Margaret Jones: Natural-born killers?

[Socialism Today, No 14, December 1996, p. 25-28]

Did Darwin really believe that society was biologically predetermined to be competitive rather than co-operative? Margaret Jones argues that the 'social Darwinians' have got it wrong.
Want to succeed in business? Your firm will need to think hard about its 'predatory pricing strategies', if it is to 'dominate the competitive battleground of the 1990s'.1 Adopt 'a 'selection of the fittest' principle', to decide what will make your firm most competitive in invading new markets. Study 'models of dominant firm behaviour', to amass more corporate territory.2 But then again, you might prefer to be just a humble salesperson, making your personal 'kill'.3 In any case, welcome to the world of social Darwinism, enthusiastically adopted by apostles of the capitalist market.
The 'Darwinian' language of territorial competition and conquest widely found in the business studies textbooks and manuals of the late 1980s is the direct legacy, not so much of Darwin himself, but of a particular interpretation of Darwin by twentieth-century popularisers like Robert Ardrey. For Ardrey, for instance, we are the descendants of a predatory 'killer ape', whose violent traits we carry in our genes.4 Paul Colinvaux's further popularisation of such arguments – which rejoices in the title, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare – concludes with the argument derived from the early Victorian economist Thomas Malthus, that 'all poverty is caused by the continued growth of population'.5 Colinvaux's is a world in which the human species as 'efficient predator' engages in 'aggressive competition, instead of peaceful coexistence, in its drive for more and more young'.6 Human beings are therefore doomed to fight wars of extermination, as they compete for dwindling resources. There is nothing to be done about it. Let 'nature' take its course. From the nineteenth-century millionaire capitalist John D Rockefeller – for whom 'the growth of a large business' represented 'a survival of the fittest … the working-out of a law of nature and of God' 7 – through to Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, such theories have been profoundly reassuring to the apostles of the 'free' market, and of corporate greed. Since we are all naked, predatory apes under our clothes, let's follow our in-built aggressive and acquisitive drives and grab all we can. After all, this is what our in-built instinct teaches.
Do we have to subscribe to a view of human beings as naturally aggressive and predatory – or is there a parallel, and contrasting, message implicit in Darwin's thinking – that of co-operative behaviour as playing an essential role in biological survival? Given the present socio-economic context, of a very predatory capitalism, in which we are forced to exist – and the widespread acceptance of the values of that capitalism – the debate seems more urgent than ever.
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'Red in tooth and claw'. As everyone knows, this is what Darwin said about nature. (In fact, the phrase was first coined by Alfred Tennyson, some years before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859).8 Yet the expression has since become proverbial, for what later generations are convinced was Darwin's simple view. And this despite Darwin's own contention – while not denying that 'warfare' takes place in nature – that the relations among organisms in nature are rather more complex, and not invariably as violent, as Tennyson's phrase suggests.
The notion of supposedly unrelievedly competitive human, as well as animal, behaviour is presented in its most systematic, and probably best-known, form, in the work of Herbert Spencer. It is Spencer who gave the term 'survival of the fittest' its overtones of unrelenting predatory destructiveness.
Even in Darwin's own day, however, the Spencerian view of Darwin already had its critics. Thomas Huxley, an early defender and champion of Darwin's theory of evolution, although himself an apologist for capitalism, protested against the extreme individualism of 'social Darwinian' interpretations of Darwin, like those of Spencer. Huxley denounced what he called 'the fanatical individualism of our time', in its mistaken analogies between 'cosmic nature' and society, in which, he objected, human 'tendencies to self-assertion are dignified by the name of rights'.9 This, according to Huxley, was totally to misunderstand the Darwinian notions of 'the struggle for existence' and of 'fitness' to survive.
In the manuscripts of Natural Selection, completed in 1858, Darwin makes clear his primary conception of 'fittedness' as one of better, or less successful, adaptation to a particular environment. A seed whose varying shape enables it to be carried further by the wind has a better chance of falling in fertile soil. Successive generations of Arctic animals have bequeathed to their descendants the attribute of thick winter fur. Members of a species best adapted to their particular environment survive and breed, thus passing their traits on to offspring. Those less well adapted die out. As Darwin comments, 'When the chance of life is trembling in the balance', an 'extremely slight' variation may mean the difference between extinction and survival.10
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin defines his own use of the term 'struggle for existence' in 'a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another'.11 The term 'struggle for existence' does not, then, of necessity imply ruthless predation. There is also symbiosis (the tick-bird feeding off the parasites on the hide of a grazing buffalo, for instance) or even of help extended to other individuals of the same species – as in the instance Darwin describes in Natural Selection, of a nearly-blind Indian crow being fed by other members of the flock!12
Unfortunately, no doubt, for later Darwin-influenced social thinking, Darwin does argue, however, that the 'struggle for life' will in general be 'most severe' between members of the same species. He applies this argument directly to the human condition, generalising from the era of accelerating colonisation in which he lived. 'How fatally', Darwin writes, 'does civilised man cause the extermination of savage man'.13
Darwin is, after all, a naturalist – not a sociologist or anthropologist. The controversial nature of his argument, for a Victorian readership raised on the Biblical teachings about Adam and Eve and the immortality of the soul, forces him to negotiate an ideological minefield. If he insists on human kinship with other animals – often to the point of de-emphasising whatever makes humans seem peculiarly different from other mammals, it is this Victorian context we must take into account.
Darwin was born into a society whose ruling class believed itself uniquely fitted to conquer and subdue the rest of the species homo sapiens. Although in some respects in advance of his times – in his passionate hatred of slavery. for example – in others he is very much of them. Thus, for Darwin. unless human beings live in the manner of middle-class Victorians under industrial capitalism, they are, by definition, deprived. He deplores the fact that there exist in the world 'areas of the most fertile land', capable of 'supporting … happy homes', which is peopled by 'a few wandering savages'14
Darwin's social views remain, however, far more tentative, more contradictory – and certainly far less ruthless – than those of his later appropriators. Admittedly, he does contend, without a shred of evidence, that the 'mental characteristics' of different ethnic groups are 'very distinct' as a direct consequence of racial heredity. Darwin believed that the 'wonderful progress' of the United States could be ascribed to social inheritance of the traits of the 'most energetic, restless, and courageous' individuals from Europe.15 But he certainly would have viewed with horror twentieth-century use by racists and supremacists of such cautious, unproven hypotheses, to justify twentieth-century atrocities of enforced. sterilisations and mass murder of the supposedly 'unfit'.
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One notorious recent misuse of the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest has been that of Herrnstein and Murray, authors of The Bell Curve.
The Bell Curve offers nothing very new, in fact. The controversy it has excited stems almost entirely from the social context of its publication – the revival of theories discredited since the 1930s, to justify right-wing social policies. Just as the US government earlier this century barred entry to Asians and Southern Europeans, on the grounds of their alleged 'genetic inferiority', and state laws imposed compulsory sterilisation of thousands of the 'mentally unfit', so Herrnstein and Murray seek justification for slashing social programmes on the grounds that inherited, unchangeable IQs make people what they are. In the world of Herrnstein and Murray, we don't have to re-shape society to give everyone a chance, because in today's perfect industrial-capitalist meritocracy (what planet do these people live on?) individuals have already found their genetically-determined 'natural' level. This is why those with the highest IQs (of course) run business and government. Single mothers on welfare, by contrast, lack the wit even to control their own fertility. African-Americans, of course, are doomed to social failure.
It is no accident that the authors of this dangerous nonsense, like their British counterpart Christopher Brand at Edinburgh University, have close connections with the far right-wing Pioneer Fund. They frequently cite as sources the discredited research of Arthur Jensen and William B Shockley, who in their day made similar claims to those in The Bell Curve.
Fortunately, to judge by one recent digest from the US press,16 a large section of US public opinion does recognise the illogicality and sheer ideological bias of Herrnstein and Murray's supposedly 'objective' work. To summarise briefly the main counter-arguments:
(1) There is no single, quantifiable measure of intelligence as such, let alone an isolatable, intelligence gene, or 'g factor' as claimed by Herrnstein and Murray. IQ tests measure competence in a set of learnable skills, which can be developed with practice. (Average [Q scores worldwide have risen some fifteen points during this century). However, IQ tests cannot measure a range of behaviours which, at different times, we identify as 'intelligent' – artistic or musical creativity, skill in human relations, assessment of long-term consequences from present conditions, inventive problem-solving, and so on.
(2) Most biologists and sociologists agree that the studies on which notions of the heritability of IQ are based are fatally flawed methodologically. To take just one example: members of any given ethnic group demonstrably perform differently on similar tests within different cultural settings, or when placed (as with adoption) in different family environments.17 There is, besides, a much broader diversity within any given ethnic group, than between any two different races.
(3) Even if – which remains open to question – as much as 60% of an individual's make-up were inherited, this still leaves enormous scope for the influence of environment – an infinity of variables. The effect on the brain's development of malnutrition in infancy; access to pre-school, or some teacher's easy dismissal of a working-class child's potential, are only a few possibilities. But these are precisely the kinds of considerations that Herrnstein and Murray wish to exclude.
(4) The Bell Curve invites the reader to think exclusively in terms of superiority/inferiority. It is this they share in common with the earlier, nineteenth-century 'social Darwinians' like Herbert Spencer, for whom the human environment could only be a jungle of winners and losers.
Herrnstein and Murray make one particularly astonishing claim: 'Most of the increasing wage inequality during the past two and a half decades', they contend, is due to the declining intelligence of working-class job applicants.18
In other words, average incomes in the Western world have fallen in real terms because the workforce got stupider, and so is worth less! Nothing to do with the discovery of new sources of cheap labour overseas, or with the ruthless determination of managers to drive down wages and extract higher profits. This is the kind of essentialist argument typical of The Bell Curve.
Against Herrnstein and Murray's view that success or failure in economic terms is 'increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit'19 it seems worth setting Darwin's own view on the matter. 'I have always maintained', Darwin wrote, 'that … men do net differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work'.20
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Social Darwinians may have read Darwin as justifying ruthless individualism, predatory competition, and genocide. But another strand is apparent in Darwin's own explicit statements on human social behaviour, when he argues for the importance of human solidarity as a pre-condition for early human survival. Primaeval humans, Darwin contends, 'would have felt some degree of love' for one another; they would 'have warned each other of danger, and given mutual aid in attack or defence' (Ironically, such supposedly genetically inherited traits are then regarded – in true Victorian colonialist fashion – as mainly valuable for the competing edge they would have afforded one tribe in subduing and conquering others).
The anarchist Peter Kropotkin was to appropriate the few hints about social co-operation in Darwin's writings, to argue for a vision of nature in general, and human behaviour in particular, as predominantly co-operative. As a young man, Kropotkin had studied the behaviour of wildlife in Siberia and Manchuria. On the basis of these observations, without denying the existence of warfare and violence in nature, he stresses the existence of mutual support and defence among animals of the same species. What Kropotkin calls 'sociability' occurs in the collective self-defence of herd animals against wolves, for instance, or in the hunting in packs of the wolves themselves.21 For Kropotkin, moreover, for the human species the pattern of mutual aid is the norm rather than the exception: 'Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind'.22
In more recent times, the biologist and Darwinian scholar Stephen Jay Gould has taken up similar themes. For Gould, both aggressiveness, and 'peacefulness, equality and kindness' – are equally 'biological'. Which traits are systematically developed in a particular human society depends on that society's organisation: 'we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish'.23
Gould finds hope, too, in his awareness of the sheer adaptability of human nature. 'The hallmark of humanity', Gould writes, 'is not only our mental capacity, but also our mental flexibility. We have made our world and we can change it'.24 Here lies a hint for socialists, if ever there was one. Darwin's speculations about human social behaviour have been allowed to form the ideological justification for predatory capitalism and for a system based on discrimination and inequality. Yet it is possible for socialists to conceive of a society of a different kind. A truly Darwinian understanding of the endless adaptability of organisms to environment can offer a vision of hope – of a society based on fostering co-operation, harmony, and the development of everyone's (very diverse) human potential.

1 Paul Geroski, Richard Gilbert, Alexis Jacquemin, Barriers to Entry and Strategic Competition (London Business School, 1989), p. 67; Ian Gordon, Beat the Competition! (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 180.

 Geroski et al, pp. 21, 91; Gordon, p. 159.

3 Michael Johnson, Business Buzzwords: the Tough New Jargon of Modern Business (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 79.

 See African Genesis (London, Atheneum, 1961), and The Territorial Imperative (London: Collins, 1967). Also Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980).

 Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 196.

 Colinvaux pp. 188, 209

 Quoted by Richard Hofstadter, 'The Vogue of Spencer'. in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, Ed, Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 397.

 In In Memoriam, written between 1833 and 1850.

 'Evolution and Ethics' (1893), in Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 82.

 Charles Darwin, Natural Selection. Ed. RC Stauffer (Cambridge University Press, 1975). p. 221.

 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 1859 Ed. Morse Peckham (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 146.

 p. 205.

 Natural Selection, p. 200.

14 The Descent of Man, vol 1. (New York: Appleton, 1873), p. 173.

 Descent, pp. 208, 172.

 See The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions. Eds. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman. New York: Random House, 1995.

17 For detailed exploration of these points, sce Alan Ryan, ‚Apocalypse Now?‘ in Jacoby and Glauberman, The Bell Curve Debate, pp 14-29; and Steven Rose, Leon J Kamin and RC Lewontin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

 Bell Curve, p. 96

 Bell Curve, p. 91

 Quoted by Greg Easterbrook in 'Blacktop Basketball and The Bell Curve, Bell Curve Debate pp. 30-43.

 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. 1902. Ed. John Howetson (London: Freedom Press, 1993), pp, 74-101.

 Mutual Aid, p. 82.

 Stephen Jay Gould, 'Potentiality vs. Determinism'. In Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. 1978 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 257.

 'The Nonscience of Human Nature', Ever Since Darwin, p. 228