120th Birth Anniversary of Martin Wickramasinghe - May 29:

Revolution and Evolution

Martin Wickramasinghe

Revolution is also an aspect of evolution. Darwin proposed the accumulation of slight modifications and natural selection as the cause of evolution of new species. The theories of Mendel and de Vries on mutations caused by sudden gene variations are accepted by modern geneticists as a cause which created new species, of course through natural selection.

Lenin’s Russian Revolution can be treated metaphorically as a collective psycho-social mutation which occurred as a result of drastic social and economic changes. After this revolutionary mutation, Russian society and culture evolved through selection of psycho-social changes. These changes are not genetically inherited, but are transmitted through culture, which is a uniquely human capacity.

Ernest Haeckel of Germany and Thomas Henry Huxley of England were enthusiastic supporters and powerful controversialists who defended Drawin’s theory of evolution, which was subjected to criticism and ridicule by theologians and those scientists who supported the organised church. But both Haeckel and Huxley were of the view that socialist theories of social change were contrary to Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection.

Natural selection and socialism

In his Grammar of Science, Karl Pearson quotes a lengthy passage from Haeckel to show that his view of natural selection and socialism is biased: Darwinism, according to Haeckel, is anything but socialistic. If a definite political tendency is attributed to this English theory - which is indeed possible - this tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic and least of all socialistic. The theory of selection teaches us that in human life, exactly as in animal and plant life, at each place and time only a small privileged minority can continue to exist and flourish; the great mass must starve and more or less prematurely perish in misery.

In criticising these views expressed by Haeckel, Karl Pearson says: “The tendency to social organisation, always prominent in progressive communities, may be termed, in the best and widest sense of the word, Socialism. Socialistic, as much as individualistic tendency is a direct outcome of the fundamental principle of evolution. Finally, there is a third factor of evolution, namely the profit that arises to humanity at large from common organisation against organic and inorganic foes. The interdependence of mankind throughout the world is becoming a more and more clearly recognised fact.”

C D Darlington in his Genetics of Man quotes from a letter of Darwin written in 1879 criticising German misinterpretation of his views on natural selection. “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.” It is ironical, that Germany also produced a thinker like Karl Marx to propound a theory of Socialism in a universal community sense, based on the same Darwinian concepts of evolution, competitiveness, and fitness, in refutation of the anti-Socialistic interpretations of natural selection by Haeckel and Nietzsche.

S A Barnett, editor of A Century of Darwin, quotes the following passage from C H Waddington’s An Introduction to Modern Genetics as a rigorous expression of the theory of natural selection: “Natural Selection is an inevitable consequence of genetical variation in fitness.”

Change in thinking

Commenting on this aphorism Barnett says that ‘biological fitness, then, is nothing to do with athletic prowess or general physical health, unless these are correlated with superior achievement in leaving descendants. And natural selection is not an agent, like a farmer choosing seeds or bulls. It is the name for a process which arises from the nature of living things, in particular from their inheritable variability.

Darlington observes: “A connection, which Karl Marx had wished to emphasize dedicating Das Kapital to Darwin, existed of course, between the theories of Evolution and Socialism. Both required change and at least a change in thinking. To Marx the connection was a matter of political expediency. Its scientific sense first came to the mind of the founder of Eugenics.” This view of Marxism and the philosophy of science, perhaps, is due to the ignoring of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engel.

Man is the only animal who has a developed language which is capable of conveying his ideas, feelings and abstract and rational thoughts. Because of this unique acquisition, man has been able to create an inheritance which is quite different to the purely biological aspects of heredity of plants and animals including man.

The study of heredity is called the science of genetics, which was developed on the basis of the shrewd guesses of a plant-breeding Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian Abbot of Brno in Czechoslovakia. His plant-breeding experiments were carried on in his monastery garden without facilities for scientific research.

Because of the invention of language, unlike all other animals including primates, mankind became inheritors of culture. Language, like the genes of biological heredity, became the external carrier of culture. There are a few anthropologists who say that man is entirely a creature of his culture and that his biological heredity stops at the surface of his skin.

Biologists reject this claim. Two great American geneticists, L C Dunn and Theodesius Dobzhansky, rejecting this claim says: “Man’s personality, as well as his physical traits, result from a process of development in which both heredity and environment play more important parts.”

Culture is a powerful aspect of the human environment. It exerts an enormous influence on the psycho-social evolution of communities.

Russian revolution

The Russian revolution has changed the cultural environment all over the world.

It has exerted a quickening influence on communities and societies which were under Western and American colonial rule until recent times.

Culture and political imitators who have been influenced by Western democratic individualism or Soviet and Chinese communism and by English education are now realizing the great importance of adapting the socialist system to suit the tradition and culture of each country and community.

Attempts to establish socialism in the small countries of Asia by armed revolution pave the way for powerful capitalistic countries to establish military governments jointly with the support of local ruling class and army men. This has already happened in many countries.

Socialists of small independent countries should devote their time to independent thinking and actively in relation to the cultural and social environments of their countries. To be merely quarrelling over imported political dogmas by socialist parties is an anachronism in the present phase of human psycho-social evolution.

Our political leaders have to shake off the imitative habits and thinking acquired over a period of 150 years from English culture, language and literature and politics, developed under the powerful influence of the English aristocracy and imperialism.

Many persons in the world today still hang on to borrowed old dogmas of democratic individualism, socialism and revolution, without reference to their own local cultural and social environment.

When our politicians, educated men and women, university students and other young people being to think independently of socialism in relation to our own tradition and cultural environment, the imitative instinct and inferiority complex which still undermine our urbanized fellow countrymen will disappear. This will create the appropriate circumstances and feelings for our own psycho-social evolution towards socialism.

Extract from Revolution and Evolution - 2006

Courtesy: Martin Wickramasinghe Trust