Ethics_and_Darwinism

Ethics and Darwinism ETHICS AND DARWINISM [PART I] by Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A. Charles Darwin never lived to enjoy the popularity of his own theory. It would take another few decades for “descent by modification” to dominate the biological sciences. Certainly, he won some important victories. The Origin of Species (1859) gave impetus to the growing naturalism of the day. It devastated the prevailing religious dogma of species fixity, and thus undermined ecclesiastical authority on scientific matters. This success attracted a host of social and political reformers who wished to attack the conservative influence of the Anglican church. If evolution could challenge the status quo in science, then perhaps it could challenge the status quo in fields as far flung as law, economics, social policy, and ethics. Yet Darwin, who shared the reformers’ liberal leanings, saw no application of his theory outside biology. The willingness to appropriate evolution, and the motivations behind it, has changed little in the last hundred years. Darwinism continues to attract an enthusiastic bevy of supporters who see the work of natural selection in every part of the Universe, from physics to psychology, and from genes to human culture. As I hope to show in this article, the attempt to derive ethics from darwin, darwinism, moral, social, nature, human, progress, spencer, natural, people, society, right, selection, one, evolution, darwin’s, animal, world, process, population, just, good, animals, yet, view, theory, sphere, place, law, came, being, agents, wrong, working, work