1. Heritability

We find in all organisms (and only in them, not in ghosts, not in crystals, that do not reproduce) that offspring are similar to parents, even if the former do not know the latter at all – as is true for most plants or animals, and at least for some human males: as the saying goes, maternity is a matter of fact, paternity one of opinion. This depends on genes – sequenced today as DNA molecules – randomly divided in sexual reproduction between parents according to Mendel’s rules, which as said before Darwin did not know or understand correctly; even though he had Mendel’s book on plant hybrids in his library, it was left uncut and unread! This shows that you can have wrong ideas on genetics but still right ones on evolution! (It also demonstrates that knowledge of the literature sometimes saves one from discoveries.) However, the route from genes to phenes is not at all fully understood in every case, especially so in behaviour, where inborn vocalization or genetically determined displays means little else than not learned. How genes can program the brains of animals – or their abilities to develop organized structures and functions – awaits further exploration. Which makes some adherents of ‘Intelligent Design’ holler out gladly, because if you don’t know, they think it proves they do know, which seems strange: just as if someone maintained that if you don’t know the way, or a foreign language, this is proof of them having this knowledge – or at least that they know how to find that knowledge in their old books. Of course, they often pose the right questions, but instead of researching the answers they just call them wonders of design, or designed wonders. This is one of the misunderstandings of heredity in Darwinism. The other, and often much more damaging misunderstanding, is that if one has shown a certain trait is genetically determined, this means also having shown that it is fixed, stereotypical, compulsive, and unalterable by experience. Biologists – above all ethnologists following Konrad Lorenz too literally – have contributed a lot to this misunderstanding, even though August Weismann had already made it clear, more than a century ago, that all that genes can prescribe is the ‘reaction norm’, that is, the limits of a trait’s variability, and of course its development. These limits can vary with environmental circumstances from all-or-none effects – i.e. strict inheritance – to more or less wide ranges of modifiability, e.g. by learning; making genes as forceful as environmental influences, which can also vary from strict obedience – e.g. to imprinted behaviours – to lose possibilities of action – or not. This most dangerous misunderstanding of genetic, i.e. evolutionary, influences on behavioural traits is most misleading in humans, where not only do some evolutionary psychologists make much ado about presumably evolutionary traces in human behaviour – which may be still there, but are hardly more than interesting remnants. What they rightfully emphasize is that it is, above all, human emotions, residing in the limbic system of the brain, such as sexuality, aggressiveness, or attachment between parents and children, which seem to be rather firmly anchored genetically in human ‘nature’: mind you, this sounds as if voluntarily asexual, peaceful, or parenticidal individuals did not exist among us – sorry to say, they do! That is the grave mistake, to take a propensity or readiness of inclination or feeling as equivalent – if influenced by genes – with an evolutionary coercion that we cannot escape. It would be as mistaken as believing that the mean of a Gaussian distribution is inescapably valid for every single measurement of a parameter – which is, of course, utter nonsense.

2. Variation

The second characteristic of Darwinian Evolution is just as fundamental as the first (although at first glance quite at variance with it): Variation, or as we might better call it now Diversity. There are many ways to diversify the genome: mutation is just one of them – and it comes in many kinds and frequencies – from very rare (<10⁻¹⁰ per gene duplication) to quite frequent hotspots of variety (10⁻³ per duplication); mixing of genes by crossover or changing their positions are others. However, whatever the means to genetically enrich a population, the fundamental process for it is always an alternation of the DNA that can be inherited. Many mutations destroy an individual’s genome. If it cannot be inherited, it is lost forever. Many mutations can produce sickness; if they allow reproduction, they can be kept alive in a population – maybe waiting there for another environment into which they fit better. Rarely do they provide the possessor with a fitness advantage; but this will in time let them increase in frequency in carrier populations. Although some mutations can be expressed only under certain circumstances, the environment cannot incite mutations, making an individual fitter for it – this is what we call their chance effect. It is self-evident that chance alone will only rarely make a complex genetic arrangement even fitter – but then there are enough individuals and generations to make them common! Some, however, may think of resistance against parasites and they are right. In some cases, mutation pressure or selection may drive a population down an alley – a dead end, as it may turn out to be, for instance in size or age.

There are two frequent misunderstandings deriving from this knowledge. The first is that mutation (or other forms of producing variations) cannot ameliorate a genome because variations are mostly deleterious. It is not only in developing resistance to pesticides, drugs or parasites that we see the contrary of this assumption; the wealth of domesticated plants and animals in innumerable varieties, naturally occurring or artificially induced, demonstrates that variation can make breeds more successful under either artificial or natural selection: wolves may perish, while dogs still flourish!

The second misunderstanding is that deviation from the norm must always do damage to a population. Although this may happen, the richness of genetic diversity, i.e. the scope of variation expressed or concealed in a population, determines its adaptability, while the peak or peaks of occurrence(s) stand(s) for its adaptedness. This is most prominently so in the two sexes and in their special reproductive adaptations, but it also shows in a thousand different axes of perspective – from body strength to disease resistance, from cognition to beauty, from agility (e.g. in sports) to talent for the arts and music. This is most markedly so in a species like humans, which is only mildly specialized corporally or mentally – except in its manifold individuals: it is in our genetic diversity that our range of abilities is represented. Here, we should see the natural richness of the human species rather than deviations from a norm, which nobody could define anyway. This is also true for the geographical or ethnic population differences – formerly often mistakenly called ‘races’ – which are today more often than not lost in mixed populations all over the world. There would not be such excitement about a black first family in the white house (or the first black family?) if black people had not been discriminated against as inferior beings for so long. Without the reality of these – after all genetic – differences, there would be much ado in the media about nothing. To state it bluntly: to see some of us as different from others should inspire rather than alienate us – for good Darwinian reasons. As in the arts, in science, and in sports, the diversity of humankind shows its strength and adaptability.

3. Overpopulation

Overpopulation of offspring is the third Darwinian factor that Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace learned independently from Thomas Malthus. It is typical for organisms to produce more offspring than can themselves survive to the reproductive stage. In trees with millions of seeds, or in fish with millions of eggs, this seems evident. It is also true for K-selected species with long life cycles and few descendants, such as humans. As long as a population grows, it is evident that more individuals are born and survive than there are parents. But even if the size of a population is steady, there are usually many more eggs produced than can be fertilized; more individuals conceived than born; more newly born than grow up to reproduce. If all required resources were available in unlimited supply, this would allow for more growth of populations. But, alas, they never are, and all kinds of life-endangering risks abound: food or water or shelter shortages, predators, parasites, and other disease-causing microbes – or most simply a lack of partners to reproduce, with too many menacing competitors around; not to mention the danger of environmental disasters of all kinds – from snow avalanches to storms, from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions, and so forth. There is a continuous ‘struggle for life,’ as the title of Darwin’s benchmark book already proclaims (not ‘fight for life’, ‘Kampf ums Dasein’, as it has been wilfully misunderstood from the beginning by so many people quoting Darwin in support of their social – not natural! – agenda!). Even if many individuals refrain completely from reproduction (as it is often the case in humans): as long as others make up for it, the population keeps growing and overproduction prevails!

4. Selection

The fourth Darwinian factor is best known to everyone, because it features in the title of Darwin’s masterpiece: The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection – as the evolution of organisms was quite well established before the mechanism for it was elucidated by Darwin and Wallace. It has to be admitted that there is woefully little about ‘the origin of species’, namely of their variety, in the book – leaving the genetics of speciation, even nowadays, a particularly fertile ground for biological research. But it is full of examples for selection acting on organisms. From Steps 1 to 3 logically follows Step 4. Selection begins to act on the gametes right up to the end of the reproductive period, and in social organisms it may act even beyond that, as long as parents or grandparents help to increase the reproductive success of their offspring by their actions. It acts through all facets of the environment of a species – from womb to grave, as it were - through enemies and parasites, disease or abiotic influences, food or competitors, advantage with partners or care of offspring, by making their genes propagate, or doing the same for whole individuals. Those individuals that do better reproductively – not only in numbers, but also in making them themselves reproduce successfully again – are called relatively fitter, as compared to their competitors for limited resources; their evolutionary fitness – or that of their genes – is only counted in genetic multiplication success, and in nothing else. Their reproductive capacity – or Darwinian fitness – is the only currency in which evolution can measure their success and award them with participation in the next round of the generational sweepstakes.

It is one of the gravest misunderstandings of Darwinism to regard ‘fitness’ as equivalent to survival. Of course, it is true that an individual that dies as an embryo is gone forever. However, even if a subject wins a gold medal in the decathlon but sires no children, such an individual will be as unfit as any miserable weakling, and if the latter manages to sire surviving children, he or she is evolutionarily fitter after all! Fitness means reproductive success, passing on genes in a direct or indirect line of descent, nothing else. This should limit the application of this biological terminus technicus from the outset to natural organisms and makes its use referring to humans quite limited – although reproduction in nearly 7 billion people, with numbers still rising, seems not to have come out of fashion, notwithstanding the fact that Europeans now produce fewer than 1.5 reproductive females per mother.

The second frequent misunderstanding is that selection can only take place in increasing populations. Imagine – as it is not unrealistic these days in humans at all – that half of a population has no children at all, while the other half has one per each female. The population will vanish with time all right, but at the same time selection will favour the still reproducing individuals: their genes will dominate future generations, and possibly allow building up the population again; or if a major section dies from a newly evolved infection before it can reproduce, the others will be positively selected because they are the fitter ones.

5. Mortality

While selection of the fitter – not necessarily the optimal, and fitter only under prevailing environmental selective conditions! – is a matter of the logical consequence of heritability, variation and relative reproductive advantage between competing genes, individual super-organisms or social groups (with group selection remaining under fire of competing evolutionary arguments and data), the fifth Darwinian factor, that is to say mortality, though rarely mentioned, remains a sobering fact. All organisms, sooner or later, have to die. Mortality is inevitable for all living organisms – the same as taxes are for us! If immortal organisms existed, evolution would come to a halt once the carrying capacity of the biosphere were exhausted, thus allowing for no future expansion, and the environment would have to stay unchanged forever in order to safeguard the organisms adaptation to it. The latter will never happen, thus robbing these organisms of their adaptability by further evolution through reproduction. Although life cycles, aging, and life spans may vary – and in fact are selected to reach reproductive success as well as individual maintenance – death is as natural and evolutionary as birth. Some organisms may do without sex and reproduce asexually by cloning, but none has found the secret to living forever, or to escaping evolutionary change and forfeiting innovation. Life on earth is forced to be creative or it would no longer be there in the long run. Continuous creativity has its price, though: mortality. The insight into this consequence is sometimes sad, sometimes exhilarating – but will not be stopped by whatever right-for-life legislation: death may be only postponed until the individual miserably dwindles away unconsciously in a nursery home: some life, as one might say.

You may call this unending creativity of life’s potential its godlike quality, as Baruch Spinoza did – deus sive natura – or as Stuart A. Kaufmann does in his most recent book Reinventing the Sacred;Reference Kaufmann¹ but whether you thus can save religions seems doubtful to me – I am scared by the sacred! Mind you, religiosity – the inner need to search for sense in one’s life by means of some religion – may be inherited in some humans, or imprinted by their societies in others, thus helping them to define their identities. But this by no means proves that the teachings of those religions are true – though they may be healthy and helpful. The wish to win a lottery may persuade one to buy a ticket, but it is no guarantee that one will win the lottery.

This is the gist of Darwinian evolution – along, of course, with millions and millions of years of time elapsing; that is to say, millions and millions of generations of organisms. And those are some of its major misunderstandings. Darwinian evolution produced the human animal, the animal with a theory of mind, with language, self-consciousness, morality, free will, arts, technical and scientific knowledge, wisdom and foresight – mostly of the human predicament. In one word: the animal with culture; the moral species.

But how was, and is, Darwinian evolution not only misunderstood, but also deliberately misused? To explain this, let me now turn to the social (and social science) response to the Darwinian evolution of humankind. It is the thorniest of nettles to grasp – especially for me as a German. But it was not only the Germans that murdered and maltreated the Jews, although the Germans may epitomise and exemplify the misuse of biological science, especially Darwinian evolution, in a highly advanced society. It should also never be forgotten how the Americans treated the Indians, the Watutsi the Hutus, or the Kampucheans or the Russians their own kind, and many other such examples. Sad though it is to admit it, this is a story of moral disaster, of the breakdown of human society, of the failure of biological science, especially of the failure of genetics and evolution, and it might all not have happened if well-educated people had heeded David Hume’s verdict never to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – however rightly or wrongly perceived the latter may be. It should also be emphasized, that most – again, right or wrong – applications of Darwinism to human affairs is cultural. Nature itself does not speak through natural science, but our social beliefs about Nature. ‘Social Darwinism’ was invented by humans – biologists, but also politicians, lawyers, social scientists of all kinds, often even religious practitioners – but never by Nature. Social Darwinism is, simply, a kind of cultural theory of ongoing evolution in humans – nothing that Nature commands, or that natural science is doing or warranting to be done by us to us!

What is actually human – in fact, before we ask the question, what is humane? What can Darwinism teach us about human evolution? Of course, physically, things are simple enough and need hardly be recapitulated: anatomically, genetically, physiologically, biochemically, taxonomically, medically, even ethologically, humans are primates, more specifically apes, as Carolus Linnaeus was the first to observe, close enough to the chimpanzee for Jared Diamond to have labelled us ‘The Third Chimpanzee’ in his famous book of 1992. But what about behaviourally and, more specifically, psychologically?

Even though physically we may be animals like all other animals – as any visit to the doctor, or to the zoo, or any show on afternoon TV will prove – mentally we are vastly different: we are self-conscious, we speak languages, we harbour a theory of mind – imputing beliefs and intentions to others, not only to humans, but also to other animals, sometimes even to mountains and rivers – we have a sense of justice and obligations, morals and values as we often call them, and which we often formally inscribe into the law of the land, valid for all living there. We decide by free will (although within many constraints), we engage in the arts – a peacock’s tail in the human species, as some surmise, in technique and science, we use writing and the internet to spread what we know, assume or believe, and what we can do and what not. Some biologists, especially ethnologists, have worked hard to prove that our behaviour is guided by genes, and this not only for pathological, but also for normal, behaviour. Although this may be true for a lot of our emotions – love, hate, aggression, desires or fears – it is demonstrable only in remnants in our behaviours that are organized by our fore-brains, in so-called rational behaviours where learning, especially social learning from other humans by teaching, prevails.

Let me say a few words here about evolution and religion, because many believe that morals come from religion only. Presumably they think suicide martyrs hoping for rewards in another world are particularly convincing proof of this. There are also some biological evolutionists around who seem to believe, since religions are so commonplace in humans and may help us to anchor social identities and give sense to an otherwise sometimes dreadful life, that ‘genes for religion’ must have been adaptively selected for – or at least they know that ‘religion’ or ‘God’ in the title of a book has a strong selling potential.

It is worrisome that during these fantasies on human nature rarely is a difference made that is nevertheless highly pertinent here: that between religion and religiosity. A religion is a system of thoughts about this world and how human life, especially moral human life, makes sense in it. It is a package of world explanations, often, but by no means always, with god or gods involved, often deriving a history of those who adhere to a creed, and promising a good future to them (and them only). It has nothing to do with evolution, nor with genes, it is purely cultural (or ethnic) or mental, and natural science has nothing to say about it, as long as it does not make statements about natural facts – for example from old books – which can be tested, approved or refuted by scientific methods.

On the other hand, religiosity is an emotional feeling of need for such a religion, a propensity to believe in it and to hold it true, which may well be part of our genetic endowment, although some people – like myself – lack this yearning and still are perfectly happy – and, by the way, may behave fully morally: paying taxes, participating in elections, and not killing anybody because he or she holds some competing creed. So it seems somewhat odd to search for ‘god genes’ on a par with those for a heart or for kidneys. Nobody can live without the latter, but one may well live without god. Therefore, it is my considerate conclusion that most of what has been and is presently written about the evolutionary developments of religiosity are just-so stories with little empirical foundation – maybe right, but maybe not so.

Let me also add a word on ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID), which creates some public noise these days, as if it were something new that organisms are surprisingly well adapted to their environments, and seem – as a rule – exquisitely ‘well-designed’: as if Darwin had not tried precisely to find a natural mechanism for the evolution of these astounding facts of life in the first place – escaping the physical-theological postulate of a designing creator; which for the one is the very proof of his existence, and for the other a superfluous stand-in hypothesis. This debate will surely go on. What is, however, interesting for an evolutionary biologist, who fully agrees with ID-people that wonderful adaptations can be found in all living organisms – although explainable by Darwinian principles, is the fact that evolution by natural selection has doubtlessly produced humankind, and that the human mind – conscious, inventive, goal-directed – produces plenty of well-designed products, from the stone axe to the airplane, that all bear the tell-tale signs of ‘Intelligent Design’ – thus proving what the ID-community always wanted to maintain the other way around, namely that evolution could beget ID, but not ID evolution! The ID people in a sense are right with their arguments from design, but they got hold of the wrong end of the stick: they only proved humans evolved intelligence beyond all previous examples!

Let us now turn to the less than exhilarating story of much more serious, in fact deadly, misuse of Darwinism by those who wilfully mix up the ‘is’ with an ‘ought’ of how humans may or even should treat other humans – and to the moral of a disastrous cultural evolution following from this, rather than to the morals of evolution. To be able to be inhuman may be part of our human natural endowment, just because culture is an inseparable part of our humanity. Not that we have to be evil by nature – not by any means; just as we are not good by nature either. Because ‘evil’ and ‘good’ pertain to the moral, the cultural domain, and they have no meaning for natural organisms. The only thing that we are by nature is that we are moral, cultural beings, free to decide and therefore able to fail. That is why we have to insist on the human power to decide, otherwise we could be neither good nor bad nor moral beings at all – but rather like some sponge or mushroom or tree or bat. Our competence for freely deciding – that is: for culture – is our natural heritage. What we call human may often refer only to our physical nature, to our skull, or to our hands, to our brain, or even to the human genome. What refers to humans as persons, as moral beings, would better be called humane: we have to make it, to invent it by our free will.

Therefore, there is always plenty of nature in us – not only in body, as well as in behaviour and soul, in feeling, in desiring, in striving: the animal in us! But only when we decide what we ought to want or do, do we enter the realm of culture and of humanity, of personal rights and personal dignity. We are always tempted, after Darwin, to treat humans as pieces of nature, but nature does not tell us what is allowed to do to human beings. Some believe that this world of norms and values must have supernatural sources. They are right insofar that these norms are not derived from nature – whether from evolution or from our own nature or from scientific research. These norms derive from the cultural realm of humanity. David Gauthier gave his 1986 book the title Morals by Agreement – agreement between humans.Reference Gauthier² Socially useful, maybe; strengthened by some religious teachings, maybe, or by some philosophical argumentation, maybe; supported by some evolutionary examples or consequences, maybe, but nevertheless independent from all these sources and deeply rooted in the social convictions and personal opinions of humans – what we may call ‘conscience.’ Maybe they are even inherited from genes or from teachings, but they are only valid if accepted by one’s own free conviction. Force cannot produce norm-abiding behaviour, only submission and slavery. And by definition a slave is not a free human being, having lost his or her freedom and dignity by threat or by force. Of course, evolutionary Darwinian biology has destroyed many of the scaffoldings that seemed to strengthen morals – at least allegedly so. In fact it has only done away with false assumptions, e.g. about the nature of humans as moral beings, and made man face his true human responsibility for himself; that is, for the contents of his morality – even if he is a moral being from his very nature.

These may seem serious problems of practical philosophy and theology of the origin and validity of moral norms, how to give sense to one’s life while seeing the world as it is, not as we have fantasized it to be. Nevertheless, if the foundations of traditional ethics are breaking down – whether they are religions or the idea of the special status of man as the single rational species – as they surely are by Darwinian evolution of humans from animals, these seemingly esoteric problems of moral philosophy, as James Rachels has maintained in his 1991 book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism,Reference Rachels³ become burning questions of everyday’s life – burning for some, quite literally.

This is the price for having evolved our genes, the very reason why we have become the moral species in the first place, in need of morals, yearning for morals – but nature does not provide us with ready-made norms. We have to learn them from a social community. But this very social community can indoctrinate us even in the best conscience, obliging us to treat human beings with every cruelty if they are regarded as different from us. So human cruelty, human evilness is not forced upon us by nature; but nature has allowed it to be forced upon us by culture. In other words: we ourselves have to take upon us full responsibility for our moral norms. This may be the severest consequence of Darwinian evolution of the human species from the natural world by natural means: that nature set us free and thus made us servants of ourselves and of our moral and religious cultures.

The misuse of the Darwinian message is, then, that knowledge – or presumed knowledge – of the forces of evolutionary change in nature is applied as proof of human norms on how we can and should treat (and maltreat) other human beings in everyday life. Or, to be even more specific: to first translate the Darwinian slogan ‘struggle for life’ mistakenly as ‘fight for life’; and then to use (or rather: misuse) such misunderstood aggressive principles as a fundamental of natural selection in order to warrant human aggression against other human beings – that is, to see it as a cultural norm, a law of enlightened culture, founded in a natural law of evolution! Nothing of that is correct, inevitable or natural: it abuses the teachings of evolution for other, cultural, means of hatred and mischief.

If it had been hoped that scientific progress and enlightenment would free people from narrow-minded, self-interested prejudice, it instead opened up a Pandora’s Box of allegedly scientifically approved evil. This misuse of evolutionary thinking in the name of Darwin unleashed the most horrid forces of inhumanity in the name of ‘natural’ morality, suppressing and killing in cold blood millions of innocent victims, and – what may be worst in the long run – compromising the scientific view of the world forever. It may have driven back uncounted numbers into obscurant ideological servility, nearly extinguishing the flame of enlightenment by kindling the devastating fire of hatred and destruction instead – for which Darwinian evolutionary thinking is blamed.

It is necessary – though not pleasant – to look at these inhuman realities in more detail, with examples from both the past and the present. But it is not only necessary to be aware of the collective excesses of inhumanity in particular historical times and locations – from Holy Wars to witch-hunts or to genocidal racism, eugenic mass-murder or tortures in the name of civilization. It is even more important to understand what it is that can turn normal people into inhuman beasts, which ideological and social circumstances set free their evil potentials and which ethical, legal – i.e. institutional – precautionary measures might help to control them.

Of course, there are innumerable ways to maltreat human dignity, but they all go back – leaving aside individual cases of moral insanity – to what we might rather call social ‘immoral sanity’, that is to say, regular patterns of inhuman societies in seemingly perfectly normal human collectives: the differences between strong and weak (often male versus female or old versus young) groups within societies; and the differences between one’s own group and foreign groups, sometimes also higher valued, superior against lower-valued, inferior fellow creatures, healthy versus sick (as perceived), or even man versus animals, sometimes even good (oneself) versus evil (the others), both within and between societies. These differences are by no means exclusive nor are they orthogonal to each other. They may strengthen (more rarely weaken) perceptions and biases, and ideology (often using scientific arguments or pseudoscientific ones) can incite them, while norms may restrain them.

Strong versus weak – let us first look at this differentiation: it is prevalent throughout societies. For example, exploitation of women by men, or of children by older ones or grown-ups; of servants by masters; of workers by employees; of debtors by usurers; of immigrants by natives – or of natives by immigrants, depending only on who has the power to exploit the others, who is strong enough to take advantage of the meek and weak, leading directly to slavery: working slavery, debt slavery, war prisoners slavery, political slavery, sex slavery, you name it. Millions of people suffer from this inhumanity even today. A large part of the development of human rights, of law, of trade union power has to do with overcoming discrimination of the weak by those in power – and this struggle is far from ended.

Own group versus foreign groups: although this other mighty reason of discrimination may include economic exploitation, it is – individually and socially – often going far beyond that. It does not only disempower the weaker, it denies them the most basic human rights and often human status altogether, treating them like animals, or worse. Shamefully, this is the area where natural science and especially allegedly evolutionary Darwinism most often and most severely failed, and thus discredited itself for many forever – particularly in Nazi Germany! Of course, it is true that, in many societies, more powerful adult men frequently exploit women or children because the latter are weaker and less protected for very simple genetic or developmental reasons. Thus, we might call them also genetically discriminated against. But there are much more crueller cases than these – for example, the most devastating mass-murders in human history and, as I am sorry to admit, committed especially by Germans: aided and abetted by science and, even worse, by pseudo-science in the garb of scientific truth. Of course, there was no direct way ‘From Darwin to Hitler’, as Richard WeikartReference Weikart⁴ titled his 2004 book. But he is right in stating that Hitler was influenced by the misconception of Darwinism, as he learned it, and many biologists, anthropologists, human geneticists, physicians, lawyers and so on, supported him in that evil and mistaken view – all in the name of science!

Evidently, I am talking of racism (or, as is was called in those days, to make it sound almost like modern medical practice: ‘racial hygiene’): a group of people defined by genealogy and genetic makeup that are discriminated against, making them genetic outcasts, non-members of one’s own social group, however defined, maybe infrahuman, ultimately non-human. There is nothing wrong with genealogies, nor with genetic peculiarities of groups of people, healthy ones or sick ones. The problem is a different one and not one of natural science at all, even if it seems to be such: what is a human being? What are his and her unalienable rights, or, as some like to put it: what is his or her human dignity? It is clearly not in their genes; nor in their human teeth or bipedal stride; or whatever else the natural diagnostic signs of a member of Homo sapiens may amount to. These methods may be good enough to differentiate between apes and humans, or between fossil Australopithecus and Homo. But do we really need a genetic test for knowing what a human being is? He or she stays one even without teeth or when unable to walk on his or her legs. Clearly enough it is us humans who define as human beings with equal rights all members of our species, whether male or female, young or old, African black or narrow-eyed Chinese. We recognize a human being – whether baby or disease-stricken old man, whether healthy Olympian winner or bed-ridden invalid. It is us – the human community – who attribute human rights and human dignity to each and every one of them – it is our legal system that safeguards it. It is not a natural gift – except from being a human being pertaining to the species sapiens of the genus Homo in the family of Hominidae, in the mammalian order of Primates, and so on. It is a cultural achievement, and whoever believes that human personality is defined by nature may fall into the racist trap of treating the other just like any other animal species.

Race is not exclusively a biological concept – at least as far as humans are concerned. Some biologists have tried to call geographically partly isolated subspecies ‘races’, but these are no natural kind, the limits from species to species are fluent, their genetic characterization is uncertain. Particularly in humans, it has long been shown that ‘races’ mean very little or nothing at all, geographically isolated subspecies no longer exist, genetically we are so mixed that even when ethnia have some genetic peculiarities – skin colours, hair forms, diseases – they mean nothing when compared with the intra-ethnic genetic variance.

The last ideology believing in alleged racial purity was Nazism in Germany: biological nonsense from the outset, morally ending in horrendous mass murder and a social catastrophe. Still, the notion of ‘race’ seems not easily to be gotten rid of. The journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Daedalus, devoted a whole issue to it in winter 2005 – mostly, quite correctly, by authors from the social sciences. Of course, there are genetic differences between people, and they are sometimes used to differentiate groups: but this does not make the people between these groups more mentally different from other groups than they may differ within them. Sociobiology teaches us that the evolution of social behaviour in animal and man needs the separation of groups – whether kin groups or more extended societies held together by other characteristics. This may indeed make human beings – like many other social animals – behaviourally, maybe even genetically, inclined towards xenophobia, making them treat inside group members differently – more cooperatively – than outsiders, who are more often aggressively repelled. Therefore, there may be roots for in-group, out-group conflicts in our human nature. However, what has so often been forgotten, and has led to terrible cruelty and crimes against people not regarded as insiders, is that to treat all humans humanely – that is, equal, as equally sharing in human dignity and human rights – is a matter completely independent from genetic differences pertaining between them. There are people that seem to believe that human equality depends on their genetic identity: what nonsense. As if we all had to be clones in order to share the same human dignity! As if discrimination against women, or redheads, or blue-eyed, or black-skinned, or people suffering from a genetic disease, would be warranted if it were proven that they were different for genetic reasons. Of course, they may be. But for this very reason it is so important that to be human is a moral social attribute, which human beings have decided to confer on themselves – not some biological diagnostic characteristic. To repeat this most important argument: humanity is a cultural, a mental, a moral concept, defined in free agreement by humans!

Some believe that it must be some natural quality that makes humans humane – like natural law, as Catholics say – but they sooner or later come into unsolvable conflict with our evolutionary understanding of how the world and how the human species in it has evolved. Not only would it really make humans ‘the third chimpanzee’, it would make the human species just another animal species, morally indistinct from them – in the end it might even make cannibalism natural for them! To endow every human being with human dignity – whatever his or her alleged ‘race’ or skin-colour, ethnic background, religious creed, sex, age or health, from birth until death, whether by natural means or self-inflicted – is a free decision of humanity as a moral agent. It follows that it is the law – human law, legal law, not natural law! – that defines who should be regarded as a human being and treated as such, e.g. before birth, whether at the point of conception or after up to three months in the womb.

This, indeed, burdens humankind with much responsibility, with responsibilities for itself, as it were, but insight into Darwinian evolution leaves us no other choice. That is why so many refuse these insights and seek rescue in other world-views – with little success in the long run, because the facts of nature will stay as they are. And Darwinian evolution of humans is a fact, however much some may regret and deny it.

One has to admit that this sobering realism, about humans being alone and fully responsible for themselves, even for their own definition, has some dangerous, but inescapable consequences: there might always happen along some people – like the National Socialists, but also many others before and after – who draw the reckless unethical conclusion from all this that they are consequently free to decide themselves who they want to include as members of their ideology, religion, race, or society, and who not, relegating the latter to the despicable status of inhuman, of under-human slaves, perhaps even without the right to live. Think of the horrors of ‘eugenics’ (what a euphemism!) which denies the right to life to the genetically handicapped. No German invention by the way, nor one by biologists: it was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, a social scientist, who first thought of this, and many scientists and non-scientist law-makers in many a continent followed along this path, though admittedly none did so to the cruel final consequences of Nazi Germany.

One has to face these dangers, because they will keep coming up in new disguises, and this because they seem to follow so logically from Darwinism. Thank your lucky stars if you are never exposed to such Darwinist temptations – scientific, biological Darwinism is quite sufficient in all its complexities; human social affairs are an entirely different, but always very serious matter, maybe sometimes stemming originally – that is, in origin – from Darwinian evolution, but never ever ending in it, hopefully. The only way to resist these Darwinist temptations is to frankly ask the people themselves – throughout the globe – in which world and in which human society they would want to live, to ask not only the masters, but to ask also those committed to slavery and drudgery. They will, by their free, democratic decisions guided by human desires for justice and enlightened by education instead of by ideological doctrines, decide for themselves, for justice and wellbeing for all. At least that holds true in theory, hopefully also in reality. As I said before, TINA – there is no alternative – or at least hardly one. This is the human predicament in an evolutionary, Darwinian world – the world we all live in. The gist of what I want to say is this: there has been and there continues to be a lot of misunderstanding of the venerable Charles Darwin, and plenty of misuse has been made of his name. But what we should really take earnestly is the real message of Darwinian evolution – even if we avoid Darwinist ideology and even more so Social Darwinist distortions of his insights into nature. What he really tells us more and more forcefully as we approach the tenth billion in population, this terrifying ubiquity of humans, of their needs and their greeds, is that we are a very special creature, though fully descended by Darwinian principals form animals, a species with moral needs and moral yearnings, yet beyond this with very little guidance from nature as to what these morals should be. We are creatures left alone to find out for ourselves what sense and goals we should give to our lives, with a lot of knowledge about the past, but with painfully little knowledge about the future of our kind. Yet the human creature also has a lot of hope as its major strength.

What evolutionary thinking really did for humanity – and where other ideologies and even religions often failed miserably – was twofold. One contribution came from the monk and geneticist Gregor Mendel who paved the way for a deeper genetic understanding of evolution. He proved convincingly – together with R.A. Fisher, who gave the proof the finishing touch – that the two sexes contribute equally, genetically, to their offspring, thus demonstrating that females and males are equal by nature, notwithstanding all their differences in habits, whether by nature or nurture. Of course, they are – from culture – equal before the law, but it was Mendel who made it impossible to refer to ‘natural differences’ between them in order to justify the – again culturally – prevalent and still widely ongoing discrimination against women.

The second argument for the natural evolution of humanity was, of course, given by Charles Darwin himself, when he proved once and for all that by their natural evolution all human beings are equal members of one and the same species Homo sapiens. Whatever their genetic differences, so often referred to in order to discriminate against handicapped individuals, ‘races’ or cultures, there is nothing in nature that can justify the discrimination of ‘inferior races’ or ‘inferior populations’ by allegedly ‘superior’ – often white-coloured – ones according to presumed Darwinian evolutionary principles. Again, it was not evolution that gave all human individuals equal rights and equal human dignity: this was a cultural achievement. However, nothing in nature can be used – as it is so often the case – to vindicate racism or slavery of any kind. Darwin proved natural human equality beyond any doubt, notwithstanding all the existing differences between us, and even if we may look or behave differently, which we indeed do – a thing moreover we should esteem highly according to truly evolutionary principles.