Darwin's Blind Spot: The Role of Living Interactions in Evolution

Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate … Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.

The great Louis Pasteur once made a perceptive statement about the role of serendipity in scientific discovery: ‘Chance,’ he declared, ‘favours only the prepared mind.’ (View Highlight)

From the very beginning, evolutionary theory has been applied to many fields of human affairs, such as sociology, psychology and even politics. Such interpretations, viewed from a Darwinian perspective alone, lead to an excessive emphasis on competition and struggle. Most damaging of all, the social Darwinism of the first half of the twentieth century led directly to the horrors of eugenics. The rise, once more, of social Darwinism is therefore a source of worry to many scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. (View Highlight)

One species of hermit crab carries a large pink anemone on top of its shell. Fish and octopuses like to feed on hermit crabs, but when they approach this species, the anemone shoots out its brilliantly coloured tentacles, with their microscopic batteries of poisoned darts, and sting the potential predator, encouraging it to look elsewhere for its meal. This is a perfect example of living co-operation, since the anemone in turn feeds on the droppings and leftovers from the crab’s meals. The crab and the anemone appear to recognise each other1 as partners by tuning in to individual chemical signals – the equivalent of a bloodhound’s fine-tuned sense of smell. The relationship is so firmly established that when the growing crab has to find a bigger shell, it delicately detaches the anemone from the old one and transports it to their new home. (View Highlight)

Dawkins saw cultural transmission as analogous to genetic transmission and thus a mechanism of evolution in its own right. Language in particular can evolve much faster than organisms do, and nowhere is cultural transmission more important than in the form of ‘communicable’ ideas. (View Highlight)

Of course competition and struggle are normal elements of business, and Carnegie and Rockefeller were more than merely paradigms of capitalist selfish exploitation: both were liberal in temperament and generous philanthropists in practice. What their example reveals is the power of the Spencerian meme and the ease with which it so captured the public imagination. (View Highlight)

No serious person would consider Julius Caesar, Vincent van Gogh, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludwig van Beethoven, or Charles Dickens as degenerates, although they are all believed to have suffered from epilepsy. Of course, for the eugenicists, there was a greater purpose in linking poverty, disease, and criminality to degenerative genetic causes; it meant that the ‘higher races’ had a duty to make sure that future generations were not ruined by a progressive dilution with the more fecund ‘lower races’. (View Highlight)