Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

And Kautsky in his work on ethics declares that Darwin’s discoveries “belong to the greatest and most fruitful of the human intellect, and enable us to develop a new critique of knowledge.”

Ernest Untermann, in his latest work “Marxian Economics,” well says: “Marx discovered the specific laws of social development among human beings. * * * But while doing this, it never occurred to him to disregard the results of Darwin’s work. On the contrary, he knew the art of combining Darwin’s results with his own, without doing violence to either.”

This evidence of the general consensus of opinion among Socialist scholars as to the value of Darwin’s work and its special importance for Socialism could easily be enlarged indefinitely. But enough has been cited to show that a comprehensive grasp of the Socialist philosophy implies a knowledge of Darwinian theories.

The greatness of Darwin’s work has two aspects; the immense impetus he gave to the general theory of evolution, and, his discovery of its main process, “natural selection.” In the popular mind this distinction is lost in confusion and a great army of popular but ill-informed expounders have added to the muddle. The two things although closely related—cause and effect—are yet quite distinct, and a clearer understanding of Darwin’s work is made possible by the distinction being kept in mind. The honor of having discovered “natural selection” Darwin shares with Wallace only; as a contributor to the theory of evolution, he is one of a long and illustrious line. But even here he is the greatest of them all precisely because of his specific discovery which, by explaining how evolution works—at least among living things, (biology)—has made the general theory impregnable.

Before proceeding to that specific theory let us clearly understand that evolution has ceased to be a theory merely, it is also a well established fact. Anyone who denies this has no part or lot in the intellectual life of the last half century. Such a one, as Professor Giddings recently said, “inhabits a world of intellectual shades. He cannot grasp the earthly interests of the twentieth century.”

Every science in the biological hierarchy has contributed its quota to the establishment of the theory of evolution, and that theory in return has, in one department after another, produced order and system where before nothing existed but a conglomerate mass of apparently unrelated facts. So thoroughly has the theory impregnated every branch of science that an intelligent dentist must be an evolutionist.

The chief honors fall to the two sciences Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Ontogeny deals with the history of the germ from its beginning as an egg to its full fruition as a fully developed individual or as Haeckel defines it, “the history of the evolution of individual human organisms.” Phylogeny is defined by the same authority as, “the history of the evolution of the descent of man, that is, of the evolution of the various animal forms through which, in the course of countless ages, mankind has gradually passed to its present form.”

I mention these two sciences together because it is by comparing them that their chief significance appears. It is one of the most astonishing discoveries of science and at the same time one of the most convincing proofs of evolution, that the whole process of the development of the human race from the lowest or simplest forms, which constitutes the subject-matter of phylogeny, is reproduced in brief in the development of the embryo of the individual. This remarkable fact Haeckel named “the biogenetic principle.”

Darwin’s chief claim however to a pedestal in the hall of fame rests on his discovery of “natural selection.”

During his memorable voyage on “The Beagle” he observed that there was no essential connection between a species’ reproductive powers and the number of its population. As this discovery plays an important part in his theory we will let him speak for himself. In his “Journal of Researches” he gives the following case, with his conclusion: “I was surprised to find, on counting the eggs of a large white Doris (a kind of sea slug) how extraordinarily numerous they were. From two to five eggs (each three thousandths of an inch in diameter) were contained in a spherical little case. These were arranged two deep in transverse rows forming a ribbon. The ribbon adhered to the rock in an oval sphere. One which I found, measured nearly twenty inches in length and half inch in breadth. By counting how many balls were contained in a tenth of an inch in the row, and how many rows in an equal length of the ribbon, on the most moderate computation there were six hundred thousand eggs. Yet this Doris was certainly not very common: although I was often searching under the stones I saw only seven individuals. No fallacy is more common among naturalists, than that the numbers of an individual species depend on its powers of propagation.”