Discussion Starter: Darwin

One of the central tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution is natural selection, in which organisms of the same or different species compete for survival and proliferate based upon their different characteristics that are conducive to survival. This theory is predicated on natural and heritable variations, limited resources, high rate of organism reproduction, ensuing “struggle for life,” and dominance in numbers by the organisms with variations most helpful to survival. Darwin states, “a struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase…as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive.”  

The struggle for success is thus a consequence of these natural conditions and a universal feature of natural selection. “Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount,” Darwin declares, explaining that organisms will always multiply to the maximum capacity offered by their environment. If a natural competitor or predator is absent, a given species will flourish as far as they able.

These concepts from natural selection and struggle for life, though used to explain evolutionary structures of life, maintain similarities to the “state of nature” described by Hobbes and Rousseau. In Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, he illustrates an anarchic state of nature consisting of a “war of all against all,” in which all people are pitted against each other, lacking compassion, altruism, and any form of government. In this (hypothetical) primeval stage of human life, men and women bear strong semblances to any of the organisms under natural selection—they use their natural variations to fight and survive and flourish. People in the state of nature are concerned with their own survival, not the welfare of others. These conditions are a result of the scarcity of resources and inability to accommodate the growing human population—provoking tensions between individuals. Hobbes writes that war erupts when two individuals desire the same resource, but not enough is available for both. Similar to natural selection, in which only those best suited to their environment survive, people in the state of nature are violent, and only those with beneficial variations will survive; those less adapted to their surroundings will die.

This situation—including the struggles for life, among other notions—is almost the very situation that Darwin proposed. However, Hobbes diverges from Darwin in one respect: he emphasizes that all of mankind is equal. Hobbes states that people may be endowed with differing natural capacities, but they are ultimately equal. This is interesting, because Hobbes agrees with Darwin that humans have variations and some are naturally fitter, yet we are still equal in other ways. This seems to suggest that humans cannot be categorized with any other organisms, in that our survival is not directly correlated to our fitness. Rather, we defy the Darwinian model in an otherwise unseen aberration of natural selection—one human having a higher fitness than another does not necessarily guarantee their success and flourishing.