A rather unusual paper appeared in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Summarizing the paper, editor-in-chief Liliana M. Dávalos described it as “A unified account of Darwinism’s varieties.” (Note immediately that the word “Darwinism” is still current in the literature, despite claims to the contrary.) She’s not talking about “varieties” in the biological sense as Darwin would have conceived them. She’s talking about varieties of Darwinism itself. Here’s how she describes the paper:

In “The Varieties of Darwinism: Explanation, Logic, and Worldview,” authors Hugh Desmond, André Ariew, Philippe Huneman, and Thomas Reydon observe that while some people claim Darwinism’s meaning should be limited to scientific content, others call for its abolition altogether. The authors propose a unified account of these varieties of Darwinism. “We show how the theories introduced by Darwin have grounded a ‘logic’ or style of reasoning about phenomena, as well as various ethically and politically charged ‘worldviews.’” They posit that the full meaning of Darwinism and how this meaning has changed over time can only be understood through the interaction between these dimensions. [Emphasis added.]

Darwinism has evolved? What a concept. It even has its own ecosystem: an interaction of ethically and politically charged worldviews built on a style of reasoning about phenomena. If the authors and editor are right, one cannot get thin-sliced Darwinism limited to scientific content alone. One can only order the thick slice with some rather unsavory seasonings mixed in.

Desmond et al. are not Darwin skeptics. They believe that Darwin came up with a “logic” that explains biological change. Their point is that you cannot get Darwinism in thin slices any longer. Darwinism has evolved into a thicker concept that has attracted a great deal of other stuff growing in and around it. Perhaps we could think of it as mold in a block of cheese, with rats nibbling at the edges. Here, have some!

Only Thick Darwinism Served Here

Many Darwin defenders only want the thin-sliced version, neatly packaged in philosophical cellophane. They speak of natural selection as “only a biological theory” about how species change over time. 

A concise and clear example of this common view was once provided by Gould who proposed that “the term [Darwinism] should be restricted to the body of thought allied with Darwin’s own theory of mechanism”. We call this the “thin conception” of Darwinism. 

In contrast, this paper advances a “thick conception” of Darwinism, where the scientific, ethical, and political dimensions are understood to be intertwined, and to constitute the full meaning of Darwinism.

But can’t an individual order his or her own preference? Why not put both versions on the menu, like the old Burger King commercial, “Have it your way”? Just scrape off the political and ethical baggage that grew up around Darwinism and keep it simple. Darwinism makes no moral statements. It’s just addressing change over time. There may have been philosophers and sociologists who have distorted Darwinism, or who applied it where it doesn’t belong, but that’s not a defect of the theory, is it?

In a subsection entitled, “The Inadequacy of a Thin Conception of Darwinism,” the authors give three reasons why that position is unworkable.

The need to distinguish between “genuine” and “distorted” Darwinisms remains. However, we believe that the effort to reduce the complexity of the meanings of “Darwinism,” and restrict it to a “scientific core” (however defined), ultimately does not work. We offer three reasons: the ethical and political uses of Darwinism cannot be simply understood as distortions of the science; the instrumentalizability of Darwinism is an explanandum that the thin conception cannot account for; and the thin concept is ultimately self-defeating.

They go on to explain these reasons, but the one that stands out (and probably was mentioned last for emphasis) is the accusation that the thin concept is self-defeating. This is important, because anything that is self-defeating, as J. P. Moreland and C. S. Lewis and others have pointed out, is necessarily false. If so, then there is no thin conception of Darwinism. 

Consider their reasoning on that point, when arguing why Darwinism cannot be “cordoned off” from its political and ethical considerations. For one thing, Darwinism is a way of looking at the world differently: “to call an approach ‘Darwinian’ refers to a specific way of investigating and reasoning about phenomena.” When applied to itself, the theory breaks down.

The problem is that if followed to its logical conclusion, this stance implies that the term “Darwinism” should be simply eliminated. This is the final reason for rejecting the thin conception of Darwinism: it implies that we should no longer speak of “Darwinism.”

How so? To speak of an “-ism” reifies Darwin’s ideas and thus inevitably carries connotations of doctrine, if not also a set of values. This need not imply that Darwinism must be categorized as similar to Marxism or Freudianism — scholars also speak of “Newtonian” science or the “Newtonian” revolution. However, even the term “Newtonianism” is understood to also refer to Newton’s metaphysical hypotheses and epistemological values (and even his theological and alchemical interests) rather than only to Newton’s specific causal generalizations. Similarly, we cannot use the term “Darwinism” without inquiring what nonempirical commitments are involved.

Well, then, isn’t the solution to just drop the word “Darwinism” and talk about evolutionary biology in a purely empirical manner? Problem solved, right? Not so fast.

However, this attempt at reengineering the term has not been met with much uptake by biologists or nonbiologists. “Darwinism” is not perceived to refer to a single scientific theory or a definable range of hypotheses, and this is both the reason why Darwinism as a term has been abandoned by contemporary biologists when talking about current evolutionary biology, and why nonbiologists have not abandoned it.The reason to either use or avoid the term “Darwinism” is precisely because of the value-laden dimensions of Darwinism: values on how to conduct scientific research and values on how to guide action and organize society. In this way, the perceived meaning of the term, both in its use and its conscious nonuse, calls for a thick conception.

Evolutionary Everything

In the paper, the authors include a table of 15 research domains prefixed by “evolutionary” as in evolutionary economics, psychology, sociology, medicine, robotics, and technology. All these presumably rely on the “thin” conception of “Darwinian” methods as consisting of variation, fitness, and heritability. But they implicitly rely on the fact that “Darwin’s ideas strongly suggests [sic] they are a way of investigating and thinking about a broad range of natural and social phenomena.”

Could one hold that Darwinism’s scientific dimensions and worldview dimensions have nothing to do with each other? We would like to argue that this is not plausible, and that these dimensions are intertwined.

Here is the crux of why the thin conception is self-defeating: to work in evolutionary biology, you would have to use a non-Darwinian approach! Like they said, to call something Darwinian involves a “specific way of investigating and reasoning about phenomena.” And what does that entail? That reasoning evolved from ape instincts! Now try to do science on that belief.

Darwinism can be called a “worldview” in the sense that it contains statements about the evolutionary origin of traits and behavioral dispositions of human beings that are perceived as highly relevant for how we deliberate on what is ethically and/or politically desirable. This aspect of Darwinism has been noted by other scholars. Consider, for instance, Mary Midgley emphasizing that Darwinism is not just “an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins”. Michael Ruse gives another reconstruction: “there is a side to “Darwinian thinking, what I refer to as Darwinism, that functions as a religion, or if you prefer, a secular religious perspective” that in fact constitutes “a [secular-] religious alternative to Christianity”. [References removed.]

Moldy Slice

The authors rightly point out that the Darwinian approach to investigating and reasoning about human beings led to eugenics, Nazism, and other unsavory political effects. One cannot simply dismiss those as distortions of Darwinism by past regimes.

Although the relation between the scientific dimensions of Darwinism and the societal/worldview dimension is not one-to-one, it cannot be claimed that there is no relation at all. The ethical or political views here surveyed were not preexisting ideologies that simply appeared dressed anew by their promoters; rather, they were grounded in some genuine elements of the Darwinian logic. In this way, a thick conception of Darwinism makes more sense than a thin conception.

Moreover, since Darwinism itself has evolved over time, worldviews have evolved too. In the 19th century, Darwin, Spencer, Galton, and others were entranced by Malthusian visions of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Both Marxists and capitalists built their systems on those Darwinian ideas. With the Modern Synthesis, the emphasis evolved toward differential fitness among populations. After the tragedies of eugenics, Darwinism evolved into an emphasis on cooperation. Early genomics led to a worldview of genetic determinism. Now the emphasis is on diversity and inclusion. In between were numerous other re-conceptualizations, including niche construction, phenotypic plasticity, neutral evolution, cultural evolution, and sociobiology. 

We cannot sit in judgment on our predecessors, therefore, saying they “misunderstood” Darwinism, without asking what current political and ethical worldviews have emerged from Darwinian reasoning in our time: 

Such historical episodes fall well short of robust, generalizable patterns, but it is not altogether implausible that new applications of Darwinism today may lead to future revisions in how we understand fundamental concepts such as natural selection and fitness.

Yoda Complex

The treatise by Desmond et al. brings some welcome clarity to the debate about Darwinism. There are multiple Darwinisms and multiple disciplines and worldviews that have emerged from Darwinian ideas. It is not possible, they argue, to disentangle the ethical and political dimensions of Darwinism by proposing a “thin” conception of variation, fitness, and inheritance, because the meanings of those very terms have evolved, and Darwinian ideas inform the approach to scientific methodology to explain them. Thick is in; thin is out. One must take Darwin-brand cheese with the mold and rats.

In my reading of the paper, however, the authors failed to go the distance. I think the commentaries here at Evolution News by Neil Thomas, David Berlinski, Nancy Pearcey and others conversant with history and philosophy give more logic and nuance to the subject. And I think the authors failed to go the distance with their point that thin Darwinism is self-defeating. If Darwinism is self-defeating, that fact distorts the authors’ ideas themselves! What happens when they turn Darwinian ideas on the act of writing a paper about Darwinism? The project self-destructs (see Pearcey, 2015). A paper about Darwinism by Darwinists is no longer “about” truth because everything in human evolution is in a state of flux for the attainment of a nebulous goal called fitness. Desmond et al. attempt to maintain the is/ought distinction, which is good, but if humans are products of Darwinian evolution, what ought to be is equivalent to what is. No “ought” can anchor itself to any final authority outside of Darwinism. One might well ask if they wrote this paper to promote their own fitness, or if their selfish genes made them do it.

Theists don’t have this problem, because they believe our minds derived from the mind of a rational and good Creator whose purpose in creating included that creatures in his image should think, love, and pursue the truth. Desmond et al. use the word “should” 25 times. But since Darwinism cannot appeal to any authority outside its own evolving notions, one could accuse them of plagiarizing non-evolving theistic principles whenever they try to teach others what they should think or should do. They recognize that Darwinian reasoning “can also be applied to the origin of moral norms and even human rationality, and thus Darwin’s ideas seem at least relevant to questions about how we should judge and act.” But Darwinian selection doesn’t care what happens. Outside of the exercise of raw power, why should anyone trust or obey what a Darwinist says we “should” do?

I’ve coined the term “Yoda complex” to refer to evolutionists who position themselves on an exalted plane of thought, above the vagaries of unguided causes, teaching the beings below them where they came from and what they should do. If Darwinism is as thick as these authors say it is, they have no option but to climb down from their platform and join their fellow evolved apes to see who can grunt the loudest. The rest of us can use our created minds for the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.