Abstract
This essay sheds light on the “father of epigenetics,” Conrad Hal Waddington’s (1905–1975) tacit critique of one of the most prominent biologists of the twentieth century, Julian Huxley’s (1887–1975) theses concerning the evolutionary meaning and importance of learning and education for the human species. This topic has great significance today when it comes to educators both recognizing and being able to orient themselves in relation to the profound biological and evolutionary aspects of their role and purpose, and in determining their own ethos and modes of activity therein. Here, I highlight Waddington’s stance in relation to Julian Huxley’s thesis that education comprises humanity’s new “psycho-social,” or alternatively, “socio-genetic,” mode of biological inheritance parallel to, yet beyond, the “rawer” biological struggle for existence that most other living organisms are engaged in, namely, that involving natural selection acting on genes or genomes and the exigency of adapting successfully to the environment. According to Huxley, the gradual, yet cumulative, transmission of the knowledge and attainments of one generation to the next, over evolutionary time, via various modes of learning and education, has enabled the human species to have surpassed the capacities of all other organisms on the planet, such that it has become super-dominant.
Waddington was in general agreement with Huxley’s thesis regarding the evolutionary significance of humanity’s learning and education here, as well as the latter’s notion that education is an epigenetic phenomenon, namely, comprising a distinct, yet interrelated inheritance system beyond that of genetic inheritance. However, Waddington tacitly disagreed with Huxley’s assertions that in light of such realizations, going forward: (1) humanity should exert the power of its selective agencies so as to take control of the biological processes of all life-forms on the planet; (2) formal education should be reformed into a function of evolutionary humanist ideology, eugenics, and transhumanism; (3) humanity ought to attempt to transcend its current capacities, as though there were a linear progression to some higher stage of biological development that is mechanistically calculable in advance. Waddington’s chief argument against Huxley is that this “socio-genetic” and/or epigenetic system of inheritance has part of its foundation in ethics and in the moral conduct of teacher and learner, and that Huxley’s inert vision of the future of education and of the role and conduct of educators therein are unethical. As such, for Waddington, Huxley’s view can be said to undermine the very inheritance system that has enabled humanity to reach its privileged place, rendering it unsustainable. From a Waddingtonian standpoint, Huxley’s stance is “biologically unwise” in that it undermines the teacher-learner relationship, given that it treats learners mechanistically, namely, as means only to the ends of evolutionary humanist and transhumanist ideology, rather than organismically, meaning as having selective agency and intrinsic worth (a notion that is grounded in the notion that living organisms are bearers of intrinsic purposiveness, as evidenced by the homeostatic, chronobiological, and autopoietic processes belonging to them which enable persistence in the face of entropy). On the contrary, Waddington calls for the cultivation of “biological wisdom” surrounding formal education (e.g., in relation to the aims of such education, its content, its curricula, the behaviour of educators, and the educational activities to be engaged in by learners), that would serve to strengthen the foundations of education qua humanity’s “psycho-social” inheritance system rather than to diminish or undermine it. Last, I associate the Waddingtonian notion of “biological wisdom” with the evolutionary-environmental ethic of “critical pan-selectionism.”
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Notes
For instance, Dawkins interprets the gene as “reach[ing] out through the individual body wall and manipulates objects in the world outside, some of them inanimate, some of them other living beings” and he sees “the gene as sitting at the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power. And an object in the world is the centre of a converging web of influences from many genes sitting in many organisms. The long reach of the gene knows no obvious boundaries” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 265–266).
While in truth originating back to Kant and Hegel, the notion of autopoiesis (Gr. self-creation; self-production; self-organization; self-maintenance) was developed by the Chilean researchers Humberto Maturana (1928-) and the late Francisco J. Varela (1946–2001) in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1973, Maturana & Varela, 1980) and other articles. Autopoiesis involves the idea that there is a purposive causal reciprocity between the organismic whole and its members (i.e., the organism as a whole and the organelles in its cells, its cells, tissues, and organs), such that living organisms, while depending on the bringing in elements from outside of their semi-permeable boundary membrane, they organize, produce, repair, and replenish their own components. In this way, living organisms can be said to produce and maintain their own existence as a unified whole that persists through entropy (the Second Law of Thermodynamics). It is to be noted that the concept of autopoiesis was originally conceived of by Maturana and Varela under a mechanistic rubric, but especially in a later writing entitled “Life After Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality” (Weber & Varela, 2002) that was co-written by Andreas Weber, he reveals a profound shift in perspective toward a more organismic, holistic, and teleological orientation. There, it is asserted that rather than there being a mere appearance or semblance of purposiveness in nature that is reducible to mechanistic explanation, as in mainstream neo-Darwinism’s emphasis on the notion of teleonomy, “immanent teleology” is “a true biological feature in the living process” (p. 97). The term “mental autopoiesis” might be employed to designate self-creative processes of intellectual appropriation, valuation, and selection, learning, and mental development. Presumably, in the course of evolutionary time, mentality emerged in living organisms as involving an awareness of the “internal–external situation,” giving the them the adaptive advantage of being able to diagnose their own condition so as to be able to direct action for the sake of maintaining the integrity of, and stability within, their “internal environment” (Bernard, 1957, p. 62), as in the notion of homeostasis.
The homeostatic self-regulatory systems of the body (e.g., those pertaining to body temperature, blood sugar, etc.…) involve the purposive attainment of “far-from-equilibrium” mean states by way of dynamic reversion and negative reversion processes, thus correcting excesses and deficiencies within the organism’s internal environment (e.g., sweating when hot to cool down and shivering when cold to heat up). Chronobiology involves the study of bio-rhythms (e.g., circadian rhythms) and adds that the mean states attained through homeostatic processes can themselves be in flux. For a more complete synopsis of the relation of homeostasis and chronobiology to education, see Scarfe (2016).
Perhaps the Hegelian term, “sublation” (Aufhebung) (Hegel, 1991, p. xxvi-xxxvi, 128–129), meaning a “surpassing of,” yet “maintaining of,” might best be employed to describe what such biologists and philosophers are after.
In relation to the theme of Lamarckism and other theories of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, it is interesting to note that Whitehead, in making his claim that university education should be focused on the phase of “generalization” in the rhythm of education, in the essay “Science and General Education,” indicates that undergraduate science students craved the ability to exercise their growing “power of abstract thought” and to be able to engage in “generalizations,” such that what they want is “a series of lectures on some general aspects of science” including “on the theory of evolution and controversies connected with it, such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics” (Whitehead, 1948, p. 146).
Even though Dawkins states that “DNA is cocooned in protein, swaddled in membranes” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 235), the notion that genotype is internally and reciprocally related with phenotype goes against the grain, for example, of Dawkins overall “selfish gene/extended phenotype” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 264) division, in which the latter are considered “throwaway survival [or replication] machines” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 234), determined fully by their selfish genes. Dennett’s “person-in-a-robot-survival-machine” story (Dennett, 1995, p. 422–427) is an analogy for Dawkins’ “selfish gene/extended phenotype” duality in relation to the components of organisms. The engineer inside the robot who created the robot to carry him into the future is considered to be a separate substance from the robot. While the robot may have some minute degree of autonomy away from its programming by the engineer, it ultimately does not reciprocally affect the engineer’s intellect.
As Jablonka and Lamb characterize them, Waddington’s “genetic assimilation” experiments show how “when faced with an environmental challenge, induced developmental changes unmask already existing genetic variation, which can then be captured by natural selection” (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005, p. 14). In one experiment, Waddington.
raised fruit flies on a high-salt medium and selectively bred flies that developed larger anal papillae in response, which helped the flies to excrete salt from their bodies. After twenty-one generations of selective breeding, this new phenotype (larger anal papillae), although initially elicited only in response to an adverse environmental condition, developed in the absence of the high-salt condition (Ellis & Bjorklund, 2005, p. 15).
In another experiment,
Waddington subjected pupal fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to heat shock. In response to this treatment, some of the surviving flies developed wings that contained few or no cross-veins. Waddington subsequently bred the no-cross-vein flies and exposed the pupal flies of that second generation to heat shock as well. This produced a second generation of fruit flies that also had few or no cross-veins in their wings. After fourteen generations of selective breeding, some fruit flies developed the no-cross-wing phenotype without the pre-exposure to heat shock; that is, Waddington showed that a new phenotype was eventually seen in the developing offspring, without having ben exposed to the original activating environmental event. Waddington referred to this phenomenon as genetic assimilation, which he defined as ‘the conversion of an acquired character into an inherited one; or better, as a shift towards a greater importance of heredity in the degree to which the character is acquired or inherited’ (Bering 61) (Ellis & Bjorklund, 2005, 52).
For Waddington’s own synopses of both of these experiments, and of their results and ramifications, see Waddington (1975, p. 46–90).
The notion of “cross-talk” means that there are complex interactions between the various epigenetic processes, which are all tied together. For example, both DNA methylation and histone modification figure prominently in chromatin remodeling, and DNA methylation and histone modification pathways intersect. According to Brian Goodwin and Peter Saunders, Waddington was preoccupied with achieving “a synthesis of development and evolution, to resolve what he experienced as a conflict between the ordered transformations of epigenesis and the randomness of neo-Darwinism on the other.” They continue, Waddington “saw the basis for this in terms of the potential of developmental processes for adaptive response to environmental influences and the stabilization, or as he preferred to call it, canalization, of particular pathways through the epigenetic landscape to the adult form” (Goodwin & Saunders, 1989, xi).
Waddington explains the notion of “homeorhesis,” involving the channeling out of the developmental trajectory of a living organism, in The Strategy of the Genes. He states that.
if a process of embryonic development is disturbed, it usually returns to normalcy some time before reaching the adult condition. Its trajectory, that is to say, converges not merely to the normal end state, but to some earlier point on the path leading towards the steady state. This is well symbolized by the epigenetic landscape. If a ball, running down one of the valleys, were pushed partway up the hillside, it might well reach the valley bottom again before the slope of the valley flattens out as it reaches the adult steady state. Such a system exhibits a tendency towards a certain kind of equilibrium, which is restored after the disturbance, but this equilibrium is not centered on a static state but rather on a direction or pathway of change. We might speak of such an equilibrium-property as a condition of ‘homeorhesis’ (Gr. ‘to flow’) on the analogy with the well-known expression, homeostasis, which is appropriate when it is an unchanging state which is maintained (Waddington, 1957, p. 32).
Elsewhere, in Evolution of an Evolutionist, Waddington explains that in comparison with homeostasis, in homeorhesis, “we are here dealing with a similar concept, but of a rather more general nature, in that the thing that is being held constant is not a single parameter but is a time-extended course of change, that is to say, a trajectory. The situation can therefore be referred to as one of homeorhesis, [a] stabilized flow rather than stabilized state” (Waddington, 1975, p. 221, my emphasis). Waddington’s notion of homeorhesis has recently been discussed by Fabris (2018), as she presents arguments for the thesis that a process-relational model of inheritance and development is more adequate than that of mechanistic neo-Darwinism. The latter sees genotype and phenotype as externally-related substances, the former being conceived to provide the underlying “program” or “code,” which causally determines the linear sequence by which the organism qua phenotype will develop. As Fabris describes it, the neo-Darwinian, “substance view of development” holds that it involves “an ordered succession of stages” or “domino sequence” that is “instigated by DNA,” which is said to “store[] all the necessary instructions for the construction of an organism” (Fabris, 2018, p. 249). In relation to this neo-Darwinian “gene-centered” view, she says that the organism qua phenotype, is “reduced to an epiphenomenon of its genes” (Fabris, 2018, p. 250). However, for Fabris, as for Waddington, organisms are agents that are “capable of shaping their own developmental trajectories, thereby actively contributing to their adaptive persistence” (Fabris, 2018, p. 250). Fabris characterizes homeorhesis as the purposive attaining of a balance between robustness, by which is meant “the ability to display stability in the face of perturbations” (Fabris, 2018, p. 253) and plasticity, namely, “the capacity to alter these same configurations over time” (Fabris, 2018, p. 253). Stemming from Waddington’s emphasis on the term homeorhesis, Fabris explains that.
homeorhesis, like homeostasis, also refers to the regulatory ability of a system to reach a dynamic form of stability by compensating against perturbations within a specific range of responses. The difference is that, while a homeostatic response concerns the maintenance of a single, fixed steady state, a homeorhetic response refers to the stability of the temporally extended trajectory of the system (Fabris, 2018, 253-254).
The concepts of homeostasis and homeorhesis are distinct, but interrelated, for the latter involves the “maintaining [of] the organism in a stable state over the course of its development by means of a range of specific homeostatic responses” (Fabris, 2018, p. 254). Overall, for Fabris, following Waddington, not only can the steady states that homeostatic processes purposively aim at fluctuate and be altered (in a similar fashion as chronobiology tells us today—that the target points are themselves in rhythmic flux), but the developmental trajectories of living organisms as wholes that are purposively aimed at (e.g., by their genomes, traditionally conceived of), can be as well, as in homeorhesis.
On the one hand, preformationism is the theory that the developing embryo resembles a miniature human being or “homunculus,” and merely grows without differentiation, form preceding development in the sense of it having everything it needs to do so at the outset. On the other hand, epigenesis is the theory that the embryo does not come into existence in a preformed way, but by way of successive cellular differentiation develops in stages toward human beinghood—the problem here being this would erode the role of genes, which are to a large extent constant, in development.
Waddington’s papers in the volume are chapter five of part one, entitled “The Process Theory of Evolution and Notes on the Evolution of Mind” and chapter five of part four, entitled “Whitehead and Modern Science.” John Cobb’s summaries of some of the main points of both chapters, respectively, located at the end of each part of the volume, are as follows. As for the first essay, he states,
Waddington’s paper illustrates how a Whiteheadian vision of organisms interacting with environments takes account of a purposive element throughout the evolutionary process. This is not, of course, a purpose for the process as a whole or even for any long-range goals at all. The ability to act in terms of far-reaching goals appears flickeringly among human beings and, so far as we know, nowhere else. But animals act intelligently in their quest for food and, in doing so, modify their environments. Evolutionary theory needs to take account of the interaction between short-term purposive behavior on the part of animals and the survival value of particular characteristics (Cobb & Griffin, 1977).
As for the second of Waddington’s papers, Cobb states that.
the essay of C. H. Waddington expresses how a practising biologist has in fact been influenced in the direction of research and the formulation of theory by Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. This provides, through concrete and important illustration, proof of the potential fruitfulness of renewal of intimate relations between science and the philosophy of nature. Waddington believes that scientific thought is “just about now beginning to catch up with the first phase of Whitehead’s thought” … He thinks science will proceed in the general direction Whitehead moved in his later work; but for him, as for all of us, that remains to be seen. The editors believe that the advance of science can be facilitated by an ongoing discussion with Whitehead’s philosophy of nature, and hope that more philosophers and scientists will join in the discussion (Cobb & Griffin, 1977).
Following on Darwin’s heels and dealing with its application to human life, British Scientist, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) defined the term eugenics (Gr. “good breeding”) to mean.
the science of improving stock … which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” Galton further stated that “man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of eugenics (Galton, 1908, p. 323).
Julian Huxley was one of the grandsons of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), Darwin’s “bulldog” who famously debated Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873) in 1860. Pointing to a link between Julian Huxley’s emphasis on eugenics and the work of his grandfather, working on the Darwinian thesis that morality in human societies was a function of group/community/social selection, in his late lectures on “Evolution and Ethics,” T. H. Huxley stated that “men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic process” (i.e., involving the “raw” form of natural selection). He continues,
as among other animals, multiplication goes on without cessation, and involves severe competition for the means of support. The struggle for existence tends to eliminate those less fitted to adapt themselves to the circumstances of their existence. The strongest, the most self-assertive, tend to tread down the weaker. But the influence of the cosmic process on the evolution of society is the greater the more rudimentary is civilization. Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but those who are ethically the best (Huxley, 2006, p. 48).
For T. H. Huxley, as for Darwin, human society offered a check on the cosmic process, natural selection no longer operating mercilessly, as in a violent state of nature. However, T. H. Huxley offered an analogy comparing human society to horticulture: a colony is a little garden under the control of a “Gardener”/“Administrator” wherein each individual in society is a plant, and there are endless varieties of cultivated flowers, fruits, tubers, and bulbs, but also weeds. He painted the picture that the Gardener/Administrator can take out the problematic weeds in his/her garden (i.e., diminishing their overall impact on the garden or society). So, there is still a competitive struggle in society, involving selective forces (e.g. involving finances and economic decision making, one’s social standing: whether one follows or does not follow social norms, students and grades), but these are mitigated and decided upon by the Gardener/Administrator. Here, T. H. Huxley is describing a kind of artificial selection within society. To some extent, these ideas may be interpreted as involving eugenics, as highlighted by his statements that “the cosmic process (involving natural selection) uses unrestricted multiplication as the means whereby hundreds compete for the place and nourishment adequate for one; it employs frost and drought to cut off the weak and unfortunate; to survive, there is need not only of strength, but of flexibility and good fortune. … The gardener, on the other hand, restricts multiplication; provides that each plant shall have sufficient space and nourishment; protects from frost and drought; and, in every other way attempts to modify the conditions, in such a manner as to bring about the survival of those forms which most nearly approach the standard of the useful, or the beautiful, which he/she has in mind” (my emphasis). That said, T. H. Huxley went on to say: “let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process” (e.g., imitating nature / natural selection), “still less in running away from it, but in combating it” (Huxley, 2006, p. 49).
Huxley writes that.
the first and basic fact about human development is that it is not a mere unfolding of a miniature model; the developing human being passes through a series of radically different stages—infancy, childhood, boy- or girlhood, adolescence, maturity, each of them demanding different educational treatment. Yet many educational systems have insisted on treating the child as a miniature man, and others as so much blank or plastic material, to be written on or moulded at the educator’s will. In reality, the development of man, like that of all other organisms, is what biologists call epigenetic. The modern science of development has shed the title of Embryology in favour of Epigenetics. Today we are beginning to explore the mechanisms by which the genetic code inscribed in the chromosomes of the egg is translated, through the co-operative interaction of the genes and their environment, into bodily and mental organization, and are discovering various of the principles at work. One of the most important of these is what Waddington has called the canalization of development into a number of channels, each leading in a definite direction towards a specific kind of end-result, while any departure from their “right” course is automatically corrected. They thus have a high capacity for self-regulation—perhaps self-direction is the better term. Such processes Waddington calls chreodes, meaning by chreode “a pathway of change” which is equilibrated, in the sense that the system tends to return to it after disturbance (Huxley, 1964, pp. 137-138).
Evolutionary ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s evolutionary neo-Kantian perspective holds to the notion that the Kantian a priori concepts of the understanding belonging to rational beings, such as self, community, causality, induction, and teleology, are metaphysical concepts that have had their mettle tested in the struggle for existence over eons of evolutionary time and which frame the way they experience the world (see Lorenz, 1965, 2009; Scarfe, 2012).
According to Daniel L. Everett in How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention,
language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations. As such the hero of this story is Homo erectus, upright man, the most intelligent creature that had ever existed until that time. Erectus was the pioneer of language, culture, human migration and adventure. Around three-quarters of a million years before Homo erectus transmogrified into Homo sapiens, their communities sailed almost two hundred miles (320 kilometres) across open ocean and walked nearly the entire world. Erectus communities invented symbols and language, the sort that wouldn’t seem out of place today. Although their languages differed from modern languages in the quantity of their grammatical tools, they were human languages. Of course, as generations came and went, Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages. … Homo sapiens means “wise man,” and suggests, erroneously as we see, that modern humans (we are all Homo sapiens) are the only wise or intelligent humans. We are almost certainly the smartest. But we are not the only smart humans who ever lived. Erectus also invented the other pillar of human cognition: culture. Who we are today was partially forged by the intelligence, travels, trials and strength of Homo erectus. This is worth stating because too many sapiens fail to reflect on the importance of earlier humans tow who we are today … language—not communication—is the dividing line between humans and other animals (2017, xv-xvii).
My emphasis on the expressions “provide” and “steer them” is for the purpose of highlighting Huxley’s ideological dogmatism in relation to education, which is perhaps to be associated with Paulo Freire’s description of the “banking model of education” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970, pp. 72–74).
It is to be noted that it is only those who inherit two copies of the sickle cell anemia mutation who will develop sickle cell anemia in ways that may lead to diminished life expectancy on average. On the contrary, individuals who inherit only one copy of the sickle cell anemia mutation (either from their father or their mother, but not both) do not contract the disease, but may have a high degree of immunity to malaria.
See Cannon (1963).
See Devall & Sessions (1985), p. 74. An additional connection that might be explored, but which is beyond the scope of this paper, is the relationship between Waddington’s “biological wisdom” and Indigenous wisdom, which, of course, long predated the figures mentioned.
To be sure, in Science and the Modern World, Whitehead stated that “it is folly to look at the universe through rose-tinted spectacles. we must admit the struggle [for existence] … the question is, who is to be eliminated … in so far as we are educators, we have to have clear ideas upon that point; for it settles the type to be produced and the practical ethics to be inculcated” (Whitehead, 1967, p. 205).
As to the imminent counter-claim that my use of the term “selection” is an equivocation between two different senses, here, as elsewhere, I am following James Mark Baldwin’s stance on the usage of this term, as he develops his theory of organic selection. The theory of organic selection involves the notion that the course that evolution takes in a species or variety can be channeled out by behavioral novelties, behavioral learning, and behavioral shifts, since those organisms that have what it takes from a physiological standpoint to perform a new behavior that becomes requisite for survival (e.g., due to changing environmental circumstances; resource scarcity) will be selected for, such physiological features in general being passed down to offspring, whereas natural selection will eliminate those that do not. In Development and Evolution (1902), Baldwin distinguished between the two different senses of the term, but also demonstrated how they relate together, such that it is necessary to recognize both in biological discourse. First, he states that “selection means the act of picking out certain objects from a number of others, and it implies that these objects are chosen for some reason or other” (Baldwin, 2005, pp. 168–169), which, when it comes to his notion of organic selection implies the organism’s behavioral selections. At the same time, he also preserves the “Darwinian” meaning of the term as synonymous with the theory of natural selection, namely, that having the connotation of “advantage gained in the struggle for existence, either by the individual or the species” (Baldwin, 2005, p. 169) and the elimination of those not succeeding in this struggle. Distinguishing between the two senses, but also showing how they fit together in the notion that organisms are not only passive objects upon which natural selection acts, but selective agents whose activities and behaviors play a role in the preservations and elimination that belong to the total process that is natural selection, Baldwin suggests that “there is only one thing to do, that is to recognize the two general uses of the term, ‘selection,’” (Baldwin, 2005, p. 169, my addition).
In characterizing Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theory concerning morality, Sir Ross states that “his fundamental theory turns out to be universalistic Hedonism, or Utilitarianism; … and I believe this to be in the long run true of evolutionary ethics in general” (Ross, 1939, p. 59). Critical pan-selectionism treats pleasure and happiness and the absence of pain and suffering as merely one among many facets of well-being to be considered in moral deliberation.
Nietzsche was one of the first to recognize the decisiveness of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and its implications for our understanding of most every aspect of human life and endeavor. However, Nietzsche did not agree with Darwin that the “reactive” adaptation of living creatures to their environment, as natural selection acts on them, was to be emphasized over their “proactive” and “agential” will to power. Nietzsche was also highly critical of the Darwinian account of the “origin of morality” that had been provided by Paul Rée in The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) and which echoed that which Darwin had supplied in chapters III-IV of The Descent of Man [1871]. While Rée had previously been Nietzsche’s close friend, to Nietzsche he had obstructed him in his romantic advances toward Lou Salomé. For Nietzsche, this Darwinian account of the “origin of morality” which has its basis in group/social/community/kin selection, did not truly represent genuine morality or altruism because such conduct was selfishly motivated by the prospect of a person seeking to heighten their material and reproductive success by way of maintaining their status in a socially cohesive tribe or group were involved. For individuals scattered alone in wild nature stand far less of a chance of survival and of attaining to reproductive success than those who are members of a socially cohesive tribe or group, who can count on others to assist them when food and water are scarce, or when predators and enemies attack. “Moralities” based in group/social/community/kin selection were for Nietzsche representative not only of psychological egoism, but of nihilistic “slave/herd morality,” in contradistinction to “master morality,” which involved individual’s creating their own values in independent fashion. To be sure of this interpretation of Nietzsche, in a post-humous fragment from 1879–1880, Nietzsche asserts that “producing offspring has no altruistic aspect. Left to itself, an animal abandons itself to reproduction, to the extent that this pleasure often causes death. To sacrifice oneself to one’s offspring is to sacrifice oneself to what is closest, to one’s own production, etc.…, this is certainly not altruism.”.
At the end of chapter eleven of The Selfish Gene entitled, “Memes: The New Replicators,” Dawkins states that “we have the power to turn against our creators … [to] rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (201) so as, for example, to engage in prosocial conduct, to contribute altruistically for the good of the collective, or to do that which is necessary to reduce our carbon footprint so as to do our share in combating climate change. However, each of these aims ultimately has the end goal of ensuring the reproductive success, or of the ecological conditions allowing for the replication of our genes over the long term. As such, such “rebellion” can be said to entail even more gene selfishness. Critical pan-selectionism emphasizes that we reflect critically on our selective activities and our behavioral selections in relation to the impact that they have on other organisms, so as to cultivate biological wisdom that will leave open the widest range of possibility for evolution to take going forward over the long term. This may seem like more gene selfishness (i.e., the ensuring of the conditions for the possibility of the survival of the genes of the forms of life of our evolutionary epoch), but given the open-endedness of the evolutionary-environmental ethic of critical pan-selectionism, this does not necessitate the view that the subject engaging in such critical reflection is merely trying to preserve the conditions for the survival of their genes, of those one shares one’s genome with, of those of one’s own biological kind or species, or even the privileging of the life-forms that exist in our contemporary evolutionary epoch. Rather, it may serve the purpose of challenging the psychological egoism and nihilism inherent in ethical systems that are the function of group/community/social/kin selection, e.g., by a person consciously deciding not to have offspring while at the same time living an ethical, altruistic, and affirming life, such as to live one’s life well and in a fashion that demonstrates that moral conduct is not contingent on being motivated, either consciously or unconsciously, by a selfish, biological “reward” or “payoff” of gene replication.
Other forms of diminishment of this “psycho-social inheritance system,” undermining trust and its sustainability, may include the corporatization of the universities and the erosion of academic freedom that are occurring today.
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Scarfe, A.C. Education as an Evolutionary Phenomenon: Huxley, Waddington, and the Foundational Importance of Ethics. Interchange 52, 133–165 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-021-09433-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-021-09433-5