Darwin's Tree of Death

[Last week, on the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre, I pointed out that it is absurd to think something like music or video games were the cause of this tragedy. However I also pointed out that Darwinism was used to justify the massacre perpetrated by Dylan and Klebold. In the blog below published on Beliefnet.com this connection was picked up and expanded upon and offered below together with a response to its critics. -J.S.]

Slouching Toward Columbine: Darwin's Tree of Death

Monday April 20, 2009

posted by David Klinghoffer

I've long been fascinated by the image of the Tree of Death, parallel to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and cryptically referred to in mystical texts explaining the Hebrew Bible:

"And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" (Genesis 2:9).

"Come and behold: as soon as night falls, the Tree of Death rules in the world and the Tree of Life disappears high above. Then the Tree of Death is the sole ruler in the universe, and all inhabitants of the world taste of death" (Zohar III:119a).

The image, and today's gruesome Columbine anniversary, provide an occasion to reflect on Darwinian evolution's social consequences, from school shootings to Nazi racism and more.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with its Tree of Life is applauded by most sophisticated Americans and Europeans as a scientific idea pure and simple, without the aura of dread and terror that, properly, should surround it in our minds.

Why should we so regard it? Not necessarily because of any judgment about whether the idea is right or wrong as science, but rather because of the uncanny way evolution has had of supplying the rationale and creating the backdrop for the most twisted, monstrous social movements that have sprung up in Western culture in the past century and half.

On April 20, 1999, two boys at Columbine High School in Colorado massacred 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounding 23 as well before shooting themselves. The 10th anniversary with its morbid recollections is upon us, but there's one aspect of the horrible memory that you can be sure you will not hear much about.

When one of the assailants, Eric Harris, was autopsied, the medical examiner found that under his black trench coat the boy had on a white t-shirt emblazoned with a peculiar slogan. The slogan was "Natural Selection." It was later reported but little commented upon that, on his website, Harris had written, among other paeans to the Darwinian mechanism, "Natural SELECTION!!!!!! God damn it's the best thing that ever happened to the earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms...but it's all natural!!! YES!"

Columbine became the most notorious of school shootings, inspiring imitators including Pekka Eric Auvinen, a Finnish high school student. On November 7, 2007, Auvinen showed up at his own school, Jokela High in Tuusula, Finland, with a small-caliber handgun. He proceeded to massacre seven fellow students and the school headmistress, wounding ten others, before shooting himself.

On a website, it was later learned, he described himself as an "anti-social social-Darwinist," declaring that "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection." The youth also posted videos on YouTube, some dominated by Nazi imagery, others evoking more recent stories of mass slaughter, including Columbine.

In media discussion of both stories, the ready availability of firearms was the theme most frequently commented upon and lamented. Protesting against the national "gun culture" was the point of Michael Moore's critically acclaimed and commercially successful documentary film Bowling for Columbine. As in the United States, gun-ownership in Finland is common. News reports about the Jokela attack emphasized this detail.

Harris and Auvinen picked up their interest in what we may call applied Darwinism from the skinhead and Neo-Nazi subculture, which is full of similar talk. Whether on aggressively Hitlerian web sites like Stormfront.org or in the comparatively restrained writings of the popular Louisiana racist David Duke, discussions of evolution and white supremacy are a common theme.

As a culture, we have trained ourselves not to notice such things. Yet theoreticians of racist imperialism, Marxism, Hitlerism, and modern pseudo-scientific eugenics have all cited Darwinian theory, its subsuming of man among the kingdom of the animals, as an inspiration. I've written a lot on these themes, conveniently collected over at Evolution News & Views.

Closer to home, in America in the 21st century, evolutionary theory lends support to moral relativism and the increasingly widespread notion that a human being possesses no more innate dignity than any other beast. Evolutionary theory has undermined the once universal belief in human exceptionalism, the idea that there is something inherently sacred in being a human. That belief once granted the right of protection to unborn children, handicapped adults, and disabled senior citizens.

People are blunter about this in Europe than we are in the U.S. Thus Baroness Mary Warnock, hailed by the London Daily Telegraph as "Britain's leading moral philosopher," argues that Alzheimer patients have a "duty to die." In a 2008 interview, she said that assisted suicide for Britain's 700,000 citizens suffering from dementia is the right course.

Borrowing language familiar to veterinarians, Lady Warnock commented, "I think that's the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you'd be licensing people to put others down." In a 2008 book, Easeful Death: Is There a Case for Assisted Suicide? (Oxford University Press), Lady Warnock explained that "Gradually, since Darwin, we have become accustomed to placing human beings among the other animals, and all animals among the rest of nature." Such thinking, though it retains its power to shock, represents the bioethical frontier.

This widespread failure to distinguish between people and animals is a moral disease we may call animalism. Both the elite and mass media are rife with it. When New York governor Eliot Spitzer was disgraced and forced out of office by a 2008 prostitution scandal, New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier leapt into the fray of the controversy with an article pointing out in detail how common adultery and even sex-for-hire are in the animal kingdom.

The star authority in the piece was a chortling University of Washington psychology professor, David Barash, author of The Myth of Monogamy, who pointed out that the only animal that seems not to cheat on its mate is a kind of flatworm that resides in the gills of some freshwater fish. "Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy," reasoned Angier, so why the big fuss about Spitzer's dalliances?

Darwinism's modern day advocates prefer to forget that ideas have consequences. Yet even a scientific idea may have disastrous consequences, as Darwin's earliest critics foresaw. One such prophet was Darwin's own professor of natural science when he was at Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick.

In a letter to Darwin dated December 24, 1859, just after the Origin of Species had been published, Sedgwick warned that if the new book were successful in making its case, then "humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."

A bit melodramatic, but otherwise on the mark. Whatever its merits as a scientific idea, evolution's Tree of Life has been revealed in many ways, in the most practical and painful terms, as a Tree of Death.

Darwin's Tree of Death: My Reply to Readers

Tuesday April 21, 2009

Responding to my post on the Columbine shooting and the social consequences of Darwinism, some objecting readers argued that the Bible, after all, has also inspired evil acts. Which is true, of course, but misses the point. Biblical faith has been used for good and abused for evil. That's why we can justifiably speak of its being "abused" -- because it has this other record of goodness.

The ideas that comprise Darwin's worldview, set forth in his books, have justified social movements for evil -- racism, colonialism, eugenics, etc. -- but none, that I'm aware of, for good. If anyone can think of counterexamples, please let me know.

Bottom line: Ideas have consequences.

Now does that mean that the Darwinian idea is false as a scientific description of how life developed? No, obviously it doesn't mean that. As I've argued all along, Darwinism's social record is simply and nothing more than a good reason to take a second look at the science behind it. And that's what uninformed people like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs adamantly refuse to do.

So when bad guys have used Darwin to justify racism and other evils, were they abusing his thought? Consider Darwin himself on "lower" peoples.

The "extermination" (a favorite word of Darwin in his writings) of failed races, whether animal or human, is a great theme in Darwin's books and a key feature in the advance of the evolutionary process as he conceived it. The elimination of human groups was a phenomenon parallel to that of animal groups: "The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism," Darwin reflected in the Descent of Man, "for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat now almost exterminated by the European rat."

Reflecting on the terror that Europeans once felt about the rise of the Turkish nation, Darwin celebrated, in a letter to the Irish philosopher William Graham, "Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."

He saw advantages to the unapologetic way barbarians went about the labor of killing off the weak.

Darwin entertained no faith in the equality of races. In the Descent he wrote that the "mental characteristics" of the human races, including the "light-hearted, talkative negroes," are "very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties."

The implications of this theory were plain, and he spelled them out in his scientific writing. Inferior races and peoples were simply lower down on the tree of life - they were losers in the struggle for existence and would, in the course of nature's normal way, be eliminated.

Darwin observed that "when civilized nations come into contact with barbarians, the struggle is short." The problem came if the dynamic of struggle was somehow impeded. This would be "highly injurious to the race of man." There was little hope that backward peoples would somehow advance to equality with their betters.

A difference between Darwinian and pre-Darwinian racism is that the pre-Darwinian variety regarded "barbarians" not as permanently inferior quasi-animals but as something more like children. Animals remain animals. Children, at least, will naturally grow up and mature.

The late Stephen Jay Gould, a modern scientific champion of Darwinism, admitted that "Biological arguments for racism...increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."

But please understand this is just the absolute tip of the iceberg. I've written elsewhere lots and lots on this theme. For more information on Darwin in America, read my colleague John West's thorough and impeccably documented Darwin Day in America. For Darwin in Europe, read Richard Weikart's startling From Darwin to Hitler.