© Colin W. Mitchell, Ph. D.

EVOLUTION AND WORLD-VIEW

Our actions are based on our beliefs, and the collective actions of groups and societies are based on their collective beliefs. Such collective beliefs constitute a world-view. This can be defined as the whole complex of ideas held by a society or group by which they relate themselves to the cosmos. Our world-view to a large extent governs our behaviour. In order to understand behaviour, we must understand the beliefs which underlie it.

Much that we do today derives from scientific ideas which have developed over the past century and a half. An important component of this is Darwin's theory of evolution. It is therefore important to understand what it says, how it arose, and what its effects have been. This book begins by considering the last of these. We can best appreciate the relevance of the pros and cons of the theory when we see the range of its effects on the beliefs and actions of our own society.

World-views consist of sets of paradigms. These are smaller sets of interrelated ideas which together form the whole. The European medieval world-view, for instance, included such paradigms as belief in the Christian revelation, the divinely-ordained authority of Church and State, and the finality of Greek science. The Renaissance modified this by reintroducing a paradigm of classical culture.

History shows a persistent human search for a unitary world-view which co-ordinates ethics and science into a single explanatory system. Some periods have seemed to approach this objective. For example, the Roman Empire under the Antonines and Europe at the height of the Middle Ages appear to have achieved a sort of synthesis, but this did not extend beyond their boundaries and was never universally accepted within them. The same search for a unitary world-view continues today, and has Darwin's Theory of Evolution as one of its basic paradigms.

At any time there seem to be three sorts of paradigm: those that contribute to the current world-view, those that can be harmonized with it, and those that cannot be harmonized with it. The third category, if pursued, can generate a change in the world-view, sometimes called a 'gestalt switch'.¹

The theory of evolution was such a paradigm. It was largely instrumental in causing a revolution in the scientific view of origins. This undermined the Victorian world-view and was largely responsible for the gestalt switch to today's evolution-dominated world-view.

Darwin's theory is twofold: a special theory of intraspecific micro-evolution and a general theory of trans-specific macro-evolution. Micro-evolution teaches that the survival of the fittest by natural selection caused significant changes to occur within many types of living creature. He obtained convincing evidence for this on the voyage of the Beagle, and it was abundantly confirmed by subsequent work. Geographical isolation was seen to cause species to develop divergently in different environments and ultimately to deny them the ability to breed with cousins. Such changes have been claimed, for example, for the peppered moth, the European gull, the Drosophila fruit fly.

Macro-evolution goes much farther. It states that all living things have arisen by a naturalistic, mechanistic, evolutionary process from a single living source which itself rose by a similar process from a dead inanimate world. It has been called the 'amoeba-man theory'. It goes beyond the limited variations of micro-evolution. It transgresses the limits of what the King James Version of the Bible calls 'kinds'. This word is a translation of the Hebrew word min which is used to describe the main divisions of plants and animals. It is not possible to tie this term to a specific scientific definition. In Genesis 1 it refers to broad group, such as fruit trees, herbs, cattle, and fowls. In Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 it concerns somewhat narrower classes such as beetles, storks, mice, and tortoises. It is never used of humans. It seems most reasonable to conclude that a 'kind', when applied to the animal kingdom approximates to a group of creatures that are interfertile where the chromosomes of both parents contribute to the offspring, and therefore can hybridize. Hereinafter, the word 'evolution' will be used in the sense of macro-evolution which transgresses these limits.

The idea of macro-evolution questioned the biblical record in a way that few earlier scientific ideas had done. If all life was ultimately descended from simple mono-cellular creatures, humans were not created by a special divine act, but were the product of a long random process, and the Earth must be more than a few thousand years old.

The theory appeared in an environment which already questioned biblical authority in science. The eighteenth-century Deists rejected the Bible as a source of knowledge, looking to mankind's own powers of reasoning to determine what we should believe and how we should act. They did not disbelieve in God but restricted His role simply to the opening acts of creation, after which the world operated as a vast machine controlled by scientific laws, such as Newton's law of motions.

Biblical authority had also long been questioned by geologists. The early nineteenth century witnessed a debate between Vulcanists, who saw volcanic activity as the dominant factor in forming the Earth's landscapes, and Neptunists who ascribed them mainly to a flood.

Evolution's intellectual triumph has led to the acceptance of its ethical and philosophical implications. It has altered our whole world-view. The change in the idea of the fixity of species has led to a change in our view of the nature of truth and ethics. It has led to a belief in the conditionality of moral principles and encouraged the acceptance of 'situation ethics'. We have lost concept of absolutes. Where there are no absolutes there can be no truth; where there is no truth there can be no justice; and where there is no justice there can be no hope. Thus an absence of absolutes leads to a paradigm change that Schaeffer² called falling below a 'line of despair'. The change in thinking has been profound and world-wide.

It came after about 1890 in Europe and after about 1935 in the USA. Before these dates people had operated on suppositions essentially the same as the Christian's. Absolutes counted. If something was true, the opposite was false. If one told somebody to be good, they might not obey, but at least they knew what one meant. Or if one said something like 'this is true', it would be taken in an absolute sense. Since these dates, however, terms such as 'good' and 'true' have lost meaning, and have become relative and conditional.³ The criteria of virtue and merit have become evolutionary success or practicality rather than accordance with absolute standards.

Geographically the change occurred first in Germany, then on the rest of the Continent, then in Britain, then the USA. Socially it occurred first among intellectuals, then among workers, then in the bourgeoisie. Intellectually it began in science and then moved to philosophy, the arts, general culture, education and, last of all, to theology.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE EVOLUTIONARY WORLD-VIEW

Certain specific consequences have followed from the acceptance of evolution.

In science, humanity is seen as not differing fundamentally from animals. Not only our physical characteristics but also our mental and moral outlook have all evolved. We do not differ from animals in kind, only in degree. Nature is a struggle. Cells and organisms do not collaborate but compete and fight. Progress is random, deriving from natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

In philosophy, the change can be seen in the destruction of the concept of fixity, an absence of absolutes. As natural forms change, so does knowledge and reality. Ethics develop from situations. There is a generally hopeful view of human progress, a belief that we are moving forwards and upwards. Conflicts between individuals and groups may sometimes be justified on the ground that this is the path of evolutionary progress.

In music and the arts, there has been a loss of structure. The emphasis is on personal experience and expression. There is a frustrating search for universals. Because absolutes have been lost, there is a striving for something to take their place. Picasso, for instance, changed his forms of self-expression throughout his life. He saw a solution in the Marxist synthesis, but towards the end of his life tended to retreat into hedonism. Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Munch all in different ways illustrate a search for the lost universal, but moved towards despair in not finding it. Modern music and drama tend to favour unconstrained self expression and show an absence of structure. The criteria of merit are the originality and forcefulness of the imagery.

In psychology, human behaviour patterns are seen as deriving from animal origins. Freud's emphasis on the sexual explanation of psychology was based on this idea. Appleton,⁴ for instance, has suggested that our aesthetic reactions to the environment are atavistic, deriving from a remote animal ancestry. We evaluate landscape features from the point of view of their suitability as prospects for finding food and necessities, or as refuges from danger.

In the social sciences, the concept of sin is rejected. Man is seen as basically good. His circumstances are determined by economic needs. His relationship to his environment is analogous to that of animals to their habitats, without a supernatural component. Evolutionary success through natural selection and survival of the fittest becomes the social as well as the biological imperative. Consequently, the emphasis in practical work is shifted away from personal regeneration towards the improvement of relationships and 'social engineering'. Our responsibility to our society comes to preceae, ana wnere necessary to replace, any higher claim.

In business, there is a tendency to esteem strife and selfish competition. Two well-known industrialists who became outstanding philanthropists illustrate this. Andrew Carnegie was first deeply troubled by the consequences of evolutionary theory, but came to accept it as desirable when he saw the law of competition as biological. He said, 'It is clear we cannot evade it. While the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race.'

John D. Rockefeller said:

There has always been a tendency for universities, first founded to teach religion, to become secularized. This process has accelerated over the past decades. Within academic disciplines the penetration of evolutionary thought has led to secularization, first of the sciences, then of the social sciences, and now increasingly of liberal arts subjects such as languages and literature. This is because the secularization of science leads to the appearance of the same ideas in non-scientific writing. Early examples of this trend in literature were Wells, Shaw, and Ibsen.

Evolution has, by its emphasis on random processes, encouraged the concept of a world without God. This has had three discernible results in modern fiction and drama. First, it has contributed to a widespread avoidance of moral absolutes, so that attitudes and behaviour which in the past would have been considered taboo, have become acceptable. Secondly, it has encouraged a stress on social, rather than individual, morality; organizational restructuring rather than personal redemption. This inspired some socially idealistic literature and drama, especially in Communist countries, but its inadequacy in practise to solve many human problems formed a theme for such novels as Conrad's Heart of Darkness,⁶ 0rwell's Animal Farm⁷ and Golding's Lord of the Flies.⁸ In these, an underlying human bestiality dooms utopian idealism to failure. Thirdly a belief in evolution is linked to Existentialism through its scientific justification of a purposeless world. It has thus indirectly influenced fiction which draws its inspiration from Existentialism. This can be seen in the novels of Orwell, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, and the plays and novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Kafka's The Castle⁹ and The Trial¹⁰ and Orwell's 1984,¹¹ for instance, illustrate a final effect of Existentialism - a failure to establish personality, a sort of reduction to nothingness.

Evolution has had a profound influence on politics and war. A philosophical justification for authoritarianism had come from Rousseau's concept of the 'general will'. This was a consensus to be determined by majority voice. Once determined all must obey it. It provided a rationale for the authoritarianism of the French revolutionary government. Evolution has probably increased the potential of this concept for oppressive ruthlessness by implicitly accepting that ends justify means that it is creditable to be unscrupulous in a good cause.

In every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power, and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens. All of them, when appeals to greed or glory failed, or even before, invoked Spencer and Darwin as providing the scientific justification. War itself was regarded as beneficial. Earlier commanders such as Napoleon, Nelson, and Wellington had seen war at first hand and described it for what it was, in simple, unpleasant words. By contrast some writers in the second half of the nineteenth century poeticized war and luxuriated in the prospect of it. They took it for granted that all struggles were struggles for life and the death of the loser its 'natural' goal. The ability of English colonists to defeat and kill native Australians was, for instance, regarded by some as a mark of their superiority.¹²

An evolution-influenced view was characteristic of the political extremes, both left and right.

Engels believed strongly in evolution: