Evolutionary antagonisms and the progress of three categories of traits.

Zakariya, Nasser

Darwin in The Descent of Man deliberates over the question of progress in relation to three categories of traits – aesthetic, moral and intellectual – attending to their interplay. The later formulations of Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace shift and reframe the terms for weighing together progress and the relationship across these traits, downplaying the role of aesthetic assessments. Huxley and Wallace invoke ‘antagonisms’ countering, respectively, ‘ethical progress’ and ‘cosmic process’, ‘humanity – the essentially human emotion’ and ‘physical and even intellectual raceimprovement’. Thereafter, evolutionary antagonisms reappear – whether to endorse, dismiss or overcome them – and they remain relevant in evolutionary arguments, whether made explicit or left implicit. Following a thread of ongoing appeals to this interplay of traits and corresponding antagonisms invoking Huxley’s 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and ethics’, implicit differences appear in the treatment of aesthetic, moral and intellectual development. These treatments maintain the progress that their own ethical systems represented, even while granting moral variation and conceding independent/alternative notions of the beautiful. They generally took as granted the uniformity of intellectual judgements, where evolutionary progress was both ethical and intellectual/ scientific, even when speculating on the development of different types of mind. As characteristic of future-oriented visions of progress by the first decades of the twentieth century, sexual selection was subsumed under natural selection.

HUXLEY, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; WALLACE, Alfred Russel, 1823-1913; DARWIN, Charles, 1809-1882; SEXUAL selection; MORAL development; INTELLECTUAL development; EMOTIONS; TWENTY-first century

BJHS Themes, 2021, Vol 6, p179

2058-850X

Academic Journal

10.1017/bjt.2021.8