Darwin’s Origin, Competition, and the economy of nature
Daniel Bivona
t
he spark that ignited a revolution in biology in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) is also a signally important medita-tion on the fraught issue of competimedita-tion in the Victorian period. one can hardly talk about competition in the nineteenth century, however, without invoking the lights of political economy. While many scholars, taking their cue from Darwin himself, have discussed the contribution made by thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) to Darwin’s conceptualization of competition throughout nature in Ori-gin, the evidence that another major political economist, Adam Smith, played a role in shaping Darwin’s ideas on competition in Origin has been somewhat more difficult to pin down. For one thing, while we know that Darwin read some of Smith’s work, we do not know whether he read The Wealth of Nations (1776). Michael ghiselin writes, “While a student at Cambridge university [Darwin] remarked in a letter dated January, 1829 that he was reading Adam Smith, but it is not obvious whether it was The Wealth of Nations or The Theory of Moral Senti-ments.”1 indeed, ghiselin has traced the origin of Darwin’s ideas about human social organization to the influence of the Theory of Moral Senti-ments, thus suggesting that the existing evidence bolsters the claim thatit was most likely that book by Smith that Darwin was referring to in his letter.2 Scott gordon reinforces this interpretation by claiming that Darwin did not read The Wealth of Nations, because he is unlikely to have derived his use of the division of labor from that source, although other scholars—notably, Silvan S. Schweber—disagree.3 gordon’s claim ultimately rests on his inference from internal evidence that Darwin’s notion of competition is “more extreme” than the model that appears in Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
Whatever Darwin’s familiarity with The Wealth of Nations—whether firsthand or secondhand—there is little question but that he was fa-miliar with the work of the foremost popularizer of political economy in Britain in the 1830s, harriet Martineau. While writing her didac-tic popular narratives, the Illustrations of Polididac-tical Economy, designed to make the basic principles of political economy accessible to ordinary readers, Martineau was a frequent guest in the Darwin household, at one point carrying on a courtship with Darwin’s older brother erasmus and engaging in long discussions with the young Charles Darwin.4
thus, while the direct line of influence between Darwin and Smith may not be easy to reconstruct, there is little doubt that Darwin was fired by ideas absorbed, even if by osmosis, from The Wealth of Nations and other important political economic writings. this is not simply a matter of borrowing metaphors. rather, Darwin was deeply influenced by both the language and the concepts of early nineteenth-century po-litical economy. these concepts range from scarcity to the division of labor to specialization to—above all—competition. i contend here that Darwin’s Origin benefited in many ways from his abstraction of eco-nomic ideas, especially those cited above, that aided him in formulat-ing a scientific argument to make sense of the evidence of evolutionary change. his sources undoubtedly varied, but the text of Origin reveals the great debt his scientific ideas owed to economic ideas abstracted, in one way or another, from political economic concepts.
A few scholars have noted the conceptual parallels with Darwin:
scarcity, specialization, division of labor, and competition. Stephen Jay gould, for instance, once succumbed to the temptation to make the broad, if overstated, claim that Darwinian evolutionary theory is “the economy of Adam Smith transferred to nature.”5 With this claim gould comes up just short of Karl Marx’s better-known, and exaggerated, as-sertion that Darwin unconsciously naturalized political economy and so did not need to have read it. After reading Origin in 1862, Marx
remarked to Friedrich engels that Darwin had “rediscovered” english society in nature with nature functioning as “civil society”—hardly a flattering tribute to the independence of Darwin’s thought, although Marx elsewhere recognized Darwin as an important scientific revolu-tionary.6 terence Ball has argued that Marx’s partner engels was the one chiefly responsible for the widely circulated claim that Darwin was to natural history what Marx was to human history. in the most im-portant sense, however, Marx’s view of nature (if not Smith’s) departed dramatically from Darwin’s, for Marx saw nature itself as essentially a human construct.7 As a natural scientist, Darwin would never endorse the notion that nature is only a human construct. rather, his theory of natural selection folds humanity back into a natural world that is indif-ferent to human wishes or human fears.
one of the central claims of The Origin of Species, however—the assertion that one of the two central mechanisms of evolution is natural selection—is based on at least two major premises that seem to owe something to Adam Smith’s work, not just to Malthus’s: first, the as-sumption that competition is universal (Smith devoted as much atten-tion to competiatten-tion as his student Malthus did); and second, the premise that the varieties of species we see around us today are the descendants of successful competitors from the past, in other words, that survival in the species sense is the chief measure of success in evolution. in this sense, Darwin’s theory is a theory of the role of competition within nature conceptualized as an evolving system. As Darwin puts it, “any variation . . . profitable to an individual” will tend to preserve that individual and be “inherited by its offspring.”8 Diversification, specialization, and profitability: these are the most important political economic themes reshaped to do service for natural history in the language of Darwin’s text. however, to call them metaphors would be a bit misleading, since Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural and sexual selection is the century’s most important meditation on economic goals and economic competition: that is, on how all organisms and species that survive for any amount of time manage to do so by solving what is the fundamen-tal economic problem in nature—procuring the means of continued subsistence and reproduction. Both political economy and Darwinian natural selection theory attempt, through an analysis of competition, to address a problem fundamental to both nature and human society.
i point to a fruitful cross-pollination here of political economy and Darwinian theory in the nineteenth century, specifically, to the ways
in which ideas and language born originally in The Wealth of Nations helped Darwin to conceptualize evolution through natural selection in nature, and thus i am suggesting that Darwin arrived at his insights in part by abstracting political economic ideas (although only in part).
Such a claim would seem to underplay the importance of biological evidence to the formation of natural selection theory, even though the persuasiveness of the argument in Origin rests in many respects on that evidence. Curiously, despite Darwin’s adroit use of what evidence there was, the evidentiary basis for natural selection in 1859 was at best a bit thin, as even Darwin acknowledges many times in the text. even if we concede that much of the evidence for natural selection cannot be observed directly in the nineteenth century but must be inferred from a very incomplete fossil record, Darwin’s theory nonetheless offers per-suasive theoretical insights into the meaning of that record and thus of the process of organic evolution.9 that this theoretical accounting relies, here and there, more on ingenious speculation than scientific ev-idence, however, has also been remarked by other readers of the text.
noting that Darwin built his theory around the “incontestable” fact of speciation, for instance, Daniel Dennett argues that, nonetheless, Dar-win could not offer convincing evidence for the evolution of species boundaries in 1859 and that, in any event, even today this issue remains under dispute. As Dennett says, “it has taken a century of further work to replace Darwin’s brilliant but inconclusive musings on the mecha-nisms of speciation with accounts that are to some degree demonstra-ble. Controversy about the mechanism and principles of speciation still persists, so in one sense neither Darwin nor any subsequent Darwinian has explained the origin of species.”10 to assert that neither Darwin nor his intellectual heirs have given a fully persuasive account of the princi-ple of speciation does not in the least diminish his accomplishment as a scientific revolutionary, any more than my assertion that Darwin made use of political economic conceptions and language in formulating the theory of natural selection diminishes the importance and originality of Darwin’s theory. indeed, i argue that this reveals Darwin to be a man intellectually of his time, a man whose thinking, no matter how revolu-tionary, was partly inspired by, and grounded in, contemporary debates about the nature of a not exclusively human concern with procuring the means of subsistence and reproduction.
Finally, i hope to develop and modify the large claim that the economist robert Frank recently made (in The Darwin Economy, 2011)
that “the invisible hand will come to be seen as a more special case of Darwin’s more general theory.”11 While i find Frank’s argument in The Darwin Economy compelling, Frank also engages there in somewhat fanciful speculation about the future. thus, he predicts that Darwin will one day be seen as the intellectual founder of economics. Frank’s way of putting the issue seems to center “the economic problem,” the fundamental object of economics as a discipline but by no means its exclusive property, at the heart of natural history. As my argument will show, the central role of “the economic” in the broadest sense seems to have been precisely the problem that Darwin saw in nature and built his theory to take account of. in that sense, i do agree with Frank’s general claim that what Darwin accomplished was the formulation of a more general theory that can be called economic, but i would add the reminder that the theory seeks to explain nothing less than the patterns of change observable (or inferable) in all life-forms over the long span of evolutionary time and thus is broader in focus than economics the discipline, with its exclusive focus on the human world.
the inViSiBle hAnD AnD DArWin’S CritiQue oF intentionAlity
like Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s Origin, as gillian Beer has noted, devotes itself to examining unintended or “systemic” consequences, an emergent order that becomes visible only in historical retrospect. As she argues, “evolutionary theory emphasises human unawareness of the past and obliges us to study a world from whose history we are largely absent. . . . [Charles] lyell, and later Darwin, demonstrated in their major narratives of geological and natural history that it was possible to have plot without man—both plot previous to man and plot even now regardless of him.”12 While competition is the main motor of this pro-cess, Origin concedes that competition can also be seen to serve the goals of cooperation, depending on one’s standpoint—implicitly, depending on how one defines the “whole” (the species? the tribe? the family? the colony? the individual soma?). While a backwards way of reading inten-tions works to demolish the claim that benevolent inteninten-tions function as a “divinity [which] shapes our ends / rough-hew them how we will”
when we are least conscious of it,13 intentionality can only, finally, be forward looking—a plan present at the origin and unfolded over time, not a plan whose existence is inferred only after its accomplishment.
Darwin’s Origin thus posits an orderly, law-like process, shaped by the operation of natural and sexual selection, that appears orderly only when one reconstructs its effects in retrospect. that there will have been order in natural evolution of a sort observable only in retrospect is a central plank of Darwin’s theory.
in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the well-known metaphor of the “invisible hand” functions in a similar fashion to the law of natu-ral selection that Darwin developed, somewhat mysteriously meshing self-interest with public interest, regardless of what the individuals in-volved in economic activity may consciously intend:
[e]very individual, therefore, . . . generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.14
Smith here both concedes the limits of the human ability to foresee the future and qualifies that assertion with the term frequently, a word that highlights his much-overlooked concession that the unbridled pursuit of self-interest is not always and inevitably a contributor to the public interest. Smith’s Wealth of Nations is a pioneering commentary on the limits of intentionality and the inability of the subject’s motives to be fully present to him- or herself; indeed, Smith therein anticipates the modern claim that purposiveness is often a systemic effect that can be inferred only after the fact of evolutionary change. in other words, na-ture did not “intend” the variety of plant and animal species we see around us today, certainly, because nature is not the kind of thing that can intend. But the reason these species are alive today is at least infer-able from a functional analysis of traits that blessed these species’ an-cestors with advantages in the universal struggle to live and reproduce.
As Daniel Dennett cautions, however, Darwinian evolutionary theory does not explain everything about individual destiny that we as individ-uals may be tempted to attribute to teleological sources. it explains why
plants and animals existing today have the features they do, but it does not explain why particular individuals have the features they do. nor does it explain why “you” are “lucky to be alive”: the beneficiary of the fact that all your ancestors going back to the beginnings of life on earth reproduced successfully before dying.15
When Darwin begins his argument for natural selection as the agency with main responsibility for species change in Origin, he launches at first into an analysis of human selection activities (what he calls “unconscious selection”), confident that if he can demonstrate the limits of intentionality there, he will be able to demolish the notion of nature as the artifact of a divine designer (29). thus, he mentions several instances in which humans have reshaped nature to fit human purposes—the most important, to him, of course, being the human domestication of various animal and plant species: “it has often been assumed that man has chosen for domestication animals and plants having an extraordinary inherent tendency to vary, and likewise to with-stand diverse climates. i do not dispute that these capacities have added largely to the value of most of our domesticated productions; but how could a savage possibly know, when he first tamed an animal, whether it would vary in succeeding generations, and whether it would endure other climates?” (14). the important point here is that the “savage” did not know and consequently could not have intended such an outcome when he first chose a wolf to domesticate. even in cases in which evolu-tionary change has been initiated by intentionalizing humans, Darwin argues, no single individual could have envisioned the end point of the process he or she began: the many species of domestic dog visible in the nineteenth century when Darwin was writing. indeed, he uses the term unconscious selection (29) to refer to selection that—paradoxically—
operates through the agency of presumably conscious human beings.
Darwin refers to the example of the domestication of the pear, which the roman historian pliny assures his readers was a distasteful fruit in the first century, not even suitable for consumption by pigs (31). how could pliny’s contemporary, the ancient roman botanical experimenter responsible for being the first to preserve sweet pear varieties to produce a fruit his pigs would eat, have known he was initiating an evolutionary process that would lead—eventually—to the production of a very sweet fruit suitable for human consumption by the nineteenth century? As Darwin puts it, “[t]he gardeners of the classical period, who cultivated the best pear they could procure, never thought what splendid fruit we
should eat; though we owe our excellent fruit, in some small degree, to their having naturally chosen and preserved the best varieties they could anywhere find” (31). Darwin’s point is that the “gardeners of the classical period” could not have foreseen that they were initiating an evolutionary process that would grow to impressive scope. And if even intentional creatures such as humans are unable to envision the end of a conscious evolutionary process of selection, then what can one infer about the entire universe of species? the answer can only be that spe-ciation is not a teleological process whose end is immanent in its begin-nings and thus not one whose evolutionary path can be envisioned in advance. the patterns that evolution stamps in natural history become visible only when we look back. in Dennett’s words, “mitochondrial eve” can only be retrospectively “crowned,” and thus all species origins are identified only through the same process of historical retrospect.16 i touch on the complex issue of “selection pressure” later in this chapter, although it does not undermine Dennett’s claim and, in any event, is not derived directly from Darwin’s work but is rather a by-product of contemporary discussions of emergent or “holistic” evolution.
evolution through natural selection is a process that can be known only retrospectively, as one retraces the complex past history of competition among species and within species for the scarce means of survival—“the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole vegetable and animal king-dom,” as Darwin says (7). While Adam Smith seeks to offer reassur-ance that the pursuit of self-interested economic gain not only does not undermine public interest but also actually serves the public interest despite appearances to the contrary, Darwin generalizes about a process that has been largely out of human hands to make the point that if
evolution through natural selection is a process that can be known only retrospectively, as one retraces the complex past history of competition among species and within species for the scarce means of survival—“the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole vegetable and animal king-dom,” as Darwin says (7). While Adam Smith seeks to offer reassur-ance that the pursuit of self-interested economic gain not only does not undermine public interest but also actually serves the public interest despite appearances to the contrary, Darwin generalizes about a process that has been largely out of human hands to make the point that if