Charles Darwin 27existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that prevailed
— and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.”
(1, 174)Fortunately selection is a little more sophisticated. The Irish might breed like
rabbits, but they tend to be careless about the raising of their offspring, so many
die without issue. The Scots to the contrary, work hard and make sure that their
offspring do succeed them. In the long run, nature values the good and decent.
Social Darwinians justify their appeal to the processes of nature by claiming
that evolution is progressive. It is right and proper to support natural selection, to
cherish it as a beneficent mechanism, because the end justifies the means. Humans
are higher than slugs and worms. Some humans (the Scots) are higher than other
humans (the Irish). It may seem cruel to ignore the pleas of widows and orphans,
but better overall for society if you do. Darwin was certainly a progressionist,
about society and about evolution. He realized that in science it was politic to
play down explicit progressionism — in the 1830s when he entered the game, (as
we have seen) social progress too strongly identified with atheism and radicalism,
and biological progress was generally identified with the worst excesses of German
romanticism,Naturphilosophie, the English then regarding continental philosophy
in much the way that they regard it today.
In the first edition of theOrigin, progress certainly gets mentioned and in the
fossil record gets a somewhat tepid endorsement.
The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have
beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher
in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague yet ill-
defined sentiment, felt my many paleontologists, that organisation on
the whole has progressed. [Darwin, 1859, 345]And again:
As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which
lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the or-
dinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that
no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with
some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural se-
lection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and
mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. (489)Later editions of theOrigin, for reasons to be given shortly, were more progress-
explicit and friendly than earlier editions.
Although we have no good evidence of the existence in organic beings
of an innate tendency towards progressive development, yet this nec-
essarily follows,... through the continued action of natural selection.
For the best definition which has ever been given of a high standard
of organisation is the degree to which the parts have been specialised