Darwin on Climate Change

In Origin of the Species, Chapter 3, Darwin wrote: “A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase.” The expression, “struggle for existence,” means death. He explains that if a specie did not suffer high rates of death, soon the planet would be overwhelmed with that specie.

Darwin wrote, “The causes that check the natural tendency of each species to increase in number are most obscure.” Among the “obscure causes” he identified is climate change. He wrote, “Climate plays an important part in determining the average numbers of a species, and periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought, I believe to be the most effective of all checks.” The expression, “check,” means killer.

Climate change will check the number of many species, including humanity. Consider the future, in Darwin’s words: “… in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals, whether of the same or of distinct species, which subsist on the same kind of food. Even when climate, for instance extreme cold, acts directly, it will be the least vigorous, or those which have got least food through the advancing winter, which will suffer most.”

High rates of death are part of natural selection, but what might happen if humanity elects to intervene through human selection? If we could stop or slow the climate change or if we could protect the “least vigorous” from destruction, would the result be better? Is it really possible for humanity to avoid the pattern of death upon which natural selection depends? Is it not inevitable that humanity will be checked by the “obscure causes?”

The modern mind does not believe in obscure causes.

Darwin on Genetic Engineering

Darwin did not write about genetic engineering, nor even about genes. He lived before their time. Nevertheless, genetic engineering is a form of human selection (e.g., breeding domestic animals and plants to have certain traits) that began before anyone spoke of genes and Darwin did say this (in Origin of the Species, Chapter 4) comparing human selection with natural selection: “Man selects for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

I don’t believe humanity really knows how to select for its own good. Darwin thought we do not. He ridiculed human selection, saying: “Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him….How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.”

It seems that from Darwin’s perspective, human selection is not only anthropocentric, it is foolish, and so genetic engineering is foolish. The wiser path for humanity is to leave selection to nature because species and varieties of species selected by the long, slow process of nature “should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship.”

Proponents of genetic engineering, and other forms of human selection, it seems, may believe that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species as Darwin wrote, but they do not appear to see the risk that Darwin saw. It seems: they agree with Darwin on the role of natural selection in the origin of the species, but not on its value for the future of the species; they do not agree that our our wishes and efforts are fleeting or that the products of human selection are poor; they implicitly hold that humanity is ready and able to assume control of selection, of life.

Human selection is not new, of course. It began at least with herding and agriculture. Maybe it began before that. One might argue its long history shows that human selection is safe. But is that history really long? No. The years in which human selection has been practiced are short when measured by geological time and by the long periods of time over which natural selection produced its species. Darwin is probably as right about our future as he is about our past.

It seems incongruent to believe that natural selection explains the origin of the species and to believe that human selection holds any hope for the future of any species.