In This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson continues the project of scientific imperialism that has defined much of the latter part of his career. This View of Life takes as given that humans are shaped by our evolutionary past, and proceeds to show how general principles derived from the discipline can be applied to policy decisions and social problems, guiding our species-wide goals to further our flourishing. Wilson aims to break evolution out of its biological box, offering it as a universal framework for understanding and shaping human phenomena.
This is an ambitious program. But first one has to address the historical elephant in the room: the misapplication of evolutionary principles. The prosecution argues that evolution stands of accused of aiding and abetting the abominations that culminated in Nazi Germany. After the defeat of Hitler's regime, evolutionary theory retreated into the redoubt of biology, concerning itself with natural history, laboratory experiments, and abstruse mathematical models. And there it should stay, argue its critics, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.
David Sloan Wilson rejects this argument in totality. He notes that the opprobrium hurled at evolution's application to social problems draws from Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought. Hofstadter was a man of left-wing commitments writing in 1944, as the war against Hitler's regime was still a live concern. His was not a dispassionate scholarly analysis. He aimed to produce something which could be deployed in the fight against “racism, nationalism, or competitive strife.”
This View of Life highlights how men as diverse as Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Thomas Malthus were not united in their views, nor were they the cruel anti-humanitarians that their detractors portray them as (Hitler's own views were scientifically inchoate at best, and ignorant at worst). Wilson's arguments are familiar to libertarians in particular, many of whom have long argued that Hofstadter misrepresented classical liberals.
The argument for the defense that one encounters in This View of Life may not entirely convince, at least in the chapter-length treatment Wilson provides. The great evolutionary geneticist R. A. Fisher's central work, Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, contains a long exposition of eugenicist thought as applied to humanity. To not put too fine a point on this, contemporary readers invariably find this section quite offensive. And yet Fisher himself was a complicated figure, a patriotic British Tory conservative and Anglican Christian. The past was truly a different age.
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