26 Michael Ruse
In the first place, as the reasoning powers and foresight of the members
became improved, each man would soon learn from experience that if
he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in return.
From this low motive he might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows;
and the habit of performing benevolent actions certainly strengthens
the feeling of sympathy, which gives the first impulse to benevolent
actions. (1, 163-164)Again the philosopher will ask his or her questions and again the philosopher
will have to be satisfied with less than full answers. The most popular way of
getting ethics from evolution is by arguing by analogy that, as go the processes of
evolution, so go the norms of proper behavior. This is so-called Social Darwinism,
and often it takes the form of moving from a bloody struggle for survival in nature
to the claim that that is what we have — and what we should have — in society.
Unrestrictedlaissez faire, with widows and children going to the wall and the
strong surviving and flourishing. Expectedly, most Social Darwinians have been
a bit more sophisticated than this [Richards, 1987; Ruse, 2000; 2005]. But there
are certainly elements of this kind of thinking in theDescent of Man.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and
those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We
civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process
of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the
sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost
skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason
to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak
constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the
weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who
has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this
must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon
a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a
domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one
is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (1, 168)The comments on the virtues of capitalism, on women, on savages, and the Irish
rather make one’s hair stand on end.
Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring
Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting,
ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious
and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and
in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land
originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts — and
in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but
five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong
to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for