A Darwinian Worldview - Sociobiology, Environmental Ethics - B. Baxter (Ashgate, 2007) WW

208 Pages·2007·1.11 MB·English

A DARWINIAN WORLDVIEW

To Jo Elvidge and to the memory of Arnold Elvidge

A Darwinian Worldview
Sociobiology, Environmental Ethics
and the Work of Edward O. Wilson

BRIAN BAXTER
The University of Dundee, Scotland, UK

© Brian Baxter 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Brian Baxter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited
Ashgate Publishing Company
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Suite 420
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Baxter, Brian, 1949-
A Darwinian worldview : sociobiology, environmental ethics
and the work of Edward O. Wilson
1. Wilson, Edward O. 2. Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 -
Influence 3. Sociobiology 4. Environmental ethics
I. Title
304.5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baxter, Brian, 1949-
A Darwinian worldview : sociobiology, environmental ethics and the work of Edward O.
Wilson / Brian Baxter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-7546-5678-4 (hardcover)
1. Sociobiology. 2. Social Darwinism. 3. Human evolution. 4. Environmental ethics. 5.
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882--Influence. 6. Wilson, Edward O. I. Title.

HM628.B38 2007
304.5--dc22
2006021583

ISBN: 978-0-7546-5678-4

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Acknowledgements
vii

1
Introduction
1

PART 1 THE EXPLANATORY ISSUE

2
Sociobiology
21

3
Evolutionary Psychology
39

4
Gene-culture Co-evolution
59

5
Consilience
77

PART 2 THE MORAL ISSUE

6
Darwinian Naturalism, Environmentalism and Humanism
95

7
Naturalism and Morality
113

8
The Possibility of Environmental Ethics
127

9
Evolution, Meaning, Suffering and Death
145

10
Conclusion
161

Appendix
177

Bibliography
189

Index
195

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Acknowledgements

My thanks must go firstly to Mike Wheeler with whom I had a very valuable
conversation when I was first developing the idea for this book. His encouragement
and advice were extremely helpful, especially in alerting me to the developing
complexities of evolutionary theory. Stephen Cowley also helped me with very
useful sources of information on the sociobiological family and the developing
consilience agenda as well as providing valuable comments on chapters 1 and 5.
Needless to say, the responsibility for what appears in the text of this book is
entirely my own.
A version of Chapter 6 appeared in 2005 in the journal Environmental Values,
15/1: 51–68 as ‘Naturalism and Environmentalism: A Reply to Hinchman’. My
thanks go to the anonymous referees whose comments on the paper helped me to
clarify and strengthen the argument. A version of ideas presented in chapters 2
and 5 were read to the Third International Conference on New Directions in the
Humanities at the University of Cambridge in August 2005 and were subsequently
published in the International Journal of the Humanities, 3 (2005–2006) as
‘Darwinism and the Social Sciences’. My thanks go to those participants in that
conference who attended the presentation of my paper for their helpful, and
encouraging, responses.
Within my own department, John MacDonald and Tony Black have supplied
me with various crucial texts central to the discussion in the first part of this
book, for which I am very grateful. Susan Malloch has, as ever, been very helpful
in providing me with secretarial support. Paul Coulam at Ashgate has been an
efficient and friendly editor, greatly facilitating the preparation of the text.
I have dedicated this book to my parents-in-law, one of whom sadly died while
it was being written. I am eternally grateful to them for their love and support,
and for producing their daughter, Lynn, who, as always, remains the mainstay
of my life.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

This book aims to explore the implications of what will be referred to as a
Darwinian worldview. Charles Darwin did not intend to produce a worldview
when he wrote Origin of the Species, aiming solely to tackle the specific intellectual
problem referred to in the title of his book. Since he published that work in 1859 his
scientific ideas have moved from the realm of the speculative to become received,
in their twentieth-century neo-Darwinian form, as part of scientific orthodoxy.
However, many thinkers have developed from his account of the origin of
species, especially as applied to our own species, a distinctive perspective on
the universe that merits the label ‘worldview’. A worldview embodies a specific
understanding of reality, based on presuppositions that are regarded by its
exponents as, at least, reasonable, and, more boldly, as firmly established or even
indubitable. From these presuppositions a synoptic account is developed of the
basic features of reality, encompassing the human and non-human realms, and
of how they relate to each other: which are fundamental, which derivative; which
are fugitive, which permanent; which have value, which do not. There are various
forms of worldview, such as religions and ideologies. But not all worldviews are
religious, even though they do all embody metaphysical positions, nor are they
all ideologies, at least if we take the latter to involve an orientation of practical
action in pursuit of socio-political purposes (Heywood 2003: p. 12). The claim
that the Darwinian worldview is a new religion is one that we will have occasion
to examine later in this book.
The Darwinian worldview embodies, of course, the two key ideas of Darwin’s
theory as applied to human beings. Firstly, it takes as axiomatic the claim that
‘Homo sapiens is an animal species’. Secondly, it accepts the Darwinian claim that
this species, like all others on the planet, has arisen by a process of evolution by
natural selection from an ancestor common to them all. My own interest in this
worldview stems from the fact that these two claims regularly form part of the
case made by environmental ethicists for the argument that human beings have
moral responsibilities towards, and not simply with respect to, the non-human
world of living entities. For such ethicists, in which group I include myself, we
are held to be an animal species with a variety of important interconnections
with the non-human world, and indeed to share a common descent with all other
life-forms on the planet, as the theory of natural selection implies. This fact of
our interconnection is held to justify the view that we have the obligations just
mentioned (see, for example, Norton 1991). Contrariwise, we are not justified in