by Greg Mayer

A few days ago The New Republic posted a review of books on miscegenation laws and eugenics by Richard Posner. Posner is a judge of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Unusually for a sitting judge, he is a prolific author who writes on a wide range of subjects. Although usually considered a conservative, he has taken some rather non-conservative positions, and is not an “originalist” (the favored judicial theory of full-blown conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia). In his review (from which I learned a lot about miscegenation laws), he writes:

The novelty of Darwinism, so far as its social and political impact was concerned, was its depiction of a struggle for survival between different species, with the ones well adapted to their environment surviving and the others becoming extinct.

Well, no, actually, that’s not the novelty of Darwinism at all. The struggle between different species (e.g., between predators and prey) was long and well known before Darwin. Natural extinction had been a more recently controversial matter, but was resolved early in the 19th century (see the excellent account in David Young’s The Discovery of Evolution). So although negative interactions between species, and natural extinction, formed important parts of Darwin’s account in the Origin, they were not novel. And even evolution as such (i.e. that organisms changed over time) was not novel with Darwin (although he was the one that convinced the world at large of its truth).  Darwin’s greatest novelty was the variational mechanism of change within species, natural selection.

Posner does go on to say some fairly sensible things about what a species is, and does in fact dwell on within species matters (since there is only one extant species of Homo), and I don’t want to pick on him, but he’s a bright, well educated, and thoughtful guy, a member of the nation’s educational and political elite who writes about Darwinism, and he has at best an incomplete notion of  the most important and novel aspects of evolutionary theory. This may seem like inside baseball (“Among species, within species– who cares?”), but it really is crucial: Darwin did more than elaborate a theory of historical community ecology (others had done that as well), but also a theory for the transformation of lineages by mechanisms which account for both adaptation and unity of type. I’m reminded of H.J. Muller’s famous statement at the time of the Darwin centennial in 1959, “One hundred years without Darwin are enough”, bemoaning that while evolution as such was known and accepted, few understood evolution by natural selection, Darwin’s most original contribution. It’s the same today: one hundred fiftyone years without Darwin are enough! (Francisco Ayala took care of one hundred fifty years.)