Survival of the Nicest? Now They Tell Us.

Struggle for existence? No;
love makes the world go round

— Sorry for all the genocides and wars. We just got evolution wrong, say the new Darwinians. —

File this in the “Now they tell us!” folder. All that rhetoric was wrong about nature red in tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, struggle for existence due to competition for resources, and death as the ladder for evolutionary progress. Darwin didn’t understand Darwinism. He should have noticed that animals and plants do better when they cooperate. Love makes the world go round.

If skulls could speak, millions of dead men’s bones would scream bloody murder. Were their untimely deaths all for naught?

Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round? (Nature, 8 April 2024). This open-access article is a book review by John R. Goodman of Jonathan Silverton’s new book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life (Oxford, 2024). Notice the word “cheering” in Goodman’s subtitle:

How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a cheering study of evolutionary biology.

Aagh.

Hitler wasn’t very cheery when he viewed the world as an evolutionary struggle of the fittest races against the imbeciles. It’s a little late for a correction after all the damage was done by Nazis, communists, and all those who built their ideologies on Darwinism. Now they tell us that “evolutionary biology” is really a cooperative history of life.

The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings. On the contrary, he argues, many phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will run dry”.

Aagh.

Silverton amasses numerous examples of cooperation in biology at all levels, from RNA molecules to ecosystems. “Selfish Genes to Social Beings is at its best,” reviewer Goodman says, “in the long, fascinating discussions of the complexity of cooperative behaviours across the natural world.” Maybe these two should teach the students chanting “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” at Columbia University today.

In all fairness, Goodman does not buy everything that Silverton argues. Silverton sees cooperation as a consequence of each organism’s own selfishness. But this anthropomorphism is a “deep and current problem,” Goodman responds. It’s a category error to view organisms in moral terms. Organisms are not trying to enslave one another or benefit one another.

Fundamentally, Silvertown proposes, cooperation in each of these situations stems from selfishness. Animals did not evolve to act for the benefit of their species, but to spread their own genes. Cooperation happens because mutual benefits are better, biologically speaking, than working alone, as the case of lichens effectively demonstrates.

Silverton should have known, Goodman implies, that stuff happens. Animals and plants are not thinking about how to cooperate for mutual benefit or even to benefit themselves. Cooperation is a consequence of natural selection, both writers maintain, not a goal of purpose-driven organisms.

And yet, in the end, Goodman doesn’t want to stay depressed. He wishes to hang onto concepts of morality when it comes to human animals. Didn’t he begin his review, “The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations”?

The author could also have talked more about how the amorality inherent in most of the natural world does not apply to humans. Similarly to other organisms, our evolutionary heritage makes us social, but whether that sociality is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a moral, not a scientific, question. This distinction from the other cooperative processes that Silvertown outlines could have been explained better.

Goodman is being illogical here. He tries to have his morality cake and eat it, too. But if human morality springs from the same Darwinian process of spreading selfish genes that produced relationships varying from mutualism to parasitism, how can he even entertain moral questions? Are ideas of human exceptionalism making his conscience itch? According to his worldview, Darwinian selection is oblivious to notions of good or bad. The only possible canon is whether something survives or not.

On that account, genocide is a scientific question, not a moral one. It just happens.

Are you feeling cheery today? Do you like this new-and-improved Darwinism? Are you feeling less depressed about old Darwinism?

Silverton and reviewer Goodman are picking their fruits from the same poison tree that produced the Darwinian genocides (e.g., 18 Dec 2023 about the Tasmanian genocide, and 11 Sept 2021 about Mao Zedong’s worldview that killed 77 million for Darwin). An evil tree cannot produce good fruit, said Jesus (Matthew 7:15-20). Don’t trust for a moment any thoughts of “survival of the nicest” and “moral questions” and “cooperation” by these crafty deceivers. It’s poison fruit. The only knowledge of good and evil you will gain is that good and evil don’t exist. Everything is selfish. Stuff happens. Deal with it.

For a previous report about “survival of the nicest,” see our 7 Oct 2012 article.