Questions Darwin Almost Asked

Darwin got a lot of miles out of noticing a few things and documenting them in excruciating detail:

• Tremendous natural variation among and within species and even "races" or varieties. This is the "engine" of change. That's just a fact. Today we know about DNA mutations, transcription errors and many other reasons for variation. Variation itself is "in your face" -- obvious.
• The mathematical fact that left to themselves, any species would reproduce to cover the Earth. There must be some reason this doesn't happen. Darwin mentioned a lot of reasons, including scarcity of resources, predators, environmental change and more.
• Descent with modification - the "family tree" of life that is the basis of modern biology.
• "Natural Selection", to Darwin, simply meant the fact that every animal is put to the test along with all other members of its species - indeed all occupants of its environment in the contest for survival. It's a brutal contest and survival is the exception rather than the rule. Many characterize this idea as "survival of the fittest", but that's a drastic simplification. In many minds, it "explained," the "survival" of the superior "white guy" over others who were unlucky enough to compete with whites over the ground they happened to be occupying. Triumph of the "whites" was evidence enough to "prove" the superiority of the white race. But Darwin's idea was much broader and powerful than this. It's best to think of it the way he thought of it: a ruthless competition with countless players resulting in constant change, including survival and extinction of entire species.

Of course, Darwin famously included human beings in his "family tree" and that resulted in a lot of controversy. What was overlooked in this controversy is that, yes, "Natural Selection" applies to humans and probably explains a lot about what we look like, but the kind of "selection" he was talking about still applies (especially to Englishmen) but not because of the individual superiority of design at the individual level. Englishmen were taking over the world because of superior technology*. 

Isn't the ability to apply "technology" in the struggle survival itself "evolved" in the classic Darwinian sense? Probably. I'd say this phase involved:

• Language (involving large, new brain structure) unique to humans
• The ability to cooperate, again involving new brain circuits unique to the great apes. This ability has, in the long run, allowed us to amass cooperative projects involving millions of individuals - usually to find clever ways to kill millions of "others".

More powerful innovations, such as writing or weapons design don't seem to have been the result of any change in the basic human "body plan", but simply new things that the improved human brain was good at learning.

So, for humans, the competition for survival boils down to the survival of a society or sometimes simple elements of technology such as the steamship, longbow, horseback riding or bronze weapons. And the competition is not simply "Darwinian" competition for resources: it is mainly competition against other humans. A hint of this fact is that we are the only species of "homo" to survive (out of dozens). Among species of homo, the competition is indeed brutal, in spite of supposedly superior evolutionary gifts, such as our big brains. For example, there is no particular reason why Neanderthal humans could not have survived perfectly well if it weren't for competition with "modern" humans. Certainly, there were other factors involved but the main one is probably competition with other species of homo with superior ability to organize in the lethal ways we still associate with gangs of humans.

Bottom line, humanity is a species of "last man standing" cultures competing with each other for survival as a culture. This competition is bad news for the "losers" in this competition and is even not great for individuals in the culture. "Successful" cultures in this competition burn up more resources, pollute more and become more dangerous to life on Earth.

"Cultural evolution" is not "Darwinian". "Classic" Evolutionary Theory applies to "fitness" of individual organisms, not cultures or groups of individuals. But Darwin's thinking leads us into some equally momentous conclusions (or at least theories) about our own situation. As with his original theories, the ideas are unsettling and controversial.

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* Evolution of the usual kind had blessed the European with relative immunity to diseases that devastated inhabitants of the Americas, but it was just dumb luck that the immunity advantage didn't work the other way around. The idea that some cultures (rather than races) are superior is shredded by Amartya Sen. Sen reaches the same dark conclusions as mine but through quite a different train of reasoning from a different set of facts.