Ethics and Darwinism

10 Pages 2541 Words

ETHICS AND DARWINISM
[PART I]
by

Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A.
Charles Darwin never lived to enjoy the popularity of his own theory. It would take another few decades for “descent by modification” to dominate the biological sciences. Certainly, he won some important victories. The Origin of Species (1859) gave impetus to the growing naturalism of the day. It devastated the prevailing religious dogma of species fixity, and thus undermined ecclesiastical authority on scientific matters. This success attracted a host of social and political reformers who wished to attack the conservative influence of the Anglican church. If evolution could challenge the status quo in science, then perhaps it could challenge the status quo in fields as far flung as law, economics, social policy, and ethics. Yet Darwin, who shared the reformers’ liberal leanings, saw no application of his theory outside biology.

The willingness to appropriate evolution, and the motivations behind it, has changed little in the last hundred years. Darwinism continues to attract an enthusiastic bevy of supporters who see the work of natural selection in every part of the Universe, from physics to psychology, and from genes to human culture.

As I hope to show in this article, the attempt to derive ethics from Darwinism is flawed fundamentally, and the implications certainly are not consistent with a Christian world view. Also, I would like to look at a relatively new idea that attempts to extend biology into the realm of sociology via an extremely bad analogy. Darwin, it seems, was right to be suspicious: even he would not condone the subjecting of all human endeavor to the workings of natural selection.

SOCIAL DARWINISM
The Obsession with Progress
It is easy to underestimate the social and historical context in which Darwin operated. This is not to say, in the spirit of relativism, that natural selection, like any theory of science, is true only for a cert...