Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Charles Darwin’s moral sense – on Darwin’s ethics of non-violence
As Paley contends, the “marks of design” are “too strong to be gotten over. Design must
have had a designer. That designer must have been a person, That person is GOD.”
(Paley 1802, pg. 111).
In his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which appeared in 1779, not quite
three years after his death, David Hume had already critically addressed the argument
from design. According to J. C. A. Gaskin, the editor of Hume’s Dialogues, the tenets of
William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) and his Natural Theology (1802) had
already “been refuted by Hume in the Dialogues (1779) and elsewhere before they were
even written” (Gaskin 1993, pg. IX).
Darwin’s revolutionary and provocative theoretical achievement consists in his having
replaced these physico-theological explanations by the illustration of purely natural
processes and laws, explaining not only the emergence of purposefulness in animate
nature, but also the evolution of new species on this basis. In doing so he orients himself
towards already existent, observable parameters and conceives of the mechanisms which
guide the development of species and adaptations using plant and animal breeding as his
model, bringing into play the concepts “individual variation”, “selection” and “inheritance”.
As he argues, breeders select those organisms of a species or race which are in
possession of certain traits, these being important for the breeding purpose in question.
They then see that these organisms reproduce in a controlled manner. In the course of a
process of inheritance which extends over several generations, the traits selected by the
breeders gradually begin to dominate or take on special characteristics in keeping with
the breeder’s intentions. According to Darwin, a mechanism analogous to that of artificial
selection was to be found in nature, but here the individual traits served a purpose
for the organisms themselves and their survival in a certain environment. Darwin drew
conclusions on the basis of the observation that members of any one species always
demonstrated individual differences or variations and thus also differing degrees of adaptation
to the environmental conditions which they were subjected to. Those organisms
which were better adapted in terms of what was necessary to survive, i.e. which were
better equipped to adapt than were other members of the species, had greater chances of
survival and could thus – statistically speaking – reproduce more successfully. In other
words, a natural selection of those members who were better adjusted or better equipped
to survive took place. In the course of a long process of gradual accumulation, their features
became dominant traits in following generations through inheritance. In this way,
new species ultimately evolved. In Darwin’s theory, natural selection not only explained
the extinction of certain species; what is more important, it fulfilled a constructive function
which helped to explain the evolution of new species, with the biblical notion of
godly creation being replaced by a scientific, i.e. biological explanation.
To explain such processes, an empirically verifiable mechanism immanent to nature
had to be made out, however, which took the place of the breeder and performed the
function of a motor of natural selection. Darwin called this mechanism “struggle for life”
or “struggle for existence”, and in doing so, he described a natural process which evidenced
a mathematically formulated disproportion between the increase in means of
subsistence and the tendential rate of reproduction of organisms. As he argued, the increase
in food supply could not keep up with the rate of reproduction. Since the number
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
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