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Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

Great minds shape the thinking of successive historical periods. Luther and Calvin inspired the
Reformation; Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire and Rousseau, the Enlightenment. Modern thought is most
dependent on the influence of Charles Darwin

By Ernst Mayr on November 24, 2009

Credit: Philippe Lisaac Getty Images

Editor's Note: This story, originally published in the July 2000 issue of Scientific American, is being
made available due to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species
Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century,
drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists
as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has
been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that
Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the
phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the
exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and
women,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicist’s style of thought and
mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein’s contributions in their fullness. Indeed, this
limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have had little impact
on the way the average person apprehends the world.
The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas
proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true.
The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been
responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than
Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s accomplishments were so many and so diverse that it is useful to distinguish three fields to
which he made major contributions: evolutionary biology; the philosophy of science; and the
modern zeitgeist. Although I will be focusing on this last domain, for the sake of completeness I will
put forth a short overview of his contributions—particularly as they inform his later ideas—to the
first two areas.

A Secular View of Life

Darwin founded a new branch of life science, evolutionary biology. Four of his contributions to
evolutionary biology are especially important, as they held considerable sway beyond that discipline.
The first is the nonconstancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is
the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of living things on
earth from a single unique origin. Up until 1859, all evolutionary proposals, such as that of naturalist
Jean- Baptiste Lamarck, instead endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater
perfection that had been in vogue since Aristotle’s concept of Scala Naturae, the chain of being.
Darwin further noted that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. Finally,
he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was natural selection.
These four insights served as the foundation for Darwin’s founding of a new branch of the
philosophy of science, a philosophy of biology. Despite the passing of a century before this new
branch of philosophy fully developed, its eventual form is based on Darwinian concepts. For
example, Darwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics
and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that
have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of
such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative
reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.
For example, three different scenarios have been proposed for the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs
at the end of the Cretaceous: a devastating epidemic; a catastrophic change of climate; and the
impact of an asteroid, known as the Alvarez theory. The first two narratives were ultimately refuted
by evidence incompatible with them. All the known facts, however, fit the Alvarez theory, which is
now widely accepted. The testing of historical narratives implies that the wide gap between science
and the humanities that so troubled physicist C. P. Snow is actually nonexistent—by virtue of its
methodology and its acceptance of the time factor that makes change possible, evolutionary biology
serves as a bridge.
The discovery of natural selection, by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, must itself be counted as
an extraordinary philosophical advance. The principle remained unknown throughout the more than
2,000-year history of philosophy ranging from the Greeks to Hume, Kant and the Victorian era. The
concept of natural selection had remarkable power for explaining directional and adaptive changes.
Its nature is simplicity itself. It is not a force like the forces described in the laws of physics; its
mechanism is simply the elimination of inferior individuals. This process of nonrandom elimination
impelled Darwin’s contemporary, philosopher Herbert Spencer, to describe evolution with the now
familiar term “survival of the fittest.” (This description was long ridiculed as circular reasoning:
“Who are the fittest? Those who survive.” In reality, a careful analysis can usually determine why
certain individuals fail to thrive in a given set of conditions.)
The truly outstanding achievement of the principle of natural selection is that it makes unnecessary
the invocation of “final causes”—that is, any teleological forces leading to a particular end. In fact,
nothing is predetermined. Furthermore, the objective of selection even may change from one
generation to the next, as environmental circumstances vary.
A diverse population is a necessity for the proper working of natural selection. (Darwin’s success
meant that typologists, for whom all members of a class are essentially identical, were left with an
untenable viewpoint.) Because of the importance of variation, natural selection should be considered
a two-step process: the production of abundant variation is followed by the elimination of inferior
individuals. This latter step is directional. By adopting natural selection, Darwin settled the several-
thousandyear- old argument among philosophers over chance or necessity. Change on the earth is
the result of both, the first step being dominated by randomness, the second by necessity.
Darwin was a holist: for him the object, or target, of selection was primarily the individual as a
whole. The geneticists, almost from 1900 on, in a rather reductionist spirit preferred to consider the
gene the target of evolution. In the past 25 years, however, they have largely returned to the
Darwinian view that the individual is the principal target.
For 80 years after 1859, bitter controversy raged as to which of four competing evolutionary theories
was valid. “Transmutation” was the establishment of a new species or new type through a single
mutation, or saltation. “Orthogenesis” held that intrinsic teleological tendencies led to transformation.
Lamarckian evolution relied on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And now there was
Darwin’s variational evolution, through natural selection. Darwin’s theory clearly emerged as the
victor during the evolutionary synthesis of the 1940s, when the new discoveries in genetics were
married with taxonomic observations concerning systematics, the classification of organisms by their
relationships. Darwinism is now almost unanimously accepted by knowledgeable evolutionists. In
addition, it has become the basic component of the new philosophy of biology.

A most important principle of the new biological philosophy, undiscovered for almost a century after
the publication of On the Origin of Species, is the dual nature of biological processes. These
activities are governed both by the universal laws of physics and chemistry and by a genetic program,
itself the result of natural selection, which has molded the genotype for millions of generations. The
causal factor of the possession of a genetic program is unique to living organisms, and it is totally
absent in the inanimate world. Because of the backward state of molecular and genetic knowledge in
his time, Darwin was unaware of this vital factor.
Another aspect of the new philosophy of biology concerns the role of laws. Laws give way to
concepts in Darwinism. In the physical sciences, as a rule, theories are based on laws; for example,
the laws of motion led to the theory of gravitation. In evolutionary biology, however, theories are
largely based on concepts such as competition, female choice, selection, succession and dominance.
These biological concepts, and the theories based on them, cannot be reduced to the laws and
theories of the physical sciences. Darwin himself never stated this idea plainly. My assertion of
Darwin’s importance to modern thought is the result of an analysis of Darwinian theory over the past
century. During this period, a pronounced change in the methodology of biology took place. This
transformation was not caused exclusively by Darwin, but it was greatly strengthened by
developments in evolutionary biology. Observation, comparison and classification, as well as the
testing of competing historical narratives, became the methods of evolutionary biology, outweighing
experimentation.
I do not claim that Darwin was single-handedly responsible for all the intellectual developments in
this period. Much of it, like the refutation of French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon
Laplace’s determinism, was “in the air.” But Darwin in most cases either had priority or promoted
the new views most vigorously.

The Darwinian Zeitgeist

A 21st-century person looks at the world quite differently than a citizen of the Victorian era did. This
shift had multiple sources, particularly the incredible advances in technology. But what is not at all
appreciated is the great extent to which this shift in thinking indeed resulted from Darwin’s ideas.
Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The
world they inhabited had been created by God, and as the natural theologians claimed, He had
instituted wise laws that brought about the perfect adaptation of all organisms to one another and to
their environment. At the same time, the architects of the scientific revolution had constructed a
worldview based on physicalism (a reduction to spatiotemporal things or events or their properties),
teleology, determinism and other basic principles. Such was the thinking of Western man prior to the
1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand
in total conflict with these prevailing ideas.
 First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of
evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely
materialistically. It no longer requires God as creator or designer (although one is certainly still
free to believe in God even if one accepts evolution). Darwin pointed out that creation, as
described in the Bible and the origin accounts of other cultures, was contradicted by almost any
aspect of the natural world. Every aspect of the “wonderful design” so admired by the natural
theologians could be explained by natural selection. (A closer look also reveals that design is
often not so wonderful—see “Evolution and the Origins of Disease,” by Randolph M. Nesse
and George C. Williams; Scientific American, November 1998.) Eliminating God from science
made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to
positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which
have lasted to this day.
 Second, Darwinism refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the
general concept of the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This
viewpoint is called typology, or essentialism. The seeming variety, it was said, consisted of a
limited number of natural kinds (essences or types), each one forming a class. The members of
each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of
other essences.

Variation, in contrast, is nonessential and accidental. A triangle illustrates essentialism: all

triangles have the same fundamental characteristics and are sharply delimited against
 quadrangles or any other geometric figures. An intermediate between a triangle and a
quadrangle is inconceivable. Typological thinking, therefore, is unable to accommodate
variation and gives rise to a misleading conception of human races. For the typologist,
Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously differ from other human
ethnic groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism. (Although the ignorant misapplication of
evolutionary theory known as “social Darwinism” often gets blamed for justifications of
racism, adherence to the disproved essentialism preceding Darwin in fact can lead to a racist
viewpoint.)

Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different
concept now called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity,
are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals. No two of the six billion humans
are the same. Populations vary not by their essences but only by mean statistical differences.
By rejecting the constancy of populations, Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific
thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to explanatory interpretation in science.
 Third, Darwin’s theory of natural selection made any invocation of teleology unnecessary.
(nb: Teleology is the idea that there is design and purpose to the natural world)
From the Greeks onward, there existed a universal belief in the existence of a teleological force
in the world that led to ever greater perfection. This “final cause” was one of the causes
specified by Aristotle. After Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had unsuccessfully attempted to
describe biological phenomena with the help of a physicalist Newtonian explanation, he then
invoked teleological forces. Even after 1859, teleological explanations (orthogenesis)
continued to be quite popular in evolutionary biology. The acceptance of the Scala
Naturae and the explanations of natural theology were other manifestations of the popularity of
teleology. Darwinism swept such considerations away.

(The designation “teleological” actually applied to various different phenomena. Many

seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature are the simple consequence of natural
laws—a stone falls or a heated piece of metal cools because of laws of physics, not some end-
directed process. Processes in living organisms owe their apparent goal-directedness to the
operation of an inborn genetic or acquired program. Adapted systems, such as the heart or
kidneys, may engage in activities that can be considered goal seeking, but the systems
themselves were acquired during evolution and are continuously fine-tuned by natural selection.
Finally, there was a belief in cosmic teleology, with a purpose and predetermined goal ascribed
to everything in nature. Modern science, however, is unable to substantiate the existence of any
such cosmic teleology.)
 Fourth, Darwin does away with determinism. Laplace notoriously boasted that a complete
knowledge of the current world and all its processes would enable him to predict the future to
infinity. Darwin, by comparison, accepted the universality of randomness and chance
throughout the process of natural selection. (Astronomer and philosopher John Herschel
referred to natural selection contemptuously as “the law of the higgledy-piggledy.”) That
chance should play an important role in natural processes has been an unpalatable thought for
many physicists. Einstein expressed this distaste in his statement, “God does not play dice.” Of
course, as previously mentioned, only the first step in natural selection, the production of
variation, is a matter of chance. The character of the second step, the actual selection, is to be
 directional.

Despite the initial resistance by physicists and philosophers, the role of contingency and
chance in natural processes is now almost universally acknowledged. Many biologists and
philosophers deny the existence of universal laws in biology and suggest that all regularities be
stated in probabilistic terms, as nearly all so-called biological laws have exceptions.
Philosopher of science Karl Popper’s famous test of falsification therefore cannot be applied in
these cases.
 Fifth, Darwin developed a new view of humanity and, in turn, a new anthropocentrism.
Of all of Darwin’s proposals, the one his contemporaries found most difficult to accept was
that the theory of common descent applied to Man. For theologians and philosophers alike,
Man was a creature above and apart from other living beings. Aristotle, Descartes and Kant
agreed on this sentiment, no matter how else their thinking diverged. But biologists Thomas
Huxley and Ernst Haeckel revealed through rigorous comparative anatomical study that
humans and living apes clearly had common ancestry, an assessment that has never again been
seriously questioned in science. The application of the theory of common descent to Man
deprived man of his former unique position.

Ironically, though, these events did not lead to an end to anthropocentrism. The study of man
showed that, in spite of his descent, he is indeed unique among all organisms. Human
intelligence is unmatched by that of any other creature. Humans are the only animals with true
language, including grammar and syntax. Only humanity, as Darwin emphasized, has
developed genuine ethical systems. In addition, through high intelligence, language and long
parental care, humans are the only creatures to have created a rich culture. And by these means,
humanity has attained, for better or worse, an unprecedented dominance over the entire globe.
 Sixth, Darwin provided a scientific foundation for ethics. The question is frequently
raised—and usually rebuffed— as to whether evolution adequately explains healthy human
ethics. Many wonder how, if selection rewards the individual only for behavior that enhances
his own survival and reproductive success, such pure selfishness can lead to any sound ethics.
The widespread thesis of social Darwinism, promoted at the end of the 19th century by
Spencer, was that evolutionary explanations were at odds with the development of ethics.

We now know, however, that in a social species not only the individual must be considered—
an entire social group can be the target of selection. Darwin applied this reasoning to the
human species in 1871 in The Descent of Man. The survival and prosperity of a social group
depends to a large extent on the harmonious cooperation of the members of the group, and this
behavior must be based on altruism. Such altruism, by furthering the survival and prosperity of
the group, also indirectly benefits the fitness of the group’s individuals. The result amounts to
selection favoring altruistic behavior.

Kin selection and reciprocal helpfulness in particular will be greatly favored in a social group.
Such selection for altruism has been demonstrated in recent years to be widespread among
many other social animals. One can then perhaps encapsulate the relation between ethics and
evolution by saying that a propensity for altruism and harmonious cooperation in social groups
is favored by natural selection. The old thesis of social Darwinism—strict selfishness—was
 based on an incomplete understanding of animals, particularly social species.

The Influence of New Concepts

Let me now try to summarize my major findings. No educated person any longer questions the
validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact. Likewise, most
of Darwin’s particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the
gradualism of evolution, and his explanatory theory of natural selection.
I hope I have successfully illustrated the wide reach of Darwin’s ideas. Yes, he established a
philosophy of biology by introducing the time factor, by demonstrating the importance of chance
and contingency, and by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather
than laws. But furthermore—and this is perhaps Darwin’s greatest contribution—he developed a set
of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution,
can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we
must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the
refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for
the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process
leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological
phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which
places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands.
To borrow Darwin’s phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been,
and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow
affected by Darwinian principles.
This article is based on the September 23, 1999, lecture that Mayr delivered in Stockholm on
receiving the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERNST MAYR is one of the towering figures in the history of evolutionary biology. Following his
graduation from the University of Berlin in 1926, ornithological expeditions to New Guinea fueled
his interest in theoretical evolutionary biology. Mayr emigrated to the U.S. in 1931 and in 1953
joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he is now Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology,
Emeritus. His conception of rapid speciation of isolated populations formed the basis for the well
known neoevolutionary concept of punctuated equilibrium. The author of some of the 20th century's
most influential volumes on evolution, Mayr is the recipient of numerous awards, including the
National Medal of Science.