The Darwinian Trap

Chapter One

A Crash Course on Darwinian Demons

Charles Darwin could not have fathomed what he was getting into when he boarded the HMS Beagle in Plymouth, England, just after Christmas 1831.

A recent graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge, the twentytwo-year-old Darwin had entered school with plans to pursue a career as a country parson. But he also harbored a deep and abiding fascination with the natural world, and he hoped to see as much of it as possible before beginning his adult life. So when the Cambridge botanist John Henslow recommended his former pupil for a naturalist’s spot on the Beagle’s voyage to conduct a wideranging survey of South America—Darwin’s wealthy father paid the fare—it didn’t take long for Darwin to accept the offer.

This second voyage of the HMS Beagle—the first had been marred by the captain’s suicide and a hostage crisis—was supposed to last two years. Instead, the journey took five years, with the Beagle sailing around Cape Horn, across the Pacific Ocean to Australia and Africa, then back to South America before heading home. The vessel docked in Falmouth on October 2, 1836, by which point Darwin had long since abandoned any thoughts of spending his life in a parsonage. He would soon find very different means of opining on the nature of man.

Darwin’s letters home to England over the course of his voyage, recounting all he had seen and experienced during his travels, had already won him a scholar’s reputation, one that blossomed into celebrity upon the publication of his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, in 1839. In it, Darwin offered not just a compelling narrative of his long and exciting trip but extensive remarks on the wide variety of life and landscapes he had observed. He was particularly influenced by his experiences on the Galápagos Islands, a remote, sparsely populated archipelago off the coast of Ecuador.

The Galápagos are perhaps best known for their giant tortoises, which can live for hundreds of years. But Darwin’s attention was also drawn to the birds there, several specimens of which he brought back to England. Though they looked broadly similar upon first glance, further inspection revealed distinct variations. Some of the birds had long, thin beaks, for example, while others had short, thick ones. Darwin taxonomized the birds separately— labeling some as blackbirds, others as finches, still others as wrens—then basically put them out of his mind until he got home.

But after examining the specimens upon the Beagle’s return, the ornithologist John Gould announced that, much to Darwin’s surprise, the birds were all finches. Moreover, each finch was sufficiently different from its counterparts that Gould classified them as twelve entirely separate species. Reviewing his notes from the voyage, Darwin realized that the birds’ variable traits seemed correlated to the differences in their environments. The thick-beaked birds, or example, came from an island where those beaks were ideally suited for cracking the hard-shelled ground nuts that abounded there. These correlations seemed to imply that speciation—the process by which members of a population evolve divergent traits, such that those members eventually become an entirely new species—had occurred in response to those environments.

In the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle, and in much greater depth in 1859’s On the Origin of Species, Darwin refined his initial observations about the Galápagos finches into a comprehensive theory of evolution, coining the term natural selection as a bit of descriptive shorthand. His theory, rendered simply, went something like this: There are always random variations within species. Some people are short, for example, while others are tall, and so on. But if the short and tall individuals within a population happen to share an environment where it is easier to survive as a tall person—an unusual land, perhaps, where predators will not attack any human standing six feet or higher—then the tall people will be more apt to survive. In turn, they will be more likely to reproduce and pass their characteristics down to subsequent generations.

In this hypothetical scenario, we might say that “tall” genes were “naturally selected” for survival by the evolutionary environment. The process by which the possessors of adaptive traits come to thrive in their environments is the essence of natural selection, which is also sometimes referred to as “survival of the fittest.” As Darwin put it in his introduction to On the Origin of Species:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.

Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection eventually transformed the natural sciences. By the time of his death in 1882, the scientific community had generally come to accept Darwin’s premise that species evolved over time, although it would take several more decades for the theory of natural selection to gain common currency. Eventually, some people began to wonder whether those theories might be more broadly applicable.

In 1983 the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published a paper titled “Universal Darwinism,” in which he took Darwin’s theories of how life evolved on Earth and suggested that they also could be applied in a wide variety of domains: companies, societies, memes, and so on. Dawkins argued that the process of natural selection would catalyze evolution everywhere, in all qualifying environments: on Earth and in far-flung galaxies, from the finches of South America to the boardrooms of New York.