ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
comings deserve to be mentioned. “Red in tooth and claw” is fair praise for a lion who
manages to make it through another day on the savannah. Food is scarce; life is hard. It
is what makes the Planet Earth documentary series so compelling to watch. But we
should be uncomfortable applying this description of nature to ourselves. For us, survival
is one necessary but insufficient condition to living well. It is the lowest common denom-
inator; it is where the story begins rather than where it ends.
When neo-Darwinians characterize the universe as indifferent to our best laid plans,
when they say morality is an illusion, they induce on the basis of a limited sample.
Darcia Narvaez uses Darwin’s work, as well as more recent work in evolutionary stud-
ies, to show how human development involves moral growth. She encourages her
readers to “rethink our systems. Adults can change cultures by developing institutions
and selecting activities that minimize detachment [and] support moral heritages. We
can believe that communal morality is humanity’s default, not immorality, violence or
selfishness. As adults, we can use our [imagination, courage and strength] so that we can
construct a society and world where all thrive” (306). She characterizes nature not as a
cruel and indifferent governor but as a plastic and open-ended opportunity to become
who we are on the basis of the care we show ourselves and each other via the careful
choices we make.
Darwin acknowledges our species has a moral sense, and “prosocial instincts” do seem to
be fixtures of our natural-historical endowment (Narvaez 4). Narvaez summarizes dread-
ful scientific results according to which “empathy has been decreasing in U.S. College stu-
dents,” meanwhile we have “been plagued by an increase in the flaunting of social
rules, more oppositional behavior and less shame for selfish behavior and even advoca-
cy of it.” But she refuses to naturalize such descriptions. From a developmental-
theoretical perspective, poor behavior does not undermine a more complete account.
Unlike many other species, ours can grow old without growing up. But the fact that
some fail to mature does not make it normal, natural or desirable. From the poor choic-
es of some, it does not follow that nature favors poor behavior. Perhaps it is preferable
to give up the ghost of morality, to go with the flow of accelerating decline?
Most basically the normative statement of survival of the fittest begs the question of
criteria. To the degree we install natural selection as the elemental force, explaining
all manner of human choices, we take away personal acts of attention, intelligence,
reflection and decision that together compose responsible decision-making. To pick on
Herbert Spencer’s famous phrase, what is fittest is what survives, yet what survives is
what is fittest. Survival of the fittest at best means an apology for the present. After
all, we are the lucky ones who made it. It leaves unanswered questions like, why isn’t
the universe already totally evolved? Why doesn’t evolution occur at an infinite
speed?
When we contend there is a single, maximally explanatory elementary force, we allege
the uniformity of nature; we make it the result of just one thing. There is no difference
between a plant species and an animal species, no difference between me and any other
entity because everything belongs to or is the result of this one force. It is bad science
and worse metaphysics, what logicians once called the fallacy of the vacuous contrast
now dressed up like an alpha predator.
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