- Email: [email protected]
For Darwin read Malthus
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 64e66
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Essay review
For Darwin read Malthus Chris Renwick Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, Piers Hale. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2014). 464 pp. Price $45.00, cloth, ISBN: 9780226108490
As even the most casual observer will know, the relationship between biology and politics has always been fraught. Our understandings of class, gender, and the role of government in society are just three issues that have never been too far away from biology and evolutionary theory during the past two hundred years. But agreement on what lessons, if any, we should draw from biology when it comes to society has always been hard to come by. To be sure, there are ideas that have become something of a consensus across particular parts of the political spectrum, largely because they have endured for long enough among a large enough number of people. One idea of this kind, captured most famously and succinctly in the UNESCO statements on race, which were written in the shadow of the Second World War, is that race is a social category that can not be supported with appeals to biological evidence. Even though the production of the UNESCO statements were much more difficult than one might expect, given the recent memory of Nazi death camps, this idea has been an important mainstay of liberal and left leaning politics and science since the 1950s. Yet, as the controversies over biologically informed social science since then, from sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to the current enthusiasm for the “neuro”, have shown, agreement on issues like race seldom means agreement on much else. It should therefore be no surprise that the history of the intersection of biology and politics features the kind of heated and vitriolic debates that were capable of ruining friendships forged in earlier battles over the merits of evolutionary theory itself. One such clash was between T. H. Huxley (1893), “Darwin’s Bulldog”, and Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest”, over what Huxley called “administrative nihilism”: the belief,
E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.03.005 1369-8486/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
rejected by Huxley, who was keen for the state to commit more resources to science, that progress can only be secured if governments keep out of society (Desmond, 1997; Huxley 1894). Spencer, in turn, argued with the German biologist August Weismann about the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s evolutionary mechanism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, whereby organisms are capable of passing on to their offspring modifications they acquire during their lifetimes, which had serious implications for not only evolutionary theory but also the widely held belief that humans are capable of improving their fundamental nature and character through transformative struggle and effort. Later, during the interwar years, the biologist and communist J. B. S. Haldane and the philosopher and liberal Bertrand Russell debated whether any good could come from interfering with humans’ genetic make-up or attempting to alter their basic biological and reproductive processes, such as pregnancy and childbirth. All of these debates, plus the more recent controversies over sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and the current enthusiasm for neuroscience, have meant historians such as Daniel Kevles (1985) and Diane B. Paul (1998a, 1998b), authors of the standard works on the history of eugenics, have been almost spoilt for choice when it comes to subject matter. An important feature of the relationship between biology and politics is that there has never been a clear line between past and the present. The Nazis have cast the longest shadow over biosocial science, of course, but they are far from the only dark chapter in the history of efforts to improve society through insights people believe they have derived from biology. Worries about “feeblemindedness” and differential fertility were everywhere in Europe and North America during the early twentieth century, for instance, spurring the development of intelligence testing and leading to interventions such as forced sterilizations of members of specific social groups. In this context, it is not simply that a scientist or theorist from the nineteenth century might be shown to have possessed opinions or beliefs that we have come to find objectionable e there are plenty of people beyond biology who cause worries of that kind e but that there are lines of causation with the potential to link those thinkers to what we would now describe as
C. Renwick / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 64e66
crimes against humanity. The most famous and controversial claim of this kind is the American historian Richard Weikart’s (2006) argument that Charles Darwin bears some responsibility for the Holocaust, not because he imagined or endorsed something like it happening but because his theory put humans and animals on the same level, which created the intellectual space for an evolutionary ethics that made an act like the Holocaust inevitable. Few historians have been persuaded by Weikart’s argument, with many pointing to his membership of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute as evidence of his argument’s dubious credentials. Yet other studies with different intellectual commitments, such as Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s (2009) work on Darwin’s anti-slavery beliefs, seem no less guilty of wishing to frame the history of evolution with a particular political tradition in mind. Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Descent in Victorian England, a study of a series of episodes in the history of evolutionary thought from around 1800 through to the First World War, is Piers J. Hale’s contribution to this field. An exercise in intellectual history of the kind that attempts to recover not just what people thought but what was at stake e politically, scientifically, and professionally e when they argued with their peers, the book explores the relationships between different nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers whose lives and work were entangled with both each other and their era’s debates about evolution. Some of these thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Karl Pearson, are well known to historians of science; others, like the novelist, designer, and social activist, William Morris, less so. Hale explores their work across seven long and deeply researched chapters, which are organized chronologically and, as a general rule, focus on key debates, such as Spencer’s with Weismann and Huxley’s with the Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin over Darwin’s characterization of life in the natural world. In so doing, Hale develops a narrative rooted in questions about evolution’s moral and political meanings, drawing our attention to the difficulties thinkers faced when it came to reconciling, say, their commitment to Darwinian evolution with their belief government should be supporting scientific research or evidence that natural selection had ceased to operate in society. As the book’s title suggests, Hale’s aim is not simply to understand these ideas and debates on their own terms but also to show how they are joined together in broader narratives that shaped the formation of clear positions on evolution and society. Hale’s main argument is that the nineteenth century was characterized by a long-running opposition between two opposing traditions of evolutionary thought: one rooted in Lamarckian mechanisms and politics; the other we now call Darwinian but with its roots in Malthusianism. Hale’s starting point is Adrian Desmond’s (1992) work on early nineteenth-century British scientific and political radicals’ enthusiasm for transmutation theories, which Hale wants to extend past the publication of On the Origin of Species. But most scholars will be more familiar with James Secord’s (2001) hugely influential work on Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which showed how the four decades before 1859 were a fertile time for middle-class radicals who saw transmutation as a scientific resource for their efforts to challenge the static worldview of the ruling political and scientific establishments. According to Hale, those debates were not entirely or even mainly about evolution. On the contrary, he argues, evolution was really the packaging for a variety of ideas that were connected to each other in interesting and consequential ways. The most important of those ideas was the Rev. T. R. Malthus’ population principle: the claim that human societies are constrained by laws that mean populations grow much faster than the resources needed to maintain them. We, of course, know that Malthus’ idea played a significant role in leading Darwin and Alfred Russel
65
Wallace to their theories. For Hale, though, when people such as Huxley asked what consequences evolution should have for humans, they were also asking what consequences Malthus should have for society. Had Malthus given a warning about the constraints humans would always operate under or, as earlier radical liberals and Whigs argued, had he drawn our attention to the mechanism by which progress was secured? The nineteenth-century debates about evolution were rooted in this question as much as they were anything else. In this sense, Political Descent is a contribution to our understanding of the wider, longer, and deeply political narrative of which Darwin’s work was a part and shows us that Malthus was the something like a dog whistle that enabled Darwin’s contemporaries to immediately recognize the very Whiggish place he occupied in it. Yet in this respect, after a masterful reflective historiographical survey in the book’s introduction, the first two long chapters fall slightly flat. The reason is that they add little to what anyone acquainted with the literature on the subjects would not already know. The first chapter, which takes us through the three decades leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species, deals with the political, particularly the Malthusian, context in which Darwin constructed his theory, covering Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle, what Jonathan Hodge (2009) called his “notebook programme”, his attitudes to race, and his position in the fast-changing political context of the 1830s and 40s, all of which have been covered amply in the vast output of the Darwin industry. The second chapter, dealing with the genesis of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy and his intentions in writing it, treads ground that will be familiar to readers of Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse, and Mark Francis, to name just three scholars who have helped us dispense with the caricature of Spencer that was widely accepted throughout most of the twentieth century. These chapters exhibit a deep understanding of the issues at stake, both scientific and political, and are written with great care and attention. If you were asked to recommend something to someone who did not know the field, including students ready to grapple with the finer points of the politics of evolution in early nineteenth-century Britain, then these two chapters will top many lists for years to come. Yet experts will find little new in them. However, this observation should not detract from the numerous serious and important achievements that characterize the second two thirds of Political Descent and mean it should be read widely by scholars of both late nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and British history more generally. To be sure, these three chapters are not unproblematic. For instance, Hale’s exploration of radicalism during the late nineteenth century does not quite consider the significance of the fact his left of centre but still mainstream thinkers are quite different from Desmond’s excluded transmutationists. Nevertheless, Hale has a genuine mastery of key aspects of radicalism and emerging social culture. This enables him to convey how key moments, such the split between the liberal and Whig wings of radicalism, broadly speaking the winners and losers from the political reforms of the early 1830s, laid tracks that subsequent thinkers would follow (pp. 151e206). Yet it also provides insights into the reasons those thinkers, particularly the leftwing thinkers, disagreed over the implications of specific issues from contemporary evolutionary debate. These insights are important because the relationship between the full spectrum of leftwing thought, from the kind of technocratic rationalism represented by the Fabians to the kind of ethical cooperativism embodied here by William Morris, has seldom received the focus it deserves from historians of science, particularly when it comes to eugenics. Instead, historians have preferred to focus on the liberal and Whig traditions in nineteenth-century Britain e a decision that reflects both Darwin’s distorting effect on the field
66
C. Renwick / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 64e66
and the political leanings of many of the scholars who have tackled the subject. David Stack’s First Darwinian Left (2003), which covers many of the same thinkers as Political Descent, is the standard work on these subjects. These two books are quite different, though, for Hale, unlike Stack, offers a take on late nineteenth-century evolution and the left that seeks to root it in a longer running narrative. Some historians will take issue with the fairly rigid two-party landscape Hale depicts the late nineteenth-century debates about evolution and society as. But, if you are prepared to accept that as more idealtype than fine-grained taxonomy, Political Descent offers deep insights derived from Hale’s close study of individuals and the stream of ideas and assumptions they were swimming in and against. The final three chapters, dealing with Huxley, Kropotkin, Weismann, and a host of British socialists, including H. G. Wells and William Morris, grapple with a range of questions, such as the problems Weismann’s germ plasm theory posed by for socialists and radicals, who frequently attached most importance to Lamarckian mechanisms of acquired characteristics as the motor of social change. As Hale points out, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was important to many leftwing thinkers because it was essential to their aim of “manufacturing” socialists. Morris’ emphasis on the aesthetic dimensions of the material world, for instance, was underpinned by the belief that once people had acquired social democratic tastes, they could be passed on to the next generation. Indeed, as Hale explains, this belief was the reason a whole range of ideas and cultural and social movements, such as vegetarianism, put down roots during the late nineteenth century. Hale’s treatment of Francis Galton’s one-time protégée, Karl Pearson e who has been a challenge for many historians of statistics, who have frequently tried to keep his fervent eugenic beliefs and his technical achievements separate e also provides valuable insights. As Hale shows, Pearson, a Darwinian who pioneered the statistical analysis of evolutionary change that would become known as “biometrics”, struggled with Weismann’s germ plasm argument. The reason was the kind of complex mix of biology and politics that appears throughout Political Descent. Pearson was a socialist and so the idea that there might be what contemporaries called a “residuum” in society was a challenge, both scientifically because natural selection should eliminate the unfit and politically because of his commitment to the working class meant he could not endorse the kind of policies we now call social Darwinism. It was this challenge, as much as anything else, that explains why Pearson developed a version of Darwinism in which natural selection had been suspended within nations but continued to operate between them e the ancestor, as Hale skillfully and subtly points out, of group selection theories that would be discussed at various junctures during the twentieth century (pp. 325e9, pp. 350e1). Competition between nations ensured efficiency but only if nations pursued eugenic, rather than social Darwinist, means of internal governance. Given discussion of subjects of this kind make up less than half his book, Hale’s modest approach means he fails to give himself the significant credit he deserves for illuminating them. If anything, the reader is left wondering if this book should
really have been cast as the book we really need on evolutionism and the left. Political Descent therefore makes significant contributions to a wide range of interconnected historiographies and will become a standard work on the intersection of biology and politics e a formulation Hale would no doubt question on the grounds biology is always, on his account, political. The book will also come to be considered also as a significant contribution to an emerging new historiography on Malthus: the figure who seldom appears in person in Political Descent but haunts its discussions throughout. As two other recent books by Matthew Mayhew (2014) and Alison Bashford (2014) have also argued, Malthus’ population principle, if not Malthus himself, has been a fixture of scientific and political debates in European and North American culture since the early nineteenth century. The worries the principle has been tied to have often changed and people have grappled with the problem of what conclusions can be drawn from Malthus’ warnings about the relationship between populations and their means of subsistence. As Hale shows, the theme that joins that discussion with the one about evolution is whether Malthus discovered something that will always limit our grandest ambitions or if, in fact, he revealed a mechanism that, once known, can be the motor of future progress. It was this tension, which goes to the heart of what we think is the appropriate way to organize society, that underpinned arguments between any number of thinkers during the nineteenth century. Hale has performed an important service by drawing our attention to this fact again. References Bashford, A. (2014). Global population: History, geopolitics and life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Desmond, A. (1992). The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Desmond, A. (1997). Huxley: Evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph. Desmond, A., & Moore, J. (2009). Darwin’s sacred cause: Race, slavery, and the quest for human origins. London: Penguin. Hodge, J. (2009). The notebook programmes and projects of Darwin’s London years. In J. Hodge, & G. Radick (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Darwin (2nd ed.). (pp. 44e72) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, T. H. (1893). Administrative nihilism. In T. H. Huxley (Ed.), Method and results: Vol. 1. Collected essays, 9 vols.. London: Macmillan. Essay first published in 1871. Huxley, T. H. (1894). The struggle for existence in human society. In T. H. Huxley (Ed.), Evolution, ethics, and other essays: Vol. 9. Collected essays, 9 vols. London: Macmillan. Essay first published in 1887. Kevles, D. J. (1985). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. New York: Knopf. Mayhew, R. J. (2014). Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Paul, D. B. (1998a). Controlling human heredity: 1865 to the present. New York: Humanity Books. Paul, D. B. (1998b). The politics of heredity: Essays on eugenics, biomedicine, and the nature-nurture debate. Albany: State University of New York Press. Secord, J. A. (2001). Victorian sensation: The extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of vestiges of the natural history of creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stack, D. (2003). The first darwinian left: Socialism and darwinism, 1859e1914. Cheltenham: New Clarion. Weikart, R. (2006). From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Essay review
For Darwin read Malthus Chris Renwick Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, Piers Hale. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2014). 464 pp. Price $45.00, cloth, ISBN: 9780226108490
As even the most casual observer will know, the relationship between biology and politics has always been fraught. Our understandings of class, gender, and the role of government in society are just three issues that have never been too far away from biology and evolutionary theory during the past two hundred years. But agreement on what lessons, if any, we should draw from biology when it comes to society has always been hard to come by. To be sure, there are ideas that have become something of a consensus across particular parts of the political spectrum, largely because they have endured for long enough among a large enough number of people. One idea of this kind, captured most famously and succinctly in the UNESCO statements on race, which were written in the shadow of the Second World War, is that race is a social category that can not be supported with appeals to biological evidence. Even though the production of the UNESCO statements were much more difficult than one might expect, given the recent memory of Nazi death camps, this idea has been an important mainstay of liberal and left leaning politics and science since the 1950s. Yet, as the controversies over biologically informed social science since then, from sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to the current enthusiasm for the “neuro”, have shown, agreement on issues like race seldom means agreement on much else. It should therefore be no surprise that the history of the intersection of biology and politics features the kind of heated and vitriolic debates that were capable of ruining friendships forged in earlier battles over the merits of evolutionary theory itself. One such clash was between T. H. Huxley (1893), “Darwin’s Bulldog”, and Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest”, over what Huxley called “administrative nihilism”: the belief,
E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.03.005 1369-8486/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
rejected by Huxley, who was keen for the state to commit more resources to science, that progress can only be secured if governments keep out of society (Desmond, 1997; Huxley 1894). Spencer, in turn, argued with the German biologist August Weismann about the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s evolutionary mechanism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, whereby organisms are capable of passing on to their offspring modifications they acquire during their lifetimes, which had serious implications for not only evolutionary theory but also the widely held belief that humans are capable of improving their fundamental nature and character through transformative struggle and effort. Later, during the interwar years, the biologist and communist J. B. S. Haldane and the philosopher and liberal Bertrand Russell debated whether any good could come from interfering with humans’ genetic make-up or attempting to alter their basic biological and reproductive processes, such as pregnancy and childbirth. All of these debates, plus the more recent controversies over sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and the current enthusiasm for neuroscience, have meant historians such as Daniel Kevles (1985) and Diane B. Paul (1998a, 1998b), authors of the standard works on the history of eugenics, have been almost spoilt for choice when it comes to subject matter. An important feature of the relationship between biology and politics is that there has never been a clear line between past and the present. The Nazis have cast the longest shadow over biosocial science, of course, but they are far from the only dark chapter in the history of efforts to improve society through insights people believe they have derived from biology. Worries about “feeblemindedness” and differential fertility were everywhere in Europe and North America during the early twentieth century, for instance, spurring the development of intelligence testing and leading to interventions such as forced sterilizations of members of specific social groups. In this context, it is not simply that a scientist or theorist from the nineteenth century might be shown to have possessed opinions or beliefs that we have come to find objectionable e there are plenty of people beyond biology who cause worries of that kind e but that there are lines of causation with the potential to link those thinkers to what we would now describe as
C. Renwick / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 64e66
crimes against humanity. The most famous and controversial claim of this kind is the American historian Richard Weikart’s (2006) argument that Charles Darwin bears some responsibility for the Holocaust, not because he imagined or endorsed something like it happening but because his theory put humans and animals on the same level, which created the intellectual space for an evolutionary ethics that made an act like the Holocaust inevitable. Few historians have been persuaded by Weikart’s argument, with many pointing to his membership of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute as evidence of his argument’s dubious credentials. Yet other studies with different intellectual commitments, such as Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s (2009) work on Darwin’s anti-slavery beliefs, seem no less guilty of wishing to frame the history of evolution with a particular political tradition in mind. Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Descent in Victorian England, a study of a series of episodes in the history of evolutionary thought from around 1800 through to the First World War, is Piers J. Hale’s contribution to this field. An exercise in intellectual history of the kind that attempts to recover not just what people thought but what was at stake e politically, scientifically, and professionally e when they argued with their peers, the book explores the relationships between different nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers whose lives and work were entangled with both each other and their era’s debates about evolution. Some of these thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Karl Pearson, are well known to historians of science; others, like the novelist, designer, and social activist, William Morris, less so. Hale explores their work across seven long and deeply researched chapters, which are organized chronologically and, as a general rule, focus on key debates, such as Spencer’s with Weismann and Huxley’s with the Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin over Darwin’s characterization of life in the natural world. In so doing, Hale develops a narrative rooted in questions about evolution’s moral and political meanings, drawing our attention to the difficulties thinkers faced when it came to reconciling, say, their commitment to Darwinian evolution with their belief government should be supporting scientific research or evidence that natural selection had ceased to operate in society. As the book’s title suggests, Hale’s aim is not simply to understand these ideas and debates on their own terms but also to show how they are joined together in broader narratives that shaped the formation of clear positions on evolution and society. Hale’s main argument is that the nineteenth century was characterized by a long-running opposition between two opposing traditions of evolutionary thought: one rooted in Lamarckian mechanisms and politics; the other we now call Darwinian but with its roots in Malthusianism. Hale’s starting point is Adrian Desmond’s (1992) work on early nineteenth-century British scientific and political radicals’ enthusiasm for transmutation theories, which Hale wants to extend past the publication of On the Origin of Species. But most scholars will be more familiar with James Secord’s (2001) hugely influential work on Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which showed how the four decades before 1859 were a fertile time for middle-class radicals who saw transmutation as a scientific resource for their efforts to challenge the static worldview of the ruling political and scientific establishments. According to Hale, those debates were not entirely or even mainly about evolution. On the contrary, he argues, evolution was really the packaging for a variety of ideas that were connected to each other in interesting and consequential ways. The most important of those ideas was the Rev. T. R. Malthus’ population principle: the claim that human societies are constrained by laws that mean populations grow much faster than the resources needed to maintain them. We, of course, know that Malthus’ idea played a significant role in leading Darwin and Alfred Russel
65
Wallace to their theories. For Hale, though, when people such as Huxley asked what consequences evolution should have for humans, they were also asking what consequences Malthus should have for society. Had Malthus given a warning about the constraints humans would always operate under or, as earlier radical liberals and Whigs argued, had he drawn our attention to the mechanism by which progress was secured? The nineteenth-century debates about evolution were rooted in this question as much as they were anything else. In this sense, Political Descent is a contribution to our understanding of the wider, longer, and deeply political narrative of which Darwin’s work was a part and shows us that Malthus was the something like a dog whistle that enabled Darwin’s contemporaries to immediately recognize the very Whiggish place he occupied in it. Yet in this respect, after a masterful reflective historiographical survey in the book’s introduction, the first two long chapters fall slightly flat. The reason is that they add little to what anyone acquainted with the literature on the subjects would not already know. The first chapter, which takes us through the three decades leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species, deals with the political, particularly the Malthusian, context in which Darwin constructed his theory, covering Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle, what Jonathan Hodge (2009) called his “notebook programme”, his attitudes to race, and his position in the fast-changing political context of the 1830s and 40s, all of which have been covered amply in the vast output of the Darwin industry. The second chapter, dealing with the genesis of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy and his intentions in writing it, treads ground that will be familiar to readers of Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse, and Mark Francis, to name just three scholars who have helped us dispense with the caricature of Spencer that was widely accepted throughout most of the twentieth century. These chapters exhibit a deep understanding of the issues at stake, both scientific and political, and are written with great care and attention. If you were asked to recommend something to someone who did not know the field, including students ready to grapple with the finer points of the politics of evolution in early nineteenth-century Britain, then these two chapters will top many lists for years to come. Yet experts will find little new in them. However, this observation should not detract from the numerous serious and important achievements that characterize the second two thirds of Political Descent and mean it should be read widely by scholars of both late nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and British history more generally. To be sure, these three chapters are not unproblematic. For instance, Hale’s exploration of radicalism during the late nineteenth century does not quite consider the significance of the fact his left of centre but still mainstream thinkers are quite different from Desmond’s excluded transmutationists. Nevertheless, Hale has a genuine mastery of key aspects of radicalism and emerging social culture. This enables him to convey how key moments, such the split between the liberal and Whig wings of radicalism, broadly speaking the winners and losers from the political reforms of the early 1830s, laid tracks that subsequent thinkers would follow (pp. 151e206). Yet it also provides insights into the reasons those thinkers, particularly the leftwing thinkers, disagreed over the implications of specific issues from contemporary evolutionary debate. These insights are important because the relationship between the full spectrum of leftwing thought, from the kind of technocratic rationalism represented by the Fabians to the kind of ethical cooperativism embodied here by William Morris, has seldom received the focus it deserves from historians of science, particularly when it comes to eugenics. Instead, historians have preferred to focus on the liberal and Whig traditions in nineteenth-century Britain e a decision that reflects both Darwin’s distorting effect on the field
66
C. Renwick / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 64e66
and the political leanings of many of the scholars who have tackled the subject. David Stack’s First Darwinian Left (2003), which covers many of the same thinkers as Political Descent, is the standard work on these subjects. These two books are quite different, though, for Hale, unlike Stack, offers a take on late nineteenth-century evolution and the left that seeks to root it in a longer running narrative. Some historians will take issue with the fairly rigid two-party landscape Hale depicts the late nineteenth-century debates about evolution and society as. But, if you are prepared to accept that as more idealtype than fine-grained taxonomy, Political Descent offers deep insights derived from Hale’s close study of individuals and the stream of ideas and assumptions they were swimming in and against. The final three chapters, dealing with Huxley, Kropotkin, Weismann, and a host of British socialists, including H. G. Wells and William Morris, grapple with a range of questions, such as the problems Weismann’s germ plasm theory posed by for socialists and radicals, who frequently attached most importance to Lamarckian mechanisms of acquired characteristics as the motor of social change. As Hale points out, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was important to many leftwing thinkers because it was essential to their aim of “manufacturing” socialists. Morris’ emphasis on the aesthetic dimensions of the material world, for instance, was underpinned by the belief that once people had acquired social democratic tastes, they could be passed on to the next generation. Indeed, as Hale explains, this belief was the reason a whole range of ideas and cultural and social movements, such as vegetarianism, put down roots during the late nineteenth century. Hale’s treatment of Francis Galton’s one-time protégée, Karl Pearson e who has been a challenge for many historians of statistics, who have frequently tried to keep his fervent eugenic beliefs and his technical achievements separate e also provides valuable insights. As Hale shows, Pearson, a Darwinian who pioneered the statistical analysis of evolutionary change that would become known as “biometrics”, struggled with Weismann’s germ plasm argument. The reason was the kind of complex mix of biology and politics that appears throughout Political Descent. Pearson was a socialist and so the idea that there might be what contemporaries called a “residuum” in society was a challenge, both scientifically because natural selection should eliminate the unfit and politically because of his commitment to the working class meant he could not endorse the kind of policies we now call social Darwinism. It was this challenge, as much as anything else, that explains why Pearson developed a version of Darwinism in which natural selection had been suspended within nations but continued to operate between them e the ancestor, as Hale skillfully and subtly points out, of group selection theories that would be discussed at various junctures during the twentieth century (pp. 325e9, pp. 350e1). Competition between nations ensured efficiency but only if nations pursued eugenic, rather than social Darwinist, means of internal governance. Given discussion of subjects of this kind make up less than half his book, Hale’s modest approach means he fails to give himself the significant credit he deserves for illuminating them. If anything, the reader is left wondering if this book should
really have been cast as the book we really need on evolutionism and the left. Political Descent therefore makes significant contributions to a wide range of interconnected historiographies and will become a standard work on the intersection of biology and politics e a formulation Hale would no doubt question on the grounds biology is always, on his account, political. The book will also come to be considered also as a significant contribution to an emerging new historiography on Malthus: the figure who seldom appears in person in Political Descent but haunts its discussions throughout. As two other recent books by Matthew Mayhew (2014) and Alison Bashford (2014) have also argued, Malthus’ population principle, if not Malthus himself, has been a fixture of scientific and political debates in European and North American culture since the early nineteenth century. The worries the principle has been tied to have often changed and people have grappled with the problem of what conclusions can be drawn from Malthus’ warnings about the relationship between populations and their means of subsistence. As Hale shows, the theme that joins that discussion with the one about evolution is whether Malthus discovered something that will always limit our grandest ambitions or if, in fact, he revealed a mechanism that, once known, can be the motor of future progress. It was this tension, which goes to the heart of what we think is the appropriate way to organize society, that underpinned arguments between any number of thinkers during the nineteenth century. Hale has performed an important service by drawing our attention to this fact again. References Bashford, A. (2014). Global population: History, geopolitics and life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Desmond, A. (1992). The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Desmond, A. (1997). Huxley: Evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph. Desmond, A., & Moore, J. (2009). Darwin’s sacred cause: Race, slavery, and the quest for human origins. London: Penguin. Hodge, J. (2009). The notebook programmes and projects of Darwin’s London years. In J. Hodge, & G. Radick (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Darwin (2nd ed.). (pp. 44e72) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, T. H. (1893). Administrative nihilism. In T. H. Huxley (Ed.), Method and results: Vol. 1. Collected essays, 9 vols.. London: Macmillan. Essay first published in 1871. Huxley, T. H. (1894). The struggle for existence in human society. In T. H. Huxley (Ed.), Evolution, ethics, and other essays: Vol. 9. Collected essays, 9 vols. London: Macmillan. Essay first published in 1887. Kevles, D. J. (1985). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. New York: Knopf. Mayhew, R. J. (2014). Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Paul, D. B. (1998a). Controlling human heredity: 1865 to the present. New York: Humanity Books. Paul, D. B. (1998b). The politics of heredity: Essays on eugenics, biomedicine, and the nature-nurture debate. Albany: State University of New York Press. Secord, J. A. (2001). Victorian sensation: The extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of vestiges of the natural history of creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stack, D. (2003). The first darwinian left: Socialism and darwinism, 1859e1914. Cheltenham: New Clarion. Weikart, R. (2006). From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.