Darwin for Doctors
Darwin for Doctors
If you ask people to summarise the ideas of Charles Darwin, they are quite likely to say that he created the concept of 'survival of the fittest.' They may go on to explain this means that stronger individuals generally prevail over weaker ones, and similarly that stronger species will usually survive, while weaker ones usually do not do so well. Evolution, they may state, is the long term process by which increasingly stronger organisms emerge, while others go to the wall as a result of being too feeble. They may even assert that Darwin regarded human beings as the prime example of how creatures with superior intelligence will always triumph over those endowed with less mental ability.
As it happens, all these statements are wrong. Darwin never invented the phrase 'survival of the fittest.' It was coined by another Victorian, the political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who tried to apply evolutionary ideas to society in a way that is generally acknowledged to be flawed. Darwin himself never argued that strength was the most crucial factor in whether different types of individuals or species were preserved into the next generation. His own idea of 'fitness' bore little relation to the modern concept of going to the gym and building up muscles. Instead, he was talking about the way certain varieties of organism in each generation turned out to 'fit' the changing environment around them, while others were less fortunate because their attributes happened to be less suitable when an unpredictable shift occurred in the geography, climate or ecology around them. Rather than believing that there would always be inexorable progress towards better types of life, Darwin recognised that the natural world was a vast interactive system, where new and different forms will always emerge in a continual cycle of change. He made no special claims for 'homo sapiens' other than pointing out that our specific abilities had, for the time being at least, enabled us to colonise a wide range of habitats, although not of course as many as some other kinds of species including birds.
It is probably quite common for people to misunderstand what great thinkers from the past have said, or to subscribe to dumbed down versions of this. In most cases – with Galileo or Einstein, for example – this matters little and is unlikely to do any harm. It the case of Darwin's ideas, it has at times been quite literally catastrophic. Herbert Spencer's erroneous view of evolution, which came to be known as 'social Darwinism', was used to provide intellectual justification for everything from the extermination of the Australian aboriginals to the Holocaust. It continues to dominate the views of many political and economic leaders, who are possessed with the conviction that the only way to achieve success is through aggressive competition rather than through an understanding of ecological processes – including the importance of mutual interdependence, and the risk that pursuing short term self-interest may imperil long term survival.
Introduction
If you ask people to summarise the ideas of Charles Darwin, they are quite likely to say that he created the concept of 'survival of the fittest.' They may go on to explain this means that stronger individuals generally prevail over weaker ones, and similarly that stronger species will usually survive, while weaker ones usually do not do so well. Evolution, they may state, is the long term process by which increasingly stronger organisms emerge, while others go to the wall as a result of being too feeble. They may even assert that Darwin regarded human beings as the prime example of how creatures with superior intelligence will always triumph over those endowed with less mental ability.
As it happens, all these statements are wrong. Darwin never invented the phrase 'survival of the fittest.' It was coined by another Victorian, the political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who tried to apply evolutionary ideas to society in a way that is generally acknowledged to be flawed. Darwin himself never argued that strength was the most crucial factor in whether different types of individuals or species were preserved into the next generation. His own idea of 'fitness' bore little relation to the modern concept of going to the gym and building up muscles. Instead, he was talking about the way certain varieties of organism in each generation turned out to 'fit' the changing environment around them, while others were less fortunate because their attributes happened to be less suitable when an unpredictable shift occurred in the geography, climate or ecology around them. Rather than believing that there would always be inexorable progress towards better types of life, Darwin recognised that the natural world was a vast interactive system, where new and different forms will always emerge in a continual cycle of change. He made no special claims for 'homo sapiens' other than pointing out that our specific abilities had, for the time being at least, enabled us to colonise a wide range of habitats, although not of course as many as some other kinds of species including birds.
It is probably quite common for people to misunderstand what great thinkers from the past have said, or to subscribe to dumbed down versions of this. In most cases – with Galileo or Einstein, for example – this matters little and is unlikely to do any harm. It the case of Darwin's ideas, it has at times been quite literally catastrophic. Herbert Spencer's erroneous view of evolution, which came to be known as 'social Darwinism', was used to provide intellectual justification for everything from the extermination of the Australian aboriginals to the Holocaust. It continues to dominate the views of many political and economic leaders, who are possessed with the conviction that the only way to achieve success is through aggressive competition rather than through an understanding of ecological processes – including the importance of mutual interdependence, and the risk that pursuing short term self-interest may imperil long term survival.
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