OK, well, I haven’t really done integrative biology in a long time, so I’m probably grossly misusing terminology.

A Tweet on Twitter led to this blog post about Social Darwinism and it disheartens me that such garbage is still mainstream. Social Darwinism is an obsolete philosophy that was pretty much disproven by the occurrence of World War II, and has little basis in actual biology.

I tend to equate Social Darwinism with paleoconservativism and so-called free market capitalism. It seems to rear its ugly head over and over again. Oh, and there’s also Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

But if you actually look at Darwin’s premise, we’re talking about reproductive fitness.

Meaning that, by Darwin’s criteria, bacteria and insects are far more “fit” than humans.

I’m not so sure if the aspirations of human beings should be exactly the same as those of E. coli and of cockroaches, but that’s just me.

The other thing is that it’s clear that altruism—in human beings as well as in non-verbal social species—is a behavioral adaptation that is selectively advantageous—if not for the particular individual in question, then at least for the species as a whole. And if you subscribe to Richard Dawkins’ paradigm that the actual unit of reproduction is DNA (see The Selfish Gene), there’s no question about it. Altruism can help maximize the reproductive potential of any one particular allele.

There are other things that altruism is good for, solely in terms of reproductive fitness. Because altruism helps relieve a lot of the selective pressure working against a particular species, it allows individuals to maximally vary their behavior. In a highly competitive environment, each individual that wants to survive is forced to adopt a limited range of behavioral adaptations, leading to homogenous behavior. Which is bad if what eats you figures it out, or if what you eat learns to work around it. But in a dog-eat-dog world, you’re probably going to be limited to eating a certain way, sleeping a certain way, hunting a certain way, running away from your pursuers a certain way. To deviate from any of these behaviors puts you at risk. The laws of thermodynamics force you to adopt the behavior that maximizes your chance of survival at the minimum of expense. The degrees of freedom drop logarithmically, and in such a situation, there are probably only a handful of ways to survive and pass on your genetic material. As an extreme example, we can look at how Clostridium species bacteria survive. This stuff is widespread in the environment, and pretty much only does a couple of things: it eats, it divides, it grows spores, it dies. While this may content some people, it’s not my idea of a life lived to the fullest. But Clostridium is pretty damn hard to eradicate. Sure, we’ve got antibiotics to kill it when it manages to stray inside the human body, but there’s absolutely no way to exterminate it. Anything you do to it only makes it stronger. (Nietzsche—and Kanye West—are probably more applicable to bacteria and viruses than to complex multicellular organisms, but I digress.)

Conversely, a less competitive environment allows the development of complexity. Not that complexity in of itself is necessarily good. But in terms of reproductive fitness, it’s a pretty good idea.

The phrase that I remember from good ol’ Charles is “Variety is the keystone to Man’s success.” He ain’t just whistling Dixie.

Complexity allows variation. A polyclonal collective of individuals will have a better chance of surviving than a monoclonal colony, no matter what the selective pressure is. A monoculture ends up cannibalizing its own, because they’re always competing for the exact same resources in the exact same way. In a polyculture, individuals can adopt different behaviors. Some will become symbiotes, others will become commensural, others will be parasites. Each individual will adapt to their particular society in a multitude of ways that, while selfish, also tends to maximize the survival benefit of their compatriots. You never know what the next selective pressure is going to be. If you’re a gene, it would be utterly idiotic to put all your eggs in one basket. So you diversify. You subspecialize. You interact. You cooperate.

In short, you build a multicellular organism.

Think about it. The human body is built on the basis of genetic altruism. The trillions of cells that make up your heart, your lungs, your liver, your brain are all going to die someday and have no hope of extending their survival beyond more than a few mitotic divisions, but their main goal is so that the product of your gametes actually gets passed on to the next generation, and hopefully onto the one after that, and the one after that, ad infinitum, in eternitas. Think about that. The human body is designed such that at least a trillion will die so that at least a few can live.

So don’t talk to me about what is “natural.” You go by these criteria, and self-sacrifice seems more natural to human nature than selfishness.

And in macroscopic terms, you can’t help but wonder if human civilization is not just the next level of generating complexity, in order to maximize variation, in order to increase the likelihood that genetic information will persist through time. The agricultural revolution and the founding of cities have greatly relieved a lot of the selective pressure that used to doom our ancestors. We live in an increasingly complex society, even as our ability to stave off selective pressure increases. Due to this explosion of genetic and behavioral variation over the last few thousands of years, I’m actually pretty sure that a good handful of people will survive even a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust of biblical proportions. About the only thing I’m really worried about is a species-annihilating meteor strike, but we’re probably on the cusp of avoiding even that.

Bottom line is: Social Darwinism is an anachronistic, erroneous philosophy borne out of a misunderstanding of evolutionary genetics, and anyone who espouses it deserves whatever happens to them. (Remember, that in the die, you too will die.)