Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Charles Darwin’s moral sense – on Darwin’s ethics of non-violence
important motor which effects the transformation of species, he also takes other factors
into consideration such as the inheritance of individually acquired traits, i.e. the inherited
effects of the use and disuse of organs, the direct effects of external conditions on organisms,
variations “which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously” and the laws
of correlation and variation independent of purposefulness and thus also of natural selection
(Darwin 1859 and later editions, chap. 5; Darwin 1876, chap. XV). Thus in Darwin’s
eye, evolution is the result of a complex dynamics of external life conditions and
the internal structure of organisms which are subject to natural laws of various kinds (the
law of natural selection, inheritance, variation, etc.), even though the effect of these is
not always known or not yet known in individual cases. Darwin does not allow ignorance
of the causes of variation to open the door to notions of godly intervention into nature,
however. As his correspondence shows, he expressly rejects the idea that variation is
pointed in a certain direction.
Darwin is undecided as regards the possibility of evolutionary progress. This becomes
clear in the very first edition of his Origin of Species when he points out the difficulties
connected with defining the concept of progress and different degrees of organization.
On the one hand, he divorces himself from Lamarck’s notions of this kind very
early on. “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’
‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’” (sic!) he writes in a letter to Joseph Dalton
Hooker on 11 January 1844 (CCD 3, pg. 2). On the other hand, we find numerous
indications of an assumption that organisms develop into higher-order organisms or
even reach perfection in the course of evolution. In this vein, he writes in his concluding
remarks that all “corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection”
because “natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being” (Darwin
1859, pg.489). At the same time, Darwin unequivocally emphasizes that as yet, no
natural scientist had been able to provide a satisfactory definition as to what is to be
understood by “progress of organization” (Darwin 1876, pg. 103). This indecisiveness is
an example for the co-existence of various thought-styles in Darwin’s theory, to which
the implicit belief in the validity of a theology of creation initially belonged. As Darwin
later concedes: “I was not, however, able to annul the influence of my former belief,
then almost universal, that each species had been purposely created; and this led to my
tacit assumption that every detail of structure, excepting the rudiments, was of some
special, though unrecognized, service.“ (Darwin 1877, pg. 65). Darwin hopes to have
“done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.” (Darwin
ibid.).
Apart from artificial and natural selection, Darwin speaks of sexual selection, by
which he means the selection of individuals of one sex by individuals of the other. Darwin
explains the development of different races among human beings and animals with
the help of this principle. The questions which such a theory raises, among them the
question as to what relation exists between natural and sexual selection, cannot be discussed
within the framework of this article, however.
until well into the 20th century. For this reason Darwin had no notion of the laws of variation and inheritance.
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
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