Origin’s Chapter VII. Darwin and the Instinct: Why Study Collective Behaviors Performed Without Knowledge of Their Purposes?

Abstract

Origin of Species brings a chapter that deals with instinct, summarizing a series of reflections by Charles Darwin, started in 1837, in his Notebook B, which is interpreted here as a dialogue with the Natural Theology and the Moral Philosophy of the Anglican elite of that time. Darwin discussed crucial aspects that had been taught in his university course at Cambridge, but which he saw manifest themselves quite differently in nature. He had been taught that moral philosophy should be a mirror of the divine will, from which benevolence and compassion would derive. However, in this chapter, Darwin shows that struggle in nature is a law that explains morally repulsive natural behaviors such as ant slavery, the infanticide of certain wasps, and the matricide of honeybees. Does instinct, as “natural behavior,” have an intelligent agent that continually encourages the opposite of benevolence and compassion? How would the “instinct to make slaves,” matricide and infanticide relate to the benevolence of nature? Would these disgusting behaviors have been designed and would continue to be encouraged by an omnipotent Creator? Instead of a myriad of phenomena that required continuous intervention by an intelligent agent, nature could be seen as a number of mechanisms following fixed laws, in the Newtonian tradition, which implacably leads to the “advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” This new Darwinian interpretation led to the conclusion that the “intelligent agent” could not be cruel enough to encourage repugnant behavior in nature. Thus, Darwin somewhat anticipated his defense of the need for new theoretical frameworks for Anglican Theology, from which he did not expect any greetings, even more after the first critical reviews of his book in the fall of 1859. In fact, one of the few modifications Darwin in the second edition of Origin was the insertion of an epigraph of one of the books he had to read at the university, written by Joseph Butler (1692–1752), with the traditional Anglican Moral Philosophy. These reflections may have important consequences for the teaching and learning of biological evolution today, discussing, from the historical point of view, how the moral and religious aspects were turned compatible with strictly scientific questions.