Darwin’s Ants: Evolutionary Theory and the Anthropomorphic Fallacy

Abstract

It was 1858—the year before Charles Darwin would publish The Origin of Species—when natural philosopher George Henry Lewes turned to Edward Forbes’s praise for the “sagacity of the razor-fish, who submits to be salted in his hole, rather than expose himself to be caught, after finding the enemy is lying in wait for him” (Lewes 365). Lewes’s empiricist convictions were prickled; here was the late Edward Forbes, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society), a respected zoological authority, attributing sagacity to the Solen siliqua. “[W]e are incessantly at fault in our tendency to anthropomorphise, a tendency which causes us to interpret the actions of animals according to the analogies of human nature,” Lewes wrote in his Sea-side Studies. “Wherever we see motion which seems to issue from some internal impulse, and not from an obvious external cause, we cannot help attributing it to ‘the will’” (365–66). We should be “on our guard against the tendency to attribute psychological motives to the actions of animals. Indeed, unless we have previously assured ourselves of identity, or at least great similarity of structure, we shall always be in error when concluding an identity of function” (368). Lewes’s “we” is telling: just pages earlier, the solen he himself is studying “change[s] his mind,” and surfaces “to indulge in a not altogether frivolous curiosity as to the being who can illogically offer salt to him who lives in salt water” (364).

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

Charles Darwin, Descent of Man