5.2.3—
Evolutionary Theory and the "Shadows of God"

No modern scientific theory did more to challenge the static, closed, deterministic, deistic view of the world than Darwin's evolutionary biology.^[18] The Darwinian revolution opposed the physical worldview of Descartes and Newton and biological worldview of Lyell and Agassiz. Against these, it asserted the primacy of time, becoming, chance, and struggle in nature and liberated this becoming from being, essence, and God. Rejecting the belief in a constant world, Darwin revealed a nature in incessant alteration and transformation.^[19] In place of the doctrines of creation and design prevalent among natural theologians and biologists alike, Darwin proposed the mechanisms of random variation and natural selection and candidly described a nature that is, by moral standards, "capricious, cruel, arbitrary, wasteful, [and] careless."^[20] Op-

[17] In doing so, he philosophically anticipates the experimental discoveries of the "Brussels School," which has reinterpreted the second law of thermodynamics to include spontaneous transformations from disorder to order, from simplicity and equivalence to complexity and difference. See, e.g., Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, passim . Also see p. 211n. 109.

[18] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 35–67.

[19] This summary presentation draws heavily on Stephen Jay Gould's and Ernst Mayr's superb accounts of the essential features of Darwin's revolution. See Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," in Darwin's Legacy, ed. Charles L. Hamrum (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), and Mayr, One Long Argument, chaps. 4–5. While I find them particularly compelling, these reconstructions of Darwinism are not uncontroversial. For criticisms, see, e.g., Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169–79, and Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 229–312.

[20] D. L. Hull, quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 14. Nietzsche uses remarkably similar language in BGE 9 and 22 to combat the design theories of the Stoics and mechanists. On Darwin's arguments against creation and design, see Gould, "In Praise of CharlesDarwin," 5–6, and Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

posing philosophical and biological essentialisms, Darwin discovered that there are no essential disjunctions between species and showed that every species is itself only a statistical abstraction over a population of irreducibly unique individuals, a variation without which evolution would be impossible.^[21] Moreover, Darwin refused to grant any divine exception to human beings, viewing them as material through and through and continuous with the rest of nature.^[22] Biological evolution also seemed to contradict the trajectory of thermodynamics. If the latter hypothesized a solar system becoming steadily more uniform and disordered, the former revealed a world in which difference and complexity increase, rather than decrease, over time.^[23]

The Darwinian revolution thus effected a profound de-deification of nature and naturalization of humanity—a fact occasionally acknowledged by Nietzsche (see HL 9; GS 357; GM III:25; A 14). Yet Nietzsche seems to have known Darwin primarily through what Stephen Jay Gould has recently called "Darwin's spin doctors," who, under the guise of disseminating Darwinism, continued to insinuate ontotheological posits into the theory of natural selection.^[24] In his quest to eliminate

[21] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 39–42, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 160–66. We have seen, in §2.2.4, that Nietzsche, too, argues against essentialism along these nominalist lines. Indeed, Mayr (One Long Argument, 41) presents an argument concerning the linguistic basis of essentialism that reads like a paraphrase of passages in TL and TI: "Essentialism's influence was great in part because its principle is anchored in our language, in our use of a single noun in the singular to designate highly variable phenomena of our environment, such as mountain, home, water, horse, or honesty. Even though there is a great variety in kinds of mountain and kinds of home, and even though the kinds do not stand in direct relation to one another (as do the members of a species), the simple noun defines the class of objects."

[22] See Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 21–27, and "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 6.

[23] See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972.), 18, and Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 127–28.

[24] Gould, Full House, 19. Gould argues that, in both the popular and the scholarly literature, the evolutionary story continues to be "spun" in this manner and that we still need to "complete Darwin's revolution" (see Full House, chap. 2). Nietzsche's critique thus remains as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. In his recent book on philosophy and evolutionary theory, Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 181–83, 46167) explicitly acknowledges the significance of Nietzsche's Darwinian critique of "Darwinism." Yet his presentation of Nietzsche's position is both superficial and patronizing. Moreover, Dennett dedicates a substantial portion of this book to a critique of Gould (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 2.29–312), who is seen as fortifying Darwin's theory with superfluous metaphysical posits. I do not find this in Gould. Indeed, I read Gould as sharingNietzsche's commitment to the thorough elimination, from evolutionary theory, of all the "shadows of God."

the "shadows of God," Nietzsche subjects such "Darwinism" to a naturalizing critique.^[25]

This critique appears throughout Nietzsche's corpus—from the 1873 essay, "On Truth and Lies," to the sections and notes of 1888 entitled "Anti-Darwin" (TI "Skirmishes" 14; WP 647, 684–85). Recurrent in these texts is an argument against a notion of evolutionary progress that takes human beings to be the goal and pinnacle of nature. In "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche remarks that the pride of humanity—the human intellect—is an evolutionary variation no better, and in many ways worse, than the "sharp teeth of beasts of prey" and that human existence will surely turn out to be but a "shadowy and transient," "aimless and arbitrary" moment in geological time (TL, pp. 79–80).^[26] Evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism, Nietzsche suggests elsewhere, are merely secular translations of biblical creationism—attempts to shift the ontotheological weight from the origin to the end of history:

Formerly, one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction! One therefore now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind is going shall serve as proof of his grandeur and kinship with God. Alas this, too, is in vain! [ . . . ] However high mankind may have evolved—and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning!—it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its "earthly course" rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. (D 49)

We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his intellectuality [Geistigkeit ] is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too—as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means

[25] "Darwinism," here refers to the view of the "spin doctors," not to Darwin's view itself, with which Nietzsche, albeit unbeknownst to Nietzsche himself, is in very substantial agreement.

[26] Cf. Gould, Full House, 18: "If we are but a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent bush of life, and if our twig branched off just a geological moment ago, then perhaps we are not a predictable result of an inherently progressive process (the vaunted trend to progress in life's history); perhaps we are, whatever our glories or accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions."

the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection . . . And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one who has strayed the most dangerously from its instincts. (A 14)^[27]

Despite Darwin's antiprogressivism, evolutionary theorists continued to see the phenomenon of evolutionary "adaptation" as progressive. According to a view promoted by Herbert Spencer, one of Nietzsche's prime targets (see GM II: 12), natural selection gradually promotes an increasingly better fit between organisms and their environment. But such "adaptationism" projects into the evolutionary process a false teleology, amounting to a revival of the "argument from design" that Darwin's theory explicitly opposed.^[28] Thus, Gould writes:

Evolutionary biologists have too often slipped into a seductively appealing mode of argument about the phenomenon of adaptation. We tend to view every structure as designed for a definite purpose, thus building (in our imagination) a world of perfect design not much different from that concocted by eighteenth-century natural theologians who "proved" God's existence by the perfect architecture of organisms. [ . . . ] But [the] current utility [of traits] does not imply that they were built directly by natural selection for the purpose they now serve. [ . . . ] We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. [ . . . ] The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose? [ . . . ] Selection works for the moment. It cannot sense what may be of use ten million years hence in a distant descendant. [ . . . ] Future utility is an important consideration in evolution, but it cannot be the explanation for current preservation. Future utilities can only be the fortuitous effects of other direct reasons for immediate favor. (The confusion of current utility with reasons for past historical origin is a logical trap that has plagued evolutionary thinking from the start.)^[29]

[27] Cf. HL 9; GM III: 25; WP 90, 401, 684–85. Also see Gould, Full House, for an extended argument against the notion of evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism.

[28] Thus Darwin wrote in his Autobiography: "The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley . . . fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of the bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows" (quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 57).

[29] Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 155–56, 170. This argument runs throughout Gould's work. The most sustained version is presented in Gould and Richard Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205 (1979): 581–98.

Nietzsche makes a strikingly similar point in §12 of the Genealogy 's second essay, which bears citing again in this context:

[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of a physiological organ [ . . . ], this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears—for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understand the reason why it originated—the eye being made for seeing, the hand made for grasping. [ . . . P]urposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in purely chance fashion. The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but the succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions.^[30]

In place of the steady upward climb imagined by the progressivists and adaptationists, Gould and Nietzsche view the trajectory of evolution as an unpredictable, ateleological movement. "Adaptation" and "success" are local and contingent; and subsequent forms can claim only temporary victory in a perpetual and shifting agon rather than global advance on "the ladder of progress."

Neither the longevity of an organism nor its complexity or later appearance are any evidence of progress or superiority. Gould points out that, however simple, "bacteria, by any reasonable criterion, were in

[30] For an earlier critique of progressivism and adaptationism as manifested in the Hegelian dialectic, see HL 8–9.

the beginning, are now, and ever shall be the most successful organisms on earth"^[31] and that the relatively late and rare appearance of complex organisms such as Homo sapiens is no sign of an inherent tendency to complexity but only a consequence of life's diversification in the only direction available to it.^[32] As Nietzsche puts it:

[M]an as a species does not represent any progress compared to any other animal. The whole animal and vegetable kingdom does not evolve from the lower to the higher—but all at the same time, in utter disorder, over and against one another. The richest and most complex forms—for the expression "higher type" means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. The former are achieved fairly rarely and maintain their superiority with difficulty. (WP 684)

In short, criteria of progress or excellence are criteria of value; and such criteria are not found or given in the nature of things but must be made and defended . Once we give up the notion that a teleology is inherent in the evolutionary process, criteria other than preservation, survival, and adaptation become available for assessing excellence.^[33] Thus Nietzsche remarks: "Greatness ought not to depend on success"; "the goal of humanity cannot lie in [ . . .  the] end [of history], but only in its highest exemplars" (HL 9, p. 111).^[34] Given the central role Darwin's theory assigns to chance,^[35] we can liken evolution to a dice game. On this model, Nietzsche suggests, excellence need not be assigned to statistical averages or probabilities but to those rare "lucky throws" [Glückswürfen ].^[36] "The brief spell of beauty, of genius," he writes, "is sui generis: such things are not inherited" (WP 684; cf. 685).

Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. "Progress" is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether not accord-

[31] Gould, Full House, 38, see also 175–216.

[32] Ibid., 167–75.

[33] See Nietzsche's 1873 notes on history (in The Portable Nietzsche, 39ff.), and HL 9; D 106, 108; GM I:17, II:12; TI "Skirmishes" 44; A 14; WP 647–48, 684–85.

[34] See GM I:9, where Nietzsche's irony hints that the "success" of "slave," "mob," "herd," or "democratic" ideals is no indication of their superiority. Also see Nietzsche's various remarks to the effect that "one always has to defend the strong against the weak" (WP 685; cf. WP 864, GM: III:14).

[35] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 48–49; Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 5; and Monod, Chance and Necessity .

[36] See GM II:16: "From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' 'great child,' be he called Zeus or chance." See also GM III:14; A 3–4; WP 684–85, 864.

ing to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength. In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures: here we really do find a higher type, which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman. Such lucky strokes [Glücksfälle ] of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. (A 4; cf. WP 881)