Evolution

by F. B. Jevons

The idea that evolution means progress, and by its very nature necessarily results in perfection, owes much of its popularity to the fallacious interpretation given to the phrase "survival of the fittest." In any scientific use of the phrase, "fittest" simply means "fittest to survive." But in popular usage it is supposed to mean "ideally or ethically best." But the fittest to survive are not necessarily the ideally best: they are, scientifically speaking, simply those best adapted to the circumstances and conditions under which they live. And the circumstances and conditions, the environment, may or may not be favourable to the survival of the ethically or æsthetically best: they may be favourable to the growth of weeds and to the destruction of beautiful flowers, in which case the cosmic process will wipe out the beautiful flowers, and the movement of evolution will be æsthetically retrogressive, not progressive.

Adaptation to environment, therefore, is no indication or test of progress, or of what is good or right or true or beautiful. Everything that exists is shown, by the mere fact of its existence, to be adapted to its environment. If, therefore, such adaptation is evidence that the thing is ideally satisfactory, it will follow that whatever is, is right. At the same time, our conception of right and good will be emptied of all meaning: a "right" or "good" thing will simply mean a thing which exists. The epithets will simply predicate existence, not a quality; and consequently we shall have to call the successful villain and the prosperous traitor good, and their methods right. They have adapted themselves to their conditions, and have flourished in consequence.

Adaptation to environment could only mean progress provided that the environment was uniformly such as to favour the survival of those alone who were ideally fit to survive. But it is not: instances are not uncommon in which organisms, having attained to a certain degree of complexity and heterogeneity of structure, subsequently, as a consequence of adapting themselves to their environment, lose it and revert to an earlier stage of development, relatively simple, homogeneous, and structureless. Such reversion or regressive metamorphosis is as much a part of the organism's evolution as its previous progressive metamorphosis; and progress and regress both are equally the result of adaptation to environment. Further, though reversion and regress may now be only occasional, it is certain that as the earth cools down they must become universal: the altered conditions of temperature, etc., will allow only the lower forms of life to survive, and will eventually extinguish even them.

As regards organic evolution in general, then, the struggle for existence and the action of the environment do not necessarily tend to result in progress. As regards the evolution of man in particular, Mr. Huxley went further and maintained that they were absolutely inimical to human progress, which has been effected, not because, but in spite of them, and is the result not of obeying the cosmic process, but of defying it.

The qualities which brought success in the struggle for existence to man as an animal were rapacity, greed, selfishness, and an absolute and cruel indifference to the wants and sufferings of others. On the gratification, at all cost to others, of his animal desires, his animal existence depended: it was the "ape and tiger" within him that made him victor in the struggle for existence; it was the environment that imposed this as the condition of success.

The qualities which make man a human being are tenderness, pity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, and love. It is in their growth—the "ethical process"—that human progress consists, and not in the ruthlessness by which the cosmic process effects the evolution of other organisms. These qualities—human and humane—do not make for success in the struggle for existence. They are not adapted to the environment provided by Nature. Their owners were not the fittest to survive, and consequently paid the penalty—physical destruction—as far as the cosmic process could exact it. If the struggle for existence and the action of the environment have not succeeded in keeping man down to the level of the brute, it is because man has deliberately set himself to oppose the cosmic process and the blind forces, knowing nothing of right and wrong, pity or love, by which it effects the evolution of the brute. The struggle for existence is fatal to the development of the qualities which are peculiarly characteristic of humanity, and man accordingly has suspended the struggle for existence. In place of warring with his fellow-man, he has begun to co-operate with him. He has learnt to some extent to postpone the gratification of his own wants to the satisfaction of those of others. He no longer destroys the weakly, the sick, the helpless, the useless, or even the criminal; and, if the environment threaten their destruction, he sets to work to alter the environment. Man no longer seeks to conquer Nature by obeying her: he studies her forces in order to command them to his will. Adaptation to environment is the implement by which she shapes human evolution to ends that are not his ends; he wrests the weapon from her hands, and by adaptation of the environment undoes her work, fosters the growth of those qualities which tend towards his ideal, and does away with the conditions which harbour ignorance and error, selfishness and sin.

Human progress, then, consists in perpetual approximation to the ideals of charity, love, and self-sacrifice. Life is exhibited as a struggle against evil, against the ape and tiger within us which we inherit from our ancestor—the brute. The evil is real, the struggle is hard but worthy, and not the less worthy because it is not directed to our personal happiness and gratification. "The practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better."[2]

Thus far this criticism of life, though stern, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, in it man seems to have recovered the freedom of action and the power of independent judgment which, as the mere product of the cosmic process, he could not enjoy according to the optimistic theory. If life is a struggle, at any rate man can fight the good fight, if he will; and he can judge for himself which is the higher, the adaptation to environment which puts man on a level with the ape and tiger, or the adaptation of environment which, for the sake of his ideals, sets him in conflict with the cosmic process.

It is when we proceed to conjecture the issue of the struggle, as thus stated, that pessimism begins to invade us. However valiantly man may fight, whatever temporary victories he may gain here or there, his defeat in the end is inevitable: the same cosmic forces which, working through him, have won him his trifling victories have preordained his ultimate destruction. As far as it is possible for science to forecast the future, it is certain that in the end man will fall a victim to his environment, and join the other extinct fauna of the earth. With him the ethical process ceases; with him perish the hopes, the aspirations, and the ideals for which he strove as being of greater worth than aught that evolution, the redistribution of matter and motion, could offer or produce.

If this were all, the picture would be sufficiently gloomy: man alone in the universe, surrounded by forces which act without regard to good or evil, without sympathy or heed for right or wrong, indeed, with the effect of impartially extinguishing both in the end. But it is not all. As the conditions grow more and more unfavourable to man's existence upon earth, as the margin of the means of subsistence contracts, and the presence of universal want increases, the ape and tiger in man will begin to assert themselves once more. In the face of starvation, the instinct of self-preservation will become imperious. Once more, as in the earliest days, man will live by rapacity, cruelty, and selfishness alone. Before man yields possession of the earth to the brutes, he will himself revert to brutishness. The puny barriers behind which man has for a moment sheltered himself from the action of the cosmic process, and nursed the feeble flame of those aspirations after higher things which distinguish him from the brute, must inevitably be swept away by the restless and relentless tide of insentient matter, perpetually redistributed by aimless motion, which constitutes the cosmic process.