Dominican Darwinism: Evolution in Thomist Philosophy After Darwin

1 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 134. A few pages earlier he raises the issue of eugenics: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one 333 The Thomist 77 (2013): 333-65 DOMINICAN DARWINISM: EVOLUTION IN THOMIST PHILOSOPHY AFTER DARWIN †EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J. Mundelein Seminary Mundelein, Illinois I. THOMIST ACUITY VS. EXPLANATORY SPRAWL A T FIRST GLANCE, Thomist philosophers would seem to be singularly “ill-adapted,” so to speak, to appreciate either biological evolution in general or the Darwinian concept of natural selection in particular. Leaving aside for a moment the purely scientific issues in evolutionary biology, Thomists can certainly find a ripe target in the totalizing philosophic claims made for biological evolution. In that regard, one rarely finds great acuity among some of Charles Darwin’s more vocal apologists, especially when they begin to take the concept of natural selection out of biology and venture to apply it to ethics or to epistemology. Ethical claims based on evolution, such as the school of thought known as social Darwinism, are now widely recognized as disastrous, beginning with Darwin’s own last book, The Descent of Man, where we read this chilling sentence: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”1 Although his remarks on EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J. 334 to the last moment. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. . . . [Except] in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed” (ibid., 113). 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 73. The irony of Nietzsche affiliating himself with what he calls the “party of life” becomes especially evident in the section called “Morality for Doctors” in Twilight of the Idols, where he peremptorily commands: “The sick person is a parasite on society . . . [and] doctors should be the ones to convey this contempt. . . . [I]n all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands that degenerate life be shoved under and shoved aside with no mercy whatever—for example, as regards the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to life” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 70-71). 3 Even T. H. Huxley, known in his day as “Darwin’s bulldog,” realized late in his life the disaster that was looming for humanity if it adopted an evolutionary ethic: “What may have moved Huxley to reconsider the matter was . . . his discovery that the religion of humanity and ethics of evolution were more immediate threats to the moral welfare of society than even the religion and ethics of the Church” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962], 404). Not that his objections did much to deflect the influence of social Darwinism on eugenics or collectivist ideologies like Nazism and Communism, as the twentieth century would prove: “I would assert that without Darwinism, materialism would still have increased . . . but it would have been far less persuasive and thus would have gained fewer adherents than it actually did. . . . Darwinism made philosophical materialism, and positivism, more respectable by providing a non-theistic explanation for the origin of ethics” (Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 14, 15). Darwin were mostly denunciatory, Friedrich Nietzsche drew on the same social-Darwinian logic throughout his life, very much including his last...