Evolutionary Ethics 221self-eliminate. He seemed at once to recognize and fear an objective condition of
degeneracy and to deny that evolution had any particular goals. [Crook, 1994, Ch.
1]. The notion that the “survival of the fittest” was a bio-historical law underwrote
metaphysical systems such as that of Herbert Spencer. The partitioning of Africa
amongst European colonial powers, and the extermination of all but a small frac-
tion of the American Indian population begun in the colonial era and completed
by the U.S. army in the late 19thcentury, were often viewed as exemplifying a
natural process of selection, accelerated by human effort and leading to overall
improvement. Whether modern man was to be considered wild or tame, whether
he degenerated under conditions of domestication and peace, and the baleful ef-
fect of the “herd instinct”, as Nietzsche termed it, were much-debated questions
towards the end of the 19thcentury. These questions have little current resonance.
The notion that capitalism and militarism were biological necessities or repre-
sented higher points of development was contested virtually from Darwin’s day
onwards [Crook, 1994, 153ff.]. Thomas Henry Huxley, citing Buddhist and Stoic
traditions of ethics, agreed with Darwin regarding the existence of an evolution-
ary basis for morality, but declared in his Romanes Lectures that the struggle to
exist at the expense of others was frankly opposed to morality: “[T]he practice
of that which is ethically best — what we call goodness or virtue — involves a
course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success
in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands
self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it re-
quires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its
influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of
as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.”
[Huxley, 1893, p. 33] The loss of the flower of youth in the First World War threw
the doctrine of the survival of the fittest into confusion, and triumphalist inter-
pretations of natural selection ceded over the course of the century to universalist
and egalitarian theories but also to existentialism and nihilism. Awareness of the
horrifying results of the translation of the American Eugenics movement to Fascist
Germany [Nicholas, 2005] brought notions of manifest racial destiny and genetic
improvement into permanent disrepute following World War II. C.H. Wadding-
ton, the eminent developmental biologist, nevertheless surprised readers ofNature
with an article published in 1941 stating that science was in a position to provide
mankind with a true system of ethics. Waddington referred to “the direction of the
evolutionary process as a whole”, and maintained that helps in the right direction
were by definition morally good and distractions from this “evolutionary course”
were evil. The notion that the process of evolution incorporated a bias towards
the production of superior forms remained in the popular mind as well. It was
dealt a significant blow in the wider culture by Jacques Monod’sLe Hasard et la
Necessit ́e[1971], a bestseller that was immediately translated into English. “Man
knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity out of which
he emerged only by chance.”
Though future intellectual historians may perceive a connection between the