In the first of a series of articles marking the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, Steve Arnott argues for a new synthesis of Marxist and Darwinist ideas, and that in the field of biology and human nature, the left needs to abandon some cherished myths and shibboleths for a greater degree of genuinely scientific understanding.

1. What has Darwin ever done for us?

Introduction

If the work of Charles Darwin, its implications, development and modern synthesis, have traditionally been neglected by the media, then the year of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth has more than made up for it.

Particularly in the television sphere (and most notably from public sector broadcasters) there has been a plethora of programming on Darwin. Almost everything has been covered, from the voyage of the Beagle and his observations in the Galapagos Islands to the vital and imaginative experiments he carried out at his country house to prove aspects of natural selection; from his family life and his gradual retreat from religion (he begun early adulthood with the ambition to be a country pastor) to analysis after analysis on the great debates and distortions his key work has engendered since publication.  The comedian Harry Hill quipped on his Saturday night family show TV Burp ‘too many Darwin programmes on the telly at the moment’ – and got a good laugh from his live audience.  It was back handed compliment – the old naturalist and his work had impinged on the realm of mass consciousness in a way rarely seen before.

From all these ‘too many’ Darwin programmes a consistent picture of Charles Darwin emerged, however. He was a thorough and industrious intellect, but no natural self promoter and certainly not an instinctive polemicist like his contemporary, Marx. He was diffident, and careful, in parsing his conclusions. As a middle class English country gentleman of means and an already established naturalist of note, he was almost painfully aware of what publication of his ideas on the origin of species would mean in terms of its challenge to the cultural paradigms of the day - the religious explanation of creation, human exceptionalism and, arguably, West European white exceptionalism (though, of course, Darwin would not have thought of it in precisely these modern terms.)

The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It concentrated on presenting Darwin’s accumulated evidence for evolution by natural selection (and sexual selection) in the animal and plant kingdom, but one animal was notably absent from the discussion – homo sapiens. Darwin referred to natural selection and humankind only once in hundreds of pages of text in the splendidly isolated sentence ‘Light will be thrown on man and his history.’

Could Darwin have had any idea just how all-encompassing his ‘dangerous idea’ – to use philosopher Daniel Dennett’s now celebrated phrase – would become in the sphere of human discourse and history, not just in science, but in psychology, politics, sociology and economics?  Sitting in his garden at Down house on a drowsy summer’s day, halfway through the nineteenth century, perhaps jotting down notes from his latest experiments, could he possibly have had even a glimmer of either the predictive power or political potency of the simple, elegant idea he was shortly to unleash on the world? 

We can never know, of course, but I open this series of articles on Darwinism, Marxism, their connections and possible synthesis, with the quote that heads up this chapter for a very good reason. I want to indicate that at least once - perhaps in the passing - Charles Darwin entertained the idea that the explanatory power of his new approach to the natural world was a thoroughly revolutionary one for human ideas and philosophy.

Similarly, I want to indicate from Marx’s own words in the second quote, that, if we are to take his own careful language ‘literally’, then Marx was well aware of humankind’s biological status and origins, and of the multiply thirled dialectic that is the human animal of the ego and the human animal within society: our ‘species-being’.

Two long human lifetimes have passed since these words were written, and the distortions of Social Darwinism and the evils of Nazi eugenics did the same kind of damage to Darwin as Stalinist totalitarianism did to Marx.  Nevertheless, particularly since the discovery of genetics, the ideas of Darwin have proven to be one of the most enduring and powerful scientific paradigms in the history of human cultural achievement.  The huge majority of biologists and commentators now routinely make the point that Darwin’s theory of adaptive evolution through natural selection has such a weight of evidence to support it, from biology, the fossil record and the expanding libraries of decoded genomes of increasing numbers of species, that it long since made the qualitative leap from theory to established and undisputed scientific fact.

Yet the key memes of Darwinism, particularly in its modern developed form, its synthesis with the science of genetics and emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology, remain largely misunderstood – or perhaps, at best, only selectively understood – by the left. It will be the purpose of the first chapter in this series to show why this is the case and to begin to supply the necessary corrective.

A statement of intent

It will be the ambition of the piece as a whole – probably stretching over a number of issues of DGS magazine - to argue that a Marxism fit for the 21^st century and capable of appealing to the mass of humanity after the scars of the 20^th must be completed by a thorough understanding of human nature and psychology. And I will argue that that is best and most readily supplied by the rich, powerful, thoroughly dialectical and materialist picture of human consciousness and psychology that has emerged from the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the last twenty to thirty years.

My method will be to argue, stage by stage and topic by topic, that

a) the left has nothing to fear and a world to gain by abandoning its historically half baked approach to modern Darwinism, particularly the tired and redundant nature versus nurture debate, and enthusiastically embracing the study of modern evolutionary thinkers such as Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley and Pinker, and the work of the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman

b) that socialism can only make a claim to be scientific if it is prepared to integrate the secure findings of science into its world view

c) the findings of modern Darwinian science have much to commend themselves to the left, particularly the discovery of evolutionary strategies for co-operation in species, including homo sapiens

d) that one of the key reasons both revolutionary and social democratic movements of the left failed in the twentieth century was that they lacked an accurate understanding of human psychology – both individual and social – from evolutionary biology  

e) Marx’s great discovery of the labour theory of value, surplus production, class society, and how the particular mode of appropriation and exploitation within capitalist class society both produces the social power of capital and perpetuates humanity’s alienation from its ‘species-being’ meets/joins/collides with the modern Darwinian syntheses at three junctures: the division of labour, modern neuroscience, and an evolutionary science led understanding of the balance in human nature between the social instincts of co-operation, empathy and sympathy, and human individuality and ego

f) consequently, for the first time in history a unified Theory of Persons becomes possible that has explanatory and predictive power (within limits) for the behaviour of individual conscious beings, both as individuals and in their social life, and for the social and economic development of the aggregate bodies (societies) in which those individuals have their collective social being

g) that if the historic goal of ending the social power of capital over humankind is to be realised in the century ahead, and we are to create a united, progressive international society ‘that harnesses our collective energies, talents and wealth for the benefit of all our citizens while safeguarding and respecting individual freedom in all its aspects’, then such a Theory of Persons - a Darwinist/Marxist synthesis - will not only be necessary, it will be indispensable.  Such a theory would not replace existing critiques from the left of Stalinism, Leninism or Social Democracy.   It would view such critiques as necessary but insufficient and offer the possibility of modifying or completing them.

I should perhaps pause here and reassure readers of a deconstructionist or post-modernist bent. I am absolutely not calling here for a new totalising or foundationalist theory (in the language of that oeuvre) to replace those of the past.  It is my hope and intent that any Theory of Persons that emerges from this work, subsequent work, or work of others will be open, dynamic, non-dogmatic and embedded in the scientific method.

Similiarly, I should recognise that by this point, that there may be readers from an academic, philosophical or scientific background who will already fear I am well on the way down the road to two gargantuan errors. Firstly, the conflation of a scientific theory (Darwinism) with a social and philosophical but non-scientific theory (Marxism).  Secondly, that I have committed the dreaded ‘naturalistic fallacy’ exposed by David Hume and am deriving my moral ‘oughts’ from my scientific ‘is’s’.

On the first point I intend to take on Karl Popper and others and show that key propositions in Marx are scientific propositions about the world in any meaningful sense of the word, but that will require a whole chapter in itself in a future issue. Secondly, I am aware of the dangers of the naturalistic fallacy. Part of my own argument that the left should stop wasting its time poking the straw man of biological determinism will be that it has acquired a habit of falling into naturalistically fallacious thinking on certain scientific issues.  It will be up to me to couch my arguments carefully over this and the other forthcoming chapters to convince my readers that I haven’t made the same mistake.

There will be a third category of sceptic, more than likely: the dyed-in-the-wool Bolshevik who will already either be dismissing me as a petit-bourgeois academic or shaking her or his head in disbelief that someone could be so ignorant as to consider Marxist theory to be incomplete. Or probably both.

I can only appeal to readers who come from a vanguardist tradition and who will undoubtedly – at least at first – consider some of my propositions to be heretical, to stick with it; to follow the arguments and evidence in the pages and chapters ahead; to allow that marvelous evolutionary organ, your own brain, not some central committee, to do your thinking for you; and to make up your mind at the end (which admittedly, given the scope of this undertaking, will be several DGS issues down the line). Even if you end up completely disagreeing with me I would argue you owe it to yourself to wrestle with serious challenges to your accepted world view.

Investigating, considering or appropriating critical elements of Darwinian thought for political purposes - of course - has dangers. However, I will neither be the first person or the last to do so.  As Gillian Beer notes in her introduction to the Oxford University Press 1996 edition of The Origin of Species

Different readers can find their hopes and fears confirmed by extending the implications of Darwin’s thought in one direction or another; and, it would later prove, those readers might be individualists, Fascists, Marxists, imperialists or anarchists – or indeed quietists. There is something fascinating and perturbing in a text that, while pursuing, in Darwin’s words ‘one long argument’, ballasted by multiple evidences, can generate such a variety of ideological potentialities…Darwin himself insisted always on constraining the extra scientific implications of his work and resisted any overt politicisation (itself, of course, a political position).

Darwin, of course, was not a socialist, and while Marx was an admirer of Darwin and sent him an autographed copy of Capital Part One, there is no evidence of reciprocation. Indeed, it would seem highly unlikely that the canny Victorian gentleman scientist, concerned as he was about the scandals generated by his own work, would have given a second thought to corresponding with a revolutionary German émigré promoting his own very unique and dangerous idea.

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker and Gerald Edelman, upon whose writings much of this work is based, are no Marxist revolutionaries either – though my educated guess would be that they are all socially progressive liberals of various political shadings. The precise political stance of individual figures, living or dead, however, is not the issue.  The science, how it relates to our understanding of persons and their societies, and how, clearly understood, it can help the left correct its historic errors, is very much the issue.

For that science I am indebted.  The political conclusions – and any scientific errors or misunderstandings – are very much my own.

A debate still stuck in the 70’s and 80’s

In 1994 I attended a weekend school organised by SML (Scottish Militant Labour) in a hostel in Strathpeffer, in Ross-shire.  Attending the event along with me were many others who are still active in politics and are scattered across the various organisations of the left in Scotland, including Solidarity, the SSP, and more specifically the CWI (Committee for a Worker’s International) and the Democratic Green Socialist group. It was an excellent event in many ways and though many that were there have now parted ways I suspect all who participated will have fond memories of it.  One of the most anticipated and well attended sessions of the weekend was a ‘debate’ on nature vs. nurture, led off by Bruce Wallace (a good friend, and someone to whom I will always be grateful for my early Marxist education).

The word debate above is in speech marks intentionally, however. There was no serious debate at all, but much agreeing with one another around the following basic propositions

That in the nature vs. nurture debate, nurture clearly won out. Although Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted, Human beings and their consciousness were essentially malleable and would be thoroughly changed in a socialist society. Genes could be used to explain inherited characteristics like height, eye colour and so on, but played no part in intelligence, personality, learning etc.  Marx’s dictum ‘conditions determine consciousness’ was to be understood purely in environmentalist terms. Once society changed, human beings would change fundamentally too. ‘Good’ evolutionary biologists were people with clear left credentials like Steven Rose and Stephen Jay Gould; ‘bad’ evolutionary biologists were ‘reactionary reductionists’ like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson. Not in our Genes by Rose, Lewontin and Kamin was the bible on all things nature and nurture related.

Richard Dawkins

Almost everyone there held these views and I was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of them. The phrase ‘There is no such thing as human nature’ was heard more than once.  To accept that human beings had a nature was to cede ground to the capitalist ideologues’ argument that socialism was impossible because human beings were essentially greedy and selfish.

There was just one dissenting voice. Another good friend of mine, Tommy Paterson, had actually read what Dawkins had written instead of just other people’s commentaries on what he had written.  He pointed out that it was silly to argue that there was such a thing as orang-utan nature or wolf nature, but not human nature, or that genes had some influence over the body but not the brain (as if the brain were not part of the body). He argued that far from the work of Dawkins leading to reactionary conclusions it could be seen as strengthening the case for universal health care and quality education for all, and the eradication of poverty.

His voice was a voice in the wilderness, however.  The terms of the nature vs. nurture debate had been set on the left in the 70’s and 80’s and it was the sea in which we all swam.  Our collective but malleable mind had settled on a fixed idea and we were having none of it.  The evil doctrine of biological reductionism had to be resisted with all our revolutionary fervour.

But ‘facts are chiels that winna ding’ as Burns wrote, and even then the scientific evidence was mounting that there was such a thing as human nature, that far from that nature being irredeemably greedy or selfish human beings had genes that were strongly selected for cooperation, altruism and reciprocation, that innate mechanisms existed in the brain – evolved by natural selection – for learning, language acquisition and behaviour modification (from the work of  Chomsky, Pinker, Edelman and many others) and it was precisely those innate mechanisms that allowed us to develop, grow and interact with our environment.

Tommy Paterson was right and we were wrong. The ‘biological reductionism’ we were determined to reject was a straw man, even then.  It rested on a misunderstanding – and at times even a wilful misrepresentation - of what our ‘opponents’ were saying.

Looking back, we did not even seem to see some of the contradictions in our own positions. Freud was the subject of much informal and enthusiastic discussion at our Highland Summer retreat in 1994 – but surely Freud’s great insight into human nature - the existence of the sub-conscious and its hidden sway over our conscious selves - rests on an understanding that the brain is an evolved organ with an evolutionary history, and innate, inherent and universal workings? 

I myself had just started work on my undergraduate dissertation on human consciousness and was basing it on the neuroscience of Edelman – this would take me to a lifelong interest in this and related fields which would eventually lead to the position I take today.  Back then however, there was a line – conceptually, philosophically, and politically – that we were not equipped or ready, or indeed, encouraged, to cross. That line has hobbled the left both theoretically and in terms of its practice for decades.  I don’t just want to cross that line or encourage others to jump over it.  I want to rub it out entirely.

I want to show that modern Darwinism and neuroscience renders the nature vs. nurture debate as we’ve known it redundant.

I want to show that Marx’s dictum ‘conditions determine consciousness’ is best understood thus: not only our social environment and society acting upon our brains to produce our consciousness, individually and socially, but also, dialectically, as natural selection having responded to the environment over evolutionary time to produce the structures of a human brain capable of sensible and conscious interaction with its environment. 

And I want to show that the gene centred view of Darwin evolutionary thinking is not just compatible with a democratic, libertarian and thoroughgoing socialism, but encouraging, even inspiring, for socialists and social progressives.

The need to promote new thinking and a new discussion around these ideas gathers even greater urgency when we realise that, despite the scientific debate having moved on leaps and bounds since the entrenched positions of the seventies and eighties, tragically, fifteen years on from the events I describe above, the left is still mired in those simplistic terms of debate, still tilting at illusory windmills, still poking with a burning stick at the straw man of ‘biological reductionism’; a biological reductionism that no serious evolutionary thinker actually believes in these days (if they ever did).

To show that the left hasn’t moved forward in its thinking on these issues at all I have picked out two quotations from left publications on the Darwin bicentenary below. This is not to have a pop particularly at either the authors or the particular publications.  Both articles contained much reasonable comment and pedagogy on Darwin, but both are also typical exemplars of the kind of misleading articles written on the left recently on this subject; that is both contain basic scientific errors and demonstrate a misplaced political ideology that generates confusion and misunderstanding.  The first quotation is from Socialist Worker.

But Darwin is also suspected by many on the left. They fear that his ideas have served to legitimise a succession of reactionary ideologies.

These start with “Social Darwinism” in the 19th century – the attempt by various ideologues to prove that biological evolution justifies capitalist competition and the imperialist domination of “inferior” races.

Then, much more recently, there has been the development of sociobiology. This involves reducing the behaviour of human beings in society to the demands supposedly put on them by their genes.

The reactionary implications of this kind of approach are well brought out by Richard Dawkins’ portrayal of people as “lumbering robots” driven unconsciously by the “selfish genes” that use them as means for their reproduction.

None of this has much to do with Darwin.

                                -Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker 14^th Feb 2009

The first two paragraphs here might be fair comment in another context.  Indeed, we’ll return to the very theme of the fears the left have of some of Darwin’s ideas at various points in this extended narrative. However, look at how ‘Social Darwinism’ – a mistaken 19^th century distortion of Darwin’s real ideas that reached its apotheosis with the Nazis and has been in the dustbin of history ever since – is here immediately associated with a wholly different conception, socio-biology, which, we are told, ‘involves reducing the behaviour of human beings in society to the demands supposedly put on them by their genes.’ Further ‘the reactionary implications’ are exemplified by ‘Richard Dawkins portrayal of people as ‘lumbering robots’ etc etc.

‘None of this has much to do with Darwin’ the writer then tells us, and he is absolutely right. Unfortunately for Alex Callinicos (and his readers) none of this has much to with Richard Dawkins or E.O. Wilson, the author of socio-biology, either!

No-one who has actually read Sociobiology or The Selfish Gene, or any subsequent work with an open mind and an unjaundiced eye would conclude that either author believes for a minute that human behaviour, in all its rich complexity, can be reduced solely to the action of genes or that we are simply ‘lumbering robots’ at the mercy of a ruthless genetic determinism.  In an otherwise readable and informative article what we have here is either genuine ignorance of the real scientific discourse taking place, or wilful misrepresentation for ideological reasons. The result is that neither politics nor science is well-served

Our second quote is from a bit closer to home and is a variation on the same refrain

                                                - Neil Bennett, Frontline Dec 2008

Once again, the sound of straw men being rapidly set up and enthusiastically thumped to the ground is deafening. In order to invite us not to take the work of these bad evolutionary scientists ‘seriously’ Neil Bennett produces a ridiculous and simplistic distortion of their ideas. Case proved! In fact, Dawkins and his followers would have no problem with much of the last two paragraphs outlining the various levels at which genes operate and the complex cellular and developmental environment they operate in– except for the line I have highlighted above because, tellingly, it is a basic scientific error.  Of course, genes are the basic units of inheritance – and since natural selection can only work through inheritance or non-inheritance (favourable adaptations give organisms a survival advantage which allows them to live long enough to pass those adaptations onto descendants), reductio ad absurdum, the gene is the basic unit of evolution.

Once again, I’m not picking on either of these two writers. Fifteen years ago I would have probably written the same kind of thing. They are simply swimming in the same misinformed sea that a handful of us managed to evolve from by actually reading the list of disapproved works and achieving at least a reasonable understanding of what, in reality, these terrible genetic determinists were getting at.

Far from being the new Nazi party in disguise, E.O. Wilson was on the liberal wing of the Democratic party in the States, was a social progressive, and even talked about the inevitability of large scale public ownership in the one chapter of Sociobiology in which he discussed homo sapiens, yet everywhere he went after the book’s publication in the seventies he was met by left wing demonstrators and cries of ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’.

This treatment didn’t extend to him alone but to the scientists, William Hamilton and Robert Trivers, whose research into the evolutionary behaviour of altruism in the animal kingdom he had drawn upon in the book.  As Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate

No-one has been more sinned against in the misrepresentation stakes by our own left in our own country than Richard Dawkins, however.  Recently his atheist bestseller The God Delusion and a number of television programmes he has made on modern Darwinism and its implications have opened up some on the left to the realisation that he’s not some wild eyed Thatcherite determinist after all.  Dawkins often complains that many of his critics get no further than the title of The Selfish Gene and assume it’s a polemic in favour of ego and self-interested social or economic behaviour in scientific guise.  In the preface to the 30^th edition he muses that he now wishes he had called the book The Immortal Gene instead and points out that the title makes a scientific – not a social or political - argument

Press and Media myths

But we should not blame the left solely in isolation for the confusion that exists on the issue.  Of course, there have been political reactionaries who have seized and used the work of biological scientists to justify their own political agenda. The media too are often very unhelpful, distorting carefully worded scientific press releases into claims that give a misleading impression to the general public ‘gene found for colon cancer’, ‘gene for homosexuality’, ‘gene for baldness’, ‘gene for journalistic licence’ and so forth. Of course, what scientists mean when they speak colloquially about a gene or set of genes being ‘for’ something they mean a gene that is associated statistically with certain feature, or predisposes us to a certain illness, condition or behaviour. In each and every case, genes require an environment in which to express themselves.  No-one who has genes associated with predisposition to certain cancers has an automatic death sentence. Yet the simplistic genetic determinism often expressed by the press compounds the difficulty genetic scientists and evolutionary psychologists have in getting the balance and complexity of their ideas across

Similarly, exaggerated claims are often made for the triumph of the environment over heredity, or nurture over nature.  When the Human Genome was first mapped one newspaper gleefully parsed Craig Venter, whose private company had been the first to complete the genome mapping. ‘Environment, not genes, key to our acts’. The basis for this epoch-making claim was that only 30,000 genes had been found in the Human Genome – too few to account for the diversity of human behaviour, according to Venter.  Of course, no-one ever had argued that genes alone could account for the diversity of human behaviour. Matt Ridley, in his own excellent deconstruction of the sterile nature vs. nurture debate quickly points out the sheer absurdity of the argument

Ridley, in the same book, goes on to explain that there is no simplistic one to one correspondence of genes with body features. That some genes encode for other genes, that some act as ‘transcription factors’ telling genes when to switch on and off, or limiting the period of time in which a gene operate in the development of the organism.  The skulls of chimpanzees and the skulls of humans, for instance, are grown by the same gene, but in the case of human beings the gene is switched on for longer during development of the foetus.

And to reiterate, there is no Chinese Wall separating genes from brains. Genes don’t tell us what to think, our how to think, or what to learn or believe, but they do encode for the development of the human brain and its various innate systems for learning from the world.  A supposedly dialectical materialist argument that says genes encode for every bodily feature we are born with except our brains is neither Darwinist or Marxist.  It is unscientific human exceptionalism, and a return to 17^th century Cartesian Dualism by the back door.  Pinker, once again, from The Blank Slate notes just a few discoveries and studies in genetic science that have confounded any notion that genes have no effect on human consciousness or behaviour.

I should probably pause here. The very mention of genes encoding for intelligence (though the claims made by Pinker here are very modest) will be enough to send certain readers into a moral apoplexy, and they will need to catch their breath. Isn’t this just the kind of thing we should be combating? If we allow that some difference in some forms of intelligence may be heritable through genes doesn’t that open up the argument that it’s a waste of time educating some people, or that there is no point in egalitarianism, because some people are born superior? And what about the vexed questions of race and gender?

In the next chapter I shall attempt to show that such fears are groundless, that they stem from the left’s own mirror image of Hume’s naturalistic fallacy – that we determine what we allow as the scientific ‘is’s’ about the natural world from our moral ‘ought’s’, and that a rich view of Darwinism that places both nurture and nature as central and essential to the development and well-being of human beings, and human societies, is both possible and desirable.

In the meantime, let us at least consign the straw man of biological determinism to the flames of history.  Leftist theorists on nature and nurture unite; you have nothing to lose but your polemical chains, and a world of understanding to win.

From his own inspiring –perhaps even revolutionary – words that close The Selfish Gene, let’s finish with the very non-determinist promise of ‘lumbering robot’ Richard Dawkins:

We have…the mental equipment to foster our long term selfish interests rather than merely our short term selfish interests. We can see the long term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

 Steve Arnott.

A comprehensive bibliography will be appended to the final chapter of this series. Meantime, I will suggest some useful reading material to accompany each chapter. 

Some of the books mentioned in this introductory chapter are good places to start

Not in our Genes by Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Leo Kamin present the traditional left view and should be read from that standpoint.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins presents the majority scientific view. (the thirtieth anniversary edition is best)

Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker are essential for anyone who wants to get a grip on both the up-to-date science and the political philosophical discourse.