Generalized Darwinism (GD) is the study of any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR), resulting in adaptation of the evolving entity to its environment. It is how Darwin and his peers thought about evolution, knowing little about the underlying mechanisms. With the advent of Mendelian genetics in the early 20th century, however, the study of evolution became centered on genetic evolution, as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. The study of human cultural change became the province of other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, many of which developed in perceived opposition to gene-centric evolutionary biology.
A return to GD for the formal study of evolution started in the closing decades of the 20th century, when terms such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and evolutionary economics came into use. Today GD is in full swing, with books such as Not by Genes Alone, Evolution in Four Dimensions, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, The Secret of Our Success, Ultrasociety, Theory of Everyone, and my own This View of LIfe published by the major university and trade presses.
Crucially, GD is not just an academic pursuit but can inform positive change efforts in the real world. Nearly all of the fast-paced changes taking place around and within us–most recently the advent of AI–are VSR processes that require the conceptual and methodological tools of GD to understand and steward.
A key insight is that VSR processes don’t automatically make everything nice. They often result in outcomes that benefit me but not you, us but not them, and short term benefits at the expense of the long view. Cooperative and sustainable behaviors can evolve by VSR processes, but only when special conditions are met. If we don’t provide these special conditions in the environments that we construct for ourselves, VSR processes will take us where we don’t want to go.
It is important to distinguish GD from Social Darwinism (SD), a term that refers to the moral justification of inequality, such as eugenics and withholding social welfare for the poor. GD is almost completely antithetical to SD in its rejection of competition as an unalloyed good and emphasis on fostering the evolution of cooperation. In addition, SD is itself widely misunderstood and often results in a blanket stigmatization of evolutionary thinking as somehow inherently more dangerous than other worldviews.
In this essay, I will first place SD in perspective and then elaborate on GD as an essential framework for evolving cooperative systems in real-world settings. A companion essay relates GD to devolution efforts in the UK.
Putting Social Darwinism in perspective
As most people understand the term, SD is predicated on the assumption that what can be measured in an individual is a property of the individual. If this were true, then desirable traits such as intelligence could be promoted by favoring the most intelligent individuals, in the same way that a poultry breeder increases egg productivity by selecting the most productive hens in a flock.
A different assumption is that what can be measured in an individual is a property of its social interactions with other individuals. If this were true, then to promote a desirable trait such as intelligence, we need to select for the right social interactions, not the individuals who happened to benefit from the social interactions.
These two assumptions describe a kind of watershed in the intuitions and policies that flow from them, concerning how to promote a desirable trait such as intelligence. Under the first assumption, it makes sense to favor the individuals who display the trait. Under the second assumption, it makes sense to favor the social interactions that result in the same trait.
The watershed distinction between the two assumptions is relevant not only to humans but also to animal breeding–the very practice that human eugenetics is supposed to be founded upon. In a classic experiment, hens were housed in cages and the most productive egg layer within each cage was selected to breed the next generation of hens. This procedure would make sense if egg productivity was a physiological property of individual hens. As it turned out, the most productive hen within each cage was the biggest bully, who achieved her productivity by suppressing the productivity of her cage mates. Her #1 ranking was based on social interactions, not her physiological ability to lay eggs. Bullying is genetically heritable and several generations of selection resulted in a strain of hyper-aggressive hens who plucked each other’s feathers and murdered each other. Egg productivity plummeted, despite the fact that the “most productive” hens were selected every generation. The mistake revealed by the experiment was to assume that the trait of egg productivity was the property of individual hens when it was more a property of the social interactions among the hens.
In a second experiment, egg productivity was monitored at the cage level and all the hens in the most productive cages were selected to breed the next generation of hens. This experiment appropriately selected for docile social interactions and egg productivity increased 160% over several generations.
Against this background, consider the common corporate practice of forced distribution ranking (also called “rank-and-yank”) whereby employees are ranked on their performance, the top ranked are rewarded, the middle range is coached, and the lowest ranked are let go. This procedure would make sense if the performance of an individual was a property of the individual, pure and simple. As it turns out, the procedure rewards self-promoting behaviors and discourages any activity that makes someone else look better than oneself. Genetic evolution doesn’t occur, but something comparable does that results in the same outcome as the first chicken experiment. A hiring policy that makes sense under the first assumption goes horribly wrong because the second assumption was warranted. The companies that thrive are the ones that select for cooperative social interactions, comparable to the second chicken experiment[1].
The early history of Social Darwinism: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scores of people attempted to relate Darwin’s theory of evolution to human affairs. In my book This View of Life, I provide thumbnail sketches of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Peter Kropotkin, and John Dewey. Broadly speaking, Malthus, Spencer, and Galton reasoned on the basis of the first assumption while Darwin, Huxley, Kropotkin and Dewey reasoned on the basis of the second assumption. Huxley lampooned the idea of selective breeding in humans as “a pigeon fancier’s polity” and wrote this biting assessment, which shows why he acquired the reputation of Darwin’s bulldog[2].
It strikes me that men who are accustomed to contemplate the active of passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous, who justify that conduct on the ground that it has the sanction of the cosmic process of the race; who, if they are consistent, must rank medicine among the black arts and count the physician as mischievous preservers of the unfit; on whose matrimonial undertakings the principle of the stud have the chief influence; whose whole lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art of suppressing natural affection and sympathy, are not likely to have a large stock of these commodities left. But, without them, there is no conscience, nor any restraint on the conduct of men, except the calculation of self-interest.
Why the term “Social Darwinism” became attached to the likes of Malthus, Spencer, and Galton but not the likes of Darwin, Huxley, Kropotkin and Dewey, therefore requires an explanation. Geoffrey Hodgson, the eminent historian of evolution in relation to the social sciences, has conducted a detailed analysis of the history of the term[3]. From the very beginning, it was used as a pejorative by left-leaning thinkers to brand what they regarded as the heartless policies of right-leaning thinkers. The term was also seldom used at all until popularized by the book Social Darwinism in America, published by the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1944, which today is regarded as more of a polemic in the aftermath of World War II than a scholarly study.
Robert Richards, the eminent historian of evolutionary science, has examined the influence of Darwin on Hitler and his associates in detail. Blaming Darwin ignores the deep roots of racism in general and antisemitism in particular in European thought. It’s hard to find a thinker during the 19th century who didn’t rank the so-called races and place Europeans at the top. Hitler was demonstrably influenced by books such as Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races by Joseph Arthur and Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Steward Chamberlin. He scarcely mentioned Darwin and his most explicit statement rejected the idea of humans evolving from apes. Richards compares the search to connect Hitler with Darwin as similar to seeing animal shapes in clouds or playing the game of six degrees of separation, which could equally connect Hitler with Jesus or Aristotle.
Today, the use of the term “Social Darwinism” is much the same as at the beginning–an insult hurled by left-leaning thinkers against their right-leaning opponents. In America, for example, former Democratic president Barack Obama used the term to describe the policies of his Republican opponents, even though they would never dream of invoking Darwin on behalf of their policies. Why bother, when laissez-faire economics is on hand to justify the root assumption that individual-level competition is an unalloyed good?
Part of the collateral damage of this history is a blanket stigmatization of evolution in relation to human affairs in the social sciences and humanities. Here is how Hodgson puts it in his analysis of the term Social Darwinism (p451-2).
The woods can be dangerous. So we might tell children stories of woodland beasts or bogeymen, to warn them away from the forest. Similarly, prevailing accounts of “Social Darwinism” have been invented as bogeyman stories, to warn all social scientists away from the darkened woodland of biology. We are told that any use of ideas or analogies from biology in the social sciences is unsafe. We are warned not to stray into that biological zone, for terrible things will happen, as they surely happened before. But scientists should not be treated as children…Let us stop telling false histories, and henceforth call things by their proper names.
I have personal experience with this kind of blanket stigmatization. I founded the first campus-wide program for teaching evolution across the curriculum at Binghamton University in 2003 (EvoS), bringing me into contact with all the departments. One graduate student in the English Department, Jonathan Gottschall, gained an interest in studying Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad from an evolutionary perspective. This horrified his faculty advisors and graduate student peers. Jon was able to proceed only by forming a committee whose members were almost entirely outside his department.
In addition to proceeding with his Homeric research, Jon and I edited a book titled The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, which we submitted to the University of Chicago Press. The press had previously published my book on religion, Darwin’s Cathedral, and my editor there was enthusiastic. To her chagrin, she had to inform me that our proposal was blocked by the faculty oversight board and couldn’t even be sent out for peer review. Evidently, UC Press was allowed to publish a book on religion from an evolutionary perspective, but not literature from an evolutionary perspective! We ended up publishing the volume with Northwestern University Press and Jon went on to write the best-selling book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human and other books. None of this served to advance his academic career, however, so great was the blanket stigmatization of evolutionary thinking in the humanities at the start of the 21st Century.
More on Generalized Darwinism
I have already introduced GD as the study of any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection and replication (VSR), resulting in adaptation of the evolving entities to their environments. In addition to genetic evolution, VSR processes include epigenetic evolution (changes in gene expression rather than gene frequencies), forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of social learning based on symbolic thought that are distinctively–possibly even uniquely–human. VSR processes can be programmed on computers and pervade the current AI revolution.
VSR processes can be intragenerational in addition to intergenerational. A well-known example is the adaptive component of the immune system, which involves the creation of millions of different antibodies and the selection of those that successfully bind to antigens. The open-ended learning ability of ourselves and many other species can also be regarded as an intragenerational VSR process, as B.F. Skinner appreciated in his 1981 article titled Selection by Consequences. Some aspects of brain development are VSR processes, which is called neural Darwinism.
Here are some major reasons why GD is almost entirely antithetical to SD.
• Critics of genetic determinism made some valid points during evolutionary biology’s gene-centric era, but GD is a comprehensive acknowledgement of this fact. According to GD, there are two streams of inheritance in our species, genetic and cultural, which interact with each other during our lifetimes and have been co-evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. As the faster process, cultural evolution is often the leading edge of human evolution and genetic evolution is a following force. As one well-documented example, the domestication of livestock (a cultural adaptation) resulted in the genetic evolution of lactose tolerance in adults.
GD does more than acknowledge the importance of cultural evolution. It brings the entire conceptual and methodological toolkit that has proven itself for the study of genetic evolution as a VSR process to the study of cultural evolution as a VSR process. I have already provided an example in my comparison of the chicken experiments and corporate hiring practices. In both cases, the environment favored individuals who outcompeted other individuals within their same group. Disruptive self-serving behaviors evolved in both cases, even though genetic evolution was the VSR process for the chickens and personal and cultural evolution was the VSR process for the corporations.
GD shows that the metaphor of the invisible hand, which pretends that the pursuit of lower-level interests robustly benefits the higher-level common good, is profoundly untrue. For whole cultural systems to function well, selection must take place at the level of the whole system. Notice that this is still a competitive process. It is the level of competition, not its absence, that is important.
GD shows that evolution need not be entirely blind and can have an intentional component. The idea that variation is random and only the immediate environment does the selecting makes sense only in the narrow context of Mendelian genetics. All organisms capable of learning make agentic choices that alter genetic selection pressures. All three components of a VSR process can be highly intentional and it remains a VSR process. Intentionality has always played a role in human cultural evolution and needs to more than ever to solve the problems of our age.
Conclusion
The words “evolve” and “adapt” were in common use long before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace came along. The significance of their theory was to give these words specific meanings by identifying variation, selection, and replication as the engine of evolutionary change and adaptation in all living systems. Historians are needed to explain why the study of biological living systems advanced faster than the study of human cultural living systems. In the present, there is an urgent need to apply the insights of GD to evolve a better world, free from the stigmatization associated with the term Social Darwinism.
[1] A National Geographics podcast titled The Problem with Superchickens entertainingly compares the chicken experiments with rank-and-yank and other examples in which human-constructed environments promote disruptive self-serving behaviors. A Harvard Business Review article titled Evidence-based Management reviews the evidence for the corrosive outcomes of rank-and-yank.
[2] See Paradis and Williams (2014) for modern commentaries in addition to Huxley’s original essay, in which this passage is on p 23.
[3] Hodgson, G. M. (2004). Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals: A Contribution to the History of the Term. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17, 428–454.
About the Author
David Sloan Wilson is President, ProSocial World and SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University