The history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late 19th and early 20th century have become settled in the minds of scholars and the interested public. The orthodox view regards Darwin as having introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing teleological considerations and moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including “moral” behavior, as ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by th ... More

The history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late 19th and early 20th century have become settled in the minds of scholars and the interested public. The orthodox view regards Darwin as having introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing teleological considerations and moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including “moral” behavior, as ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, had inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. I believe this orthodox view to be quite mistaken and so argue in this collection of essays. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and positioned human beings as the goal of evolutionary development. The careful scholar will suspend the usual charges of fraud brought against Haeckel, while recognizing that this German evolutionist at times allowed his artistic impulses to move him beyond the immediately empirical. As for Hitler, an unprejudiced examination of his tangled and confused biological notions shows they have nothing to do with Darwinian evolutionary theory, despite the avowals of some historians and a host of religious reactionaries. The essays in this volume investigate such disputed questions and a range of others, including the moral consequences of Darwin’s theory and the artistic and linguistic applications of that theory.