The claims of realism.(Darwinian Conservatism)(Book review)

Larry Arnhart Darwinian Conservatism. Imprint Academic, 162 pages, $17.90

reviewed by Paul R. Gross

Since a revolutionary day in June 1860, when the Bishop of Oxford, "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, rose before the British Association to put an end to Mr. Darwin's impertinence, many proper people have had mixed feelings about evolution: (1) Evolution can't be true. (2) Let us hope it's not true. (3) Well, if it is true, let us hope it's not bruited about. (4) At least, it mustn't be taught to children!

There remains some dispute about that day's details, but it was in fact Professor Huxley who, responding briefly for evolution, put an end to the Bishop's impertinence. That was, however, a momentary thing, in which the pride of Victorians in their fairness overcame the hope for a good roast of the scientists. Among non-scientists, mixed feelings returned, and we are no longer Victorians, which need not be entirely to our credit.

Reputed parallels between Victorian liberalism and Darwinian evolutionary biology have been masticated all too often by writers more knowledgeable about economics or politics than biology. In his Apes, Angels, and Victorians (1955), however, William Irvine, a better-prepared commentator, noticed and argued that "Darwinism" and political conservatism--at least the English variety--had far more in common than had been suspected. The parallels are indeed striking. There has always been a core of interest and support for the science of evolution among conservatives. In Darwinian Conservatism, the political scientist Larry Arnhart resurrects and refreshes that comparison. He does so at a time when, if an accurate poll of conservatives could be taken, a radical shrinkage of their rationalist core would be manifest. Conservative air is filled with thunder against "scientism," meaning not the idolatry of science but evolutionary biology and all its works. Some prominent public figures applaud or endorse teaching something called "Intelligent Design Theory" to schoolchildren--or, at least, teaching supposedly scientific reasons to reject evolution, our 150-year old scientific account of the history of life. Much of this is recent, a matter of three decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, much virulent anti-Darwinism came from the feminist, multiculturalist, postmodernist academic left. (Darwin was, after all, a white, European, male Victorian.)

Arnhart is not primarily concerned with the causes and kinetics of this astonishing political reversal. His aim is to demonstrate that, far from serving as a scaffold for left-radicalism, evolution was and remains a body of empirical science and solid theory that displays and supports bedrock conservative principles. These include the inextricability of present and future from the past, the inevitability of variation in individuals and systems, differential survival of useful variations and the containment of damaging ones, and the omnipresent control of everything by environment, itself changing as its inhabitants change--in response to itself. There could not be a system of thought more opposed, Arnhart believes, to what radical utopianism has sought to bring into the world since 1860.

His argument is that a broad view of human behavior is "realist" only if it incorporates the vast body of fact and theory from the life sciences during the last 150 years. This is opposite to the current biophobia of the social sciences. He argues that true conservatives are committed to realism about human nature and prospects: