Happy Birthday Darwin!!!

The man revolutionized how we view ourselves. We see ourselves as much more a part of the world we inhabit after Darwin than we did before him. It's a little presumptuous, but I think it's still fair to say that we are the pinnacle of evolution thus far, but we are still part of a process that produced all the life we see. We're all connected, and that is an important thing to know as we approach life. Darwin was not the first to suspect this, of course. But he also gave us a way of thinking about processes that produce order. Order emerges because order survives adversity. Evolutionary thinking has spread to almost every other field of inquiry because of the power of this idea.

One of my favorite posts from just over a year ago is on Evolution and the Pitfalls of Teleological Thinking, which may be of interest to people on Darwin's birthday.

*****

I also can't help pointing out a Keynes-Darwin connection. John Maynard Keynes's younger brother, Geoffrey, ended up marrying Charles Darwin's granddaughter. They had a son - Richard Darwin Keynes - who assisted in biological research that lead to a Nobel Prize for the primary investigator, Alan Hodgkin. Richard Darwin Keynes also spent a lot of his career studying and collecting information on his great-grandfather's voyages. In addition to this work on his great-grandfather, Richard helped to edit a volume on his uncle - John Maynard Keynes, and his relationship with Lydia Lopokova.

This is John Maynard Keynes on Darwin in The End of Laissez-Faire (1926):

"By the time that the influence of Paley and his like was waning, the innovations of Darwin were shaking the foundations of belief. Nothing could seem more opposed than the old doctrine and the new - the doctrine which looked on the world as the work of the divine watchmaker and the doctrine which seemed to draw all things out of Chance, Chaos, and Old Time. But at this one point the new ideas bolstered up the old. The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition - that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that - free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalisation of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of ocean.

Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing - individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin."

Keynes's critique of the way Darwin was used here should be familiar to anyone that knows about the debates over "Social Darwinism". It also shouldn't be surprising, given the tremendous influence that the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore had on Keynes. Social Darwinism is practically a textbook case of the "naturalistic fallacy", which Moore discussed at length in a Principia Ethica (1903), a guiding work for Keynes and the entire Bloomsbury Group. Darwin emphatically rejected what would become popularly known as Social Darwinism in his 1882 book The Descent of Man.