Reflections on Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics." (Thomas Huxley)

When walk through the woods behind my house, I don't see Tennyson's nature "red in tooth and claw." It's the beauty I see - and whiff. The scent of fallen leaves, familiar to me from fifty years ago, when my nose was much nearer the ground, is one of the pleasures of autumn still. Today I step brusquely on the red, orange, yellow, and green maple leaves, overlaid with strips of silvery willows. I do not kick up the curled and crisp oak leaves. It's been a half-century since I made great piles of them and buried myself. Nor do I bury potatoes in a pile of leaves to roast them while the leaves burn. To, day that's illegal. But I relish the aroma of fallen leaves.

While the leaves were on their branches, they served the purpose of the trees. They were metabolic machines, solar panels, respirators in the service of life. The trees have discarded them now, but still they have a use for me. They are my potpourri au naturel. Long ago great thinkers might have agreed that the fallen leaves are for my contemplative enjoyment. It's not just that I take advantage of them but that their new function, once they have fallen, is to provide for my enjoyment. Perhaps Aristotle would have agreed, for he did say that plants exist for the sake of animals. Furthermore, as he stated in Politics, "If nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of humankind." We sit atop the pyramid; let the fallen leaves be for the sake of pleasing us.

A bit too anthropocentric, perhaps? The Stoics supplied a finer, more humbling sentiment. As Cicero said in On the Nature of the Gods: "As the cover is made to fit the shield and the scabbard to fit the sword, so everything in nature except the universe itself has been created to serve something other than itself." Evidently I, too, serve, in my contemplation of the fallen leaves, a more inclusive whole. I reflect in my intelligence "this consensus, this harmony, this unbroken kinship of nature." My thought is a mirror held up to nature's face.

These philosophers! They are the voices of, oh, so long ago. The anthropocentrists, represented by Aristotle, and the cosmocentrists, represented by the Stoics, were both wrong. Both of them thought that nature had an intrinsic worth as a whole, a comprehensive purpose that all the parts served. So the sages of old did not set importance on distinguishing genuine function-serving from simple advantage-taking. Of course, within a narrow frame of reference, the leaves served functions while they lived on the branches; but while they lie on the ground, I merely take advantage of them. The ancients did not see the theoretical ultimacy of this distinction, however: one part ordained to serve another's interests as distinct from that other just taking advantage of the first to serve its own interests. For in their analyses, it all amounted to the same thing. All served the same supreme end.

Switch to another time, another world view. I am walking along the carpet of leaves stretched everywhere around me; I see it as so much death. Such prodigality with life - nature wastes so much of it! The leaf aroma is carcass smell, pleasing though it be. Fallen leaves symbolize all the extinct species: the 99 percent of an evolution's products that have left no descendants. Fallen leaves symbolize the prevalence of death, the necrosis and the senescence built into life. And I'm feeling a bit creaky in the joints myself.

There is no whole that all the parts of life serve. The ultimate story is that the parts interact mostly to take advantage of each other. Rarely do they interact to their mutual advantage. The result is not just the dying but the mindless rapacity, the enormity, of it all. I must agree with Schopenhauer that, for nature, "the life or death of the individual is of absolutely no consequence." And I push his thought further: for nature, the life or death of the species is of absolutely no consequence either. Most of the species which ever evolved are already extinct.

Nature makes everything in vain. After all, what is evolution? A mindless process built on evil; that's what it is. Natural selection, acting on some lineage of organisms, cannot look ahead along the path of adaptation it is following. It cannot predict and evaluate ahead of time the outcome of its shaping; it cannot weigh the balance of prospective good and evil, undo its false steps, or backtrack and strike off on an alternate path. Thus it bungles and it botches and it makes do. But the rare things it gets almost right do accumulate, and by now they have become quite prevalent. So natural selection seems smart to those who see only the surviving products, but as a design process it is idiotic. And the raw brutality of the process is offensive.

A hundred years ago, Thomas Huxley saw it right in his Romanes lecture, "Ethics and Evolution" with "Prolegomena" added to it (republished in 1989 by Princeton University Press, edited by James Paradis). For Huxley, natural selection is not to be deemed a mixed blessing; rather, it is a damnable mix. It is not just "natural evil." Natural evil is earthquakes killing people, hurricanes and floods - unequivocal evils, but distinct from the culpable sort that puts us into a retributive and condemnatory frame of mind. But neither is natural selection intentionally and culpably bad. Only people are bad that way. The evil of natural selection - more sinister than either of these kinds - derives from the life-or-death competition for scarce necessities. It is a heightened perversity of evil, because in natural selection the good of one organism is the evil of another or, even worse, one organism's good in one respect is its own evil in another respect. Nothing is good without being evil, too. Now that equation is fiendish. If it were by design, a devil designed it.

Time passes. When the snow cover melts off my woodland path, within days I see the first green leaves of the violets springing through the detritus of last fall. The fallen leaves, now crumbling into humus, will soon be overtopped with fresh green growth. Out of sight, out of mind. As I walk, I do not find myself reflecting on evil, for now I see goodness everywhere. I pass a patch of the brightest, cheeriest yellow flowers. Could these be marsh marigolds so soon? Here is another source of phony nature romanticism. I am falling prey to an illusion caused by time's passing.

Good may come before evil or at the same time as evil or after evil. When good makes evil happen at the same time or at a later time, we deplore that. But when evil precedes the good, we say, "To every dark cloud, there's a silver lining." Why this asymmetrical evaluation? Surely with human evil, we do not excuse the use of evil means to achieve a good end. The goodness of the outcome does not cancel the evil of the process. Nor should we trivialize the evil by comparing it to a sick person's enduring the foul taste of a medicine that works a wonderful cure. I saw a program recently on sea turtles that told how, for every turtle that survives to maturity, 1,000 to 10,000 young turtles die. That is a holocaust - an evil we euphemistically call natural selection. (Nazis, with an ear for apt analogy, caned the Holocaust "selection") We cannot think that the good coming from natural selection - namely, well-adapted turtles and other organisms - can recompense its young victims. Nor does the happy life of us human beings - the living beneficiaries of another holocaust surrounding our own past lineage - recompense its prior victims. John Stuart Mill made these points in his essay "Nature," published posthumously in 1874.

Time's passage distorts our judgment of evil in a second way. Besides evil's preceding the good, there's also its being over and done with. "What's past is past." "Let the dead bury the dead." "To the victor belong the spoils." This is the egoist of the present moment speaking, who restricts evil to current suffering. If the egoist is not suffering now, then, however much suffering there used to be, it's over and to be forgotten. On the contrary, just as past suffering was evil at the time it occurred, all present and future judgment must continue to declare it was evil. You and I may not be able to rectify it, but we should never stop condemning it, even though without it we would not have existed. When I dispel the illusions of springtime, the horrific truth returns to mind. The mix of good and evil in evolution is diabolical.

If I regret all the evil that helped bring about my species and even my own being, must I then regret my own existence? Must I wish I had never been? But I am glad that I exist! May I not then declare the past a felix culpa, so that I may avoid this emotional dissonance? Such a self-serving whitewash would be one more instance of the phenomenon Bertrand Russell described in the second of his Sceptical Essays: "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." The truth is that we find ourselves in an inescapable moral predicament.

Just as heaven cannot be the same place as hell, neither can the ethical ideal of a community be nature's regime of the double-edged sword. And so Huxley says, "Ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent." It is not just trite to counsel acquiescence in the natural order; it is inconsistent with our ethical nature. Saintly quietism can be immoral.

We must contradict nature and insist that the good can come into being without evil means, that it can exist without depending on evil, and that it can have consequences at least more good than bad. For otherwise we do good in vain, just as nature does. We may phrase the point qualitatively: the more the balance of good and evil in nature tips toward the good, the more reason there is for the good being there. It's the net of goods minus evils that counts, not just the absolute amount of goods. Thus, to see good and evil as so essential to each other, as they are in natural selection, must scandalize the mind, for the goods and evils cancel out and all value is undermined. We do not anthropomorphize nature or blame it when we recognize this consequence; yet, it deserves our special antipathy.

Antipathy need not always lead to action, but when nature acts directly against the good of persons we must fight it. To give a representative example, I present the sickle cell trait, which confers on those who have it in heterozygous form some protection from malaria. It is a hopeless bungle for natural selection to endow both parents with some immunity to malaria at the cost of a fourth of their children dying of sickle cell anemia. Since parents do not shed children as a tree sheds its leaves, we are horrified especially at the perversity of it. We use our intelligence to disentangle the good-evil mix of a balanced polymorphism of this sort. Putting our science in the service of our ethics, we produce the same good of immunity but without the evil attached. It's caned chloroquine; soon there will be a vaccine.

Some will respond that natural selection stiff operates through our own actions: "You can't repeal a law of nature." Huxley was not recommending that absurdity; indeed, he warned of the consequences of humanity's escape from the ordinary forms of selection pressure, the consequences of overpopulation and ecosystem collapse. Thus he recommended we restrain fecundity and exploitation. Even without repeal of nature's law, however, we can weaken the pressure of selection at the individual level in some ways and strengthen it at the level of the group, the species, and, indeed, the ecosystem in other ways. No law of nature is violated in that shift of priorities. Our redirecting the force of selection so that it is a wise, just, and compassionate natural selection would do the good for persons and prevent, forestall, counter, or mitigate the previously attendant evils. But forestall for how long, counter or mitigate how effectively? Certainly not fully or for eternity. In the long run, all good loses out to evil. But for the short run, Huxley was an optimist: "I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions. of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by history." The essential point, however, is not the optimism or pessimism we may bring to the task but the obligatory nature of it, whatever the outcome. We ought to remove as much of the evil from the good as we can, so that the good is not in vain.

Some have thought recent innovative concepts mitigated "the gladiatorial theory of existence" that Huxley saw in natural selection. Thus biologists have discovered that living things pursue their inclusive fitness, which means they pursue not just their own longevity but the welfare of their young and of the young of their relatives. Life is less egoistic and more nepotistic in its struggle for existence amidst scarce resources than we had thought. But nepotistic calculations are still too short-sighted to prevent the evil consequences of familial selfishness from accumulating and overwhelming the good we intend.

Even the ancient Stoic ideal has been revived in the contemporary guise of the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis is the claim, supposedly supported by biology and the earth sciences, that there's a fitness for one and all and that the owner of that fitness is Gaia, who is the sum of all biota in interaction with the earth. Without a consciousness of her own, she nevertheless stabilizes herself in a state of fitness against disturbances of her essential equilibria. She can do without our help, but her distinguished spokespersons (James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis) ask that we stop knocking her off balance.

But this individual is only Maya - that is, illusion. The illusion is in seeing the global interactions of life with the air, the seas, and the earth's crust as somehow exploiting information for the whole's own purposeful self-maintenance, when in fact those cycles of interaction mimic only slightly the purposive, information-exploiting mechanisms characteristic of living things. Even trees respond to information about changes of climate for the sake of their own fitness, when they produce the hormones which kill and drop their leaves. Nothing like that serves a fitness for one and all.

And natural selection is not in the business of building such lovable goddesses; it is too stupid for that. Not even evolution by selection for symbioses will work. It is true that the eukaryotic cell, characteristic of all life except bacteria, evolved by symbiosis; several originally independent types of cell became organelles of the encompassing cell by way of symbiotic evolution. That, however, is no model for the evolution of an all-encompassing Gaia. For the predecessors of the eukaryotic cell were always proving themselves in competition, but it is the nature of Gaia that, before she could come into existence, all competition would have to have become submerged in a universal mutualism. And that is beyond natural selection.

Behind many illusions we find wishful thinking. And the wish behind the Gaia hypothesis is laudable. For a Gaia could be a home for the ethical community. But if there is to be a fitness for one and all, it will not be found ready, made. It will come about only by human choice and action. We can make compacts or conventions of valorization. We should make Gaia's realization our goal even though it is not natural selection's goal. If we can valorize a piece of paper called a dollar bill, we can valorize the fitness for one and all by setting up the global economy to define it and treat it as having overriding value. Then we would have a Gaia valorization, and Huxley would applaud.

But a Gaia hypothesis - Gaia as already produced by nice natural selection - is just more anachronistic Stoicism, which Huxley targeted for a scathing indictment. The Stoic maxim that we should live according to nature "has done immeasurable mischief in later times," he said, echoing Mill. "It has furnished an axiomatic foundation for the philosophy of philophasters and for the moralizing of sentimentalists." These shoes fit the proponents of the Gaia hypothesis. The sentimentalists observe nature with an eye more to its products than to its process, and so they tend not to see how awful it is, and they become confused about whose side they are on in the contest between ethics and evolution. They observe, but see global function-serving where there is only piece-meal advantage-taking. It is wishful observing, Maya, not accurate observing.

Since Huxley published the words I've quoted, the leaves have fallen a hundred times. It's about time we conceded that he was right. We can believe in evolution and yet not condone it. We ought to combat it. Only by combatting it can we create our Gaia.

Arthur Falk is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University.