Biology, more so than any other science, typically shapes how we perceive and interact with the world around us. How we think about biological things directly affects and largely determines how we think about ourselves and our relationships with other people, to plants, to animals, or to nature more generally. Biology tells us, in a sense, what we are doing here on this massive floating space rock, how we came to be as bipedal hominids with enlarged cerebral cortices, why we think the way that we think, and where we are likely heading well into the future.
Ideas about biology and about life thus lie at the epicenter of everything we think and do as humans, since we are, well, living beings. For example, materialism, capitalism, and consumerism are all founded on the biological idea that we are separate and superior to nature, and thus we can exploit and bend nature to our will. Colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism are founded on the biological idea that we are separate from other groups of humans; that our differences between people vastly outweigh our similarities. Take it as a general rule of thumb that if a word has an –ism at the end of it, then it has something to do with biology and our relations to other biological things — irrespective of whether those relations are true or not in our biological reality.
This is why biology is not something to toy around with; with great power comes great responsibility. And since its nascence, biology has been coopted as a sociopolitical tool to push certain agendas. It has been used as a tool to draw divisions between people and things where none truly exist in our biological reality, often at the behest of the people drawing such divisions and to the detriment of the people forced to accept such divisions. Now, none of this is a new phenomenon in human history, by any means. Power-hungry people have invariably leeched off of the praised social status of the sciences for generations, and they still do today.
Yet in our modern context, more so than in any period in human history, we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye or be ignorant of our biological relations to one another. We can no longer afford to have a massive schism between most modern developed societies and our biological reality. The consequences are just too big. We are playing with the fate of future generations now.
Thus, in the following I am going to tell you a brief story about how we have traditionally misrepresented and misunderstood biology in our modern societies. I will give you a quick overview of how we used to think about biology, and how these ideas about biology became intertwined within our modern social fabric, supporting particularly ignorant, racist, or unsustainable social ideals. I will then discuss two new ideas that lie at the frontiers of the biological sciences, Multilevel Selection Theory and the Gaia hypothesis, and how these ideas can bring about significant changes in our lives when properly understood by society.
The biological world is infinitely more complex than we initially realized, and recent findings from the biological sciences are beginning to reveal a new picture of what it means to be human and what the hell we are doing here on this massive floating space rock.
The Story of Social Darwinism
So, to begin our story, we must venture back in time to when modern biology arose within the mind of the British Naturalist Charles Darwin. From 1831 to 1836, on his infamous Beagle voyage, Darwin collected fossils and specimens from ecosystems all over the world. Now, Darwin was never the most gifted student, but he was particularly observant. He noticed that different ecological circumstances caused different morphological and anatomical characteristics in similar species. Finches from one island of the Galapagos, say, had surprisingly different beak lengths in comparison to finches from other islands.
He inferred from his observations that the individuals who were the best adapted to their respective environmental conditions were also the most likely to survive and reproduce, thereby leaving more descendants to future generations. Individuals within a species thus competed for resources — food resources, sexual resources, etc. — in what he referred to as “the struggle for existence”. The world was seen as a tough and unforgiving place, and thus, competition between members of the same species as well as between members of different species became a central idea of how biological things were seen to relate to one other. From Darwin onwards, the competition-based orientation of evolution became the dominant and underlying viewpoint of biology; it was how we viewed the relations and connections between biological things for the next century.
Future successors would take Darwin’s ideas one step further than originally intended. In response to reading Darwin’s famous On the Origins of the Species, the naturalist Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” — and while both Spencer and Darwin meant fittest in the sense that the most adapted individuals survive, sociopolitical theorists eventually coopted and misinterpreted this phrase to justify their political agendas; to justify their laissez-faire capitalism, imperialist pursuits, or racist public policies — which is not a happenstance, by the way, since we humans are really freakin’ good at relieving our cognitive dissonance through the creation of false realities, capable of justifying nearly any action made towards another human — hence why we have nearly incessant warring, genocides, and bad actors between other versions of the same people.
“Survival of the fittest” thus became synonymous with the social attitude that certain people or races are more powerful in society or globally because they are innately better than others, what was a sociopolitical movement called Social Darwinism. The Social Darwinian movement was furthered by none other than Darwin’s own cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who was the first to coin the term “eugenics” to express the quixotic ideal that we can perfect the human race by getting rid of “undesirables” while multiplying “desirables” — what were the “desirable” characteristics that Galton was referring to? Well, that was up to the observer. But now politicians, in their eyes, had scientific backing to support their racist narratives and policies.
Thus, as a direct consequence of Darwin’s competition-based viewpoint of evolution — regardless of all its misunderstandings and misinterpretations made by scientifically ignorant politicians or sociopolitical theorists — Social Darwinism gained in popularity, so much so that by the start of the twentieth century, a majority of the ruling and educated class in Western societies began to believe in Social Darwinism as a sociopolitical ideology. As a result, social inequality reached new heights, imperialism was further justified, and racist attitudes flourished throughout Western society — thereby setting the perfect social conditions for Nazism to gain momentum in 1920s Germany, when Hitler employed Social Darwinism to justify the genocide of any people he deemed “undesirable” — or gypsies, Jews, gays, poles, scientists and intellectuals.
Following the massive carnage of World War 2, the notions of Social Darwinism and eugenics were rightly criticized and rejected by biologists from all over the world. However, by this time, the damage had already been done. Social Darwinism still laid as the intellectual basis for laissez-faire capitalism and implicitly racist public policy. Perhaps the best way to frame it is that Social Darwinism was tamed during this period, rather than outright rejected and disposed of.
Social Darwinism has never fully gone away — it comes up anytime a politician reasons why the poor can’t seem to find a job like they just magically grow on trees, why the rich are entitled to their earnings, or when we justify social inequality. You see these ideas particularly sprouting in the thinking of elitist politicians such as Trump or Boris Johnson, who have boiled down their “success” to good genes and not small one-million-dollar loans from rich fathers.
Now, it should be noted that Darwin’s ideas about evolution weren’t the direct cause of the sociopolitical landscape that we live in today, but they certainly acted as a catalyst for social movements that view competition as a good thing in a zero-sum world, or that benefit from false divisions among people. Darwin’s ideas about evolution have directly contributed to a significant amount of suffering and the rise of social inequality today.
Yet the good thing about biology, and science in general, is that it evolves with new evidence and insight. Darwin had literally no idea about genes or genetic inheritance — what is now the foundational basis of modern biology. We couldn’t sequence genomes until the 1980s. We couldn’t alter genomes until the last 5 years. Biology, like the phenomenon we study, evolves over time, and we are currently experiencing some major evolution in our thinking about, well, evolution.
The New Picture of Evolution
Since the 1960s and 70s, an entirely new picture of evolution has been building in the literature. Biologists such as David Sloan Wilson or E.O. Wilson — both unrelated — have built a solid case against the traditional Darwinian, competition-based viewpoint of evolution, and have expanded Darwinian theory to accompany entire populations or species, an idea known today as Multilevel Selection Theory (or MLS theory for short). MLS theory posits that the same Darwinian principles of natural selection can be applied to entire populations or species, relative to Darwinian theory which saw natural selection as mostly a competition between individuals within a population or species. What this means, is that our environments don’t merely select for the most adapted individuals, but also for the most adapted populations or species. Our being, our very existence, lives at multiple levels, and this is why social positives such as altruism or trust have evolved, because those populations or species with greater amounts of altruism or trust will eventually outcompete those that are more selfish over the many courses of time.
The most classic example of Multilevel Selection at work is the evolution of sexual reproduction. Like most multicellular species, humans reproduce sexually rather than asexually because the fusion of different genomes begets greater diversity, thereby allowing our species as a whole to adapt and evolve to new environmental conditions. This is why you and your siblings look differently from one another because during a process known as meiosis that occurs during egg fertilization, the genomes of your mother and father recombine or “shift around” to produce an entirely novel genetic combination — identical twins, of course, being the exception to this rule. Because you are unique in your genetic material, there will never be an exact same genetic copy of you, and this uniqueness affords our entire species the benefit of being able to adapt and evolve to new environmental conditions. If our environments change, then one of us unique individuals is more likely to be better adapted to the new environment than if we were a uniform, diverse-less species. We sex at the benefit of us all.
Sex as a reproductive strategy is quite literally built into each and every one of our genomes because it benefits us all as a species; it benefits literally everybody that is a Homo sapien. What this means, in a sociological sense, is that part of our existence and identities live in every waking, breathing human being. I am not merely Mitch the individual, but I am Mitch the individual who also lives as a crucial part of the species Homo sapien. Part of my very being, my identity, my self lives and breathes in every human. What MLS theory offers is an entirely new way to look at humanity and our connections to one another. But MLS theory is only part of the new story told by biology.
Around the same time that MLS theory was gaining traction among biologists, the “Mother of the Microworld” Lynn Margulis was also attacking the Darwinian competition-based viewpoint of evolution from a micro-perspective. Due to her groundbreaking work investigating microorganisms living within our bodies, or our microbiome, Margulis was the initial popularizer of endosymbiotic theory — which is the idea that aerobic single-celled bacteria were, at some point in our long evolutionary past, ingested by larger anaerobic bacteria, thereby explaining why plants have chloroplasts or why animals have mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. It is worth mentioning that this idea of endosymbiosis is the most widely accepted explanation for the origins of all multicellular life.
Margulis’s empirical investigations led her to challenge the orthodoxy of Darwinism from the vantage point of microbiology. The micro-world seemed to suggest that evolution was less about competition between biological entities as we previously assumed, but more about cooperation and collaboration between completely unrelated species. Rather than evolution being primarily a process that occurs between related individuals within a population, evolution developed into something so much more extravagant and detailed, as a process that could occur at the smallest perspective of the micro-world and expand to explain phenomena from the largest perspective of our biosphere, with Darwinian evolution only explaining what happens at the levels in between.
Such findings led Margulis and an English scientist named James Lovelock to conceive of a totally new way to look at life on Earth called the Gaia hypothesis, named after the Greek goddess who personified the Earth. The Gaia hypothesis postulates that the entire biosphere on Earth is a synergistic and self-regulating biological entity in its own right, undergoing the same biological principles of Darwinian evolution but on a larger scale. Species directly influence their environment, and in turn, their environment is more supportive of further life to evolve. Life begets life, so to speak. Early aquatic plants were the first to release oxygen into our atmosphere, setting the conditions for all aerobic and complex lifeforms thereafter. Early trees quite literally laid the ground for enough soil to accumulate, setting the conditions for all terrestrial life thereafter. And today, we wouldn’t be alive without the pollinating action of bees, who aid in the fertilization of the majority of our food stock.
You see, the entire Earth ecosystem seemingly interacts just as that, as a living, breathing, interacting, and interconnected system, and Humans are very much a part of that system. It follows from Gaia that humans exist as supporting actors in a play that is so much bigger and more magnificent than merely us.
Today, of course, several older biologists still view evolution in Darwinian terms, such as Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene Theory. But most biologists — especially the better, more reputable biologists who sit closer to the empirical evidence — now accept MLS theory and at least some version of the Gaia. However, society has yet to appreciate such significant changes in our knowledge of living things, which is to say that this knowledge hasn’t reverberated back into society — perhaps because the last time that biology directly affected social attitudes, a major world war broke out.
In short, new ideas from modern biology, including but not limited to Multilevel Selection theory and the Gaia, redefine what it means to be human and therefore have the potential to inspire world-changing progress. MLS theory radically alters how we look at and treat our fellow human beings, and the Gaia radically alters how we look at and interact with nature. Most of the sociopolitical ideas in modern Western society, however, are predicated on an utterly false and outdated viewpoint of biology. We thus must incorporate modern biology into our future if we are to ensure our long-term success as a species. The survival of future generations depends upon it.
As previously published on Medium
Want to know more about evolution? Check out my free E-Book published on Researchgate, “Evolution in Space and Time: The Second Synthesis of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and the Philosophy of Biology”.