by GREGORY RADICK
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Political Descent: Malthus, mutualism, and the politics of evolution in Victorian England by Piers J. Hale, University of Chicago Press. 442pp. £31.50 (US $45)
H . G. Wells only makes an appearance towards the end of Political Descent. But no one in the book more fully justifies the pun in Piers Hale’s title, or his claim that the Victorian debate on Darwinism and politics should be understood through two of its subsidiary questions. One was whether or not to believe in a “struggle for existence”, born of the chronic overpopulation that the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus described in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). It was Charles Darwin who brought Malthus’s principle squarely into debates over evolution. On Darwin’s theory of natural selection, nature is in perpetual Malthusian crisis, with survival a matter of the smallest inborn differences which, by chance, make some individuals that little bit better adapted to their environments. Because Malthus had offered his Essay as a conservative rebuke to the utopian thinkers of his day, Malthusian doctrine had been controversial from the first. The politics of Malthusianism became, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), part of the politics of evolution.
The other question concerned the kind of inheritance known as “Lamarckian”, after the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, though it was neither original nor very important to him. Under Lamarckian inheritance, improvements made or impairments suffered owing to a changing environment during an individual’s lifetime are passed on to their offspring. Darwin accepted Lamarckian inheritance, seeing it as sometimes bringing about changes in conjunction with natural selection, and sometimes as acting independently of it. But the period after Darwin’s death in 1882 saw a new polarization. To be Lamarckian was increasingly to uphold not merely the reality of the inheritance of acquired characters but the rapidity of Lamarckian as against Darwinian evolution, and also to stress the uplifting nature of a process driven by the activity of the organism. To be Darwinian increasingly included expressing serious doubts about Lamarckian inheritance, together with the insistence that some are born to win and some to lose, with progress coming but slowly, and degeneration an ever-present threat.
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