin lays plain both ideas in the Introduction to On the Origin of Species. We can start here:

In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species.¹

That’s the kernel whose generalization is common descent.

But, as Darwin quickly points out, the real question is how in tarnation this could happen. We need “insight into the means of modification and co-adaptation.”²

Natural selection is the answer:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.³

Of course Darwin did not yet know the fundamental unit of selection. In the modern telling, we now know what Darwin did not: what’s selected are genes. (The claim that we know this, it turns out, is a myth. But that needn’t detain us.)

Anyway, I don’t care about either of these well-known aspects of Darwin’s thought. Neither natural selection nor common descent explain Darwin’s lasting, humanity-shattering significance. They are merely symptomatic of a more fundamental commitment.

The commitment that Darwin unwittingly uses to shatter humanity is a commitment to the application of Baconian science to human beings.

Baconian science is decidedly anti-teleological. Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, published originally in 1620, is named to represent what it is: a conscious, systematic rejection of Aristotle’s Organon, the six books of the Aristotelian corpus concerned with the methods of rational investigation, analysis, and logic. An explicit target is Aristotle’s four causes, and among the four is final cause, telos, “that for the sake of which”. Indeed, for Aristotle, final causes are arguably the most important. In a cosmos, the movements of things are explained by where they belong relative to where they in fact are. And belonging is governed by telos. Likewise, in a picture of individuals as mini-cosmoi, a thing’s development, shape, organization, even its good, are understood teleologically.

Bacon’s “New” Organon, written as a series of pithy “aphorisms”, rejects this. Wholesale. Aphorism 2 of Book II goes like this:

In what an unhappy state human knowledge of today finds itself is clear from even common maxims. It is correctly laid down that ‘To know truly is to know through causes.’ And those causes are rightly divided into four kinds: the material, the formal, the efficient and the final. But of these the final cause, so far from assisting the sciences, actually corrupts them. … The discovery of the formal cause is a forlorn hope; while efficient and material causes…are perfunctory and superficial, and contribute almost nothing to true and active knowledge.

Bacon, it seems, is no fan of Aristotle’s causes. But telos comes in for special approbation. Efficient and material causes are superficial, and formal causes can’t be found. But final causes corrupt.

What is left? Bacon goes on, still in Aphorism 2:

nothing truly exists in Nature except separate bodies performing separate pure actions.

Nature is nothing but a universe. Nature is small things bumping.

And for Darwin, humans are wholly natural. This is the key. If humans are natural, and nature is understood in Baconian terms, then humans are mini-universes rather than mini-cosmoi.

Though he merely hints at the application of his theory to human beings in Origin, it is fairly clear that Darwin believed that human beings were wholly natural even at its publication in 1859. Anyway, the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871 removes any mystery. Descent explicitly does for humans what Origin had done for other aspects of the living universe: it explains everything about them using the tools and rules of the science Bacon (and Descartes) circumscribed.

This is the true significance of Darwin: he places humanity squarely within Bacon’s Nature, within Descartes’s universe. Thereby, Darwin applies the new scientific anti-cosmology to human beings. And like the whole of the universe, individual humans are merely collections of small things bumping. Thus, humans have no telos, not anyway one that comes merely by way of being human.

Brief sidebar. Common descent and natural selection, on this way of understanding the significance of Darwin, don’t matter nearly so much as is sometimes believed. Common descent and natural selection are merely the specific mechanisms by which Darwin sought to explain humans inside Baconian Nature. Far more important are the constraints on explanation Bacon insisted upon. It’s the constraints—the constraints of a universe—that matter. End sidebar.

Strikingly, it is rather unclear whether Darwin took the naturalization of the world, and therefore the naturalization of human beings, to demand the anti-teleology of Bacon. In the finale of Origin, Darwin suggests the laws of nature have the good as their end and perfection as their outcome:

[W]e may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

An important question is, of course, whose good? It is unlikely to be ours. Perhaps Darwin thought nature as a whole maintains a telos in a Baconian universe, but we are merely steps along the way to Nature’s marching up the steps of perfection. And we will be long gone prior to it achieving its perfect end.

Anyway, Darwin’s personal views are in many ways beside the point. The effect of Darwin’s work has anti-teleological, whether he meant to be or not. And so, if Copernicus and Descartes moved the physical world from cosmos to chaos, Darwin moved us from cosmos to chaos.

Thereby, Darwin ended the accidental war.

In the aftermath, Donne’s verse becomes all the more salient:

And every man alone thinks he hath got to be a phoenix.

A question remains: What will rise from the ashes?

1. Quoted from the 1958 Mentor/Penguin edition of Origin, p. 28.

2. p. 29.

3. p. 29.