Nietzsche | Darwin and Lamarck

While these two biologists are not considered to be about philosophy per se, the contemporary view of evolution is often applied to certain social studies, but I will contend that it is Jean Baptiste Lamarck and not Charles Darwin who has the better interpretation for social evolution, the study of culture.

Let’s look at Darwin first.

Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin, but Nietzsche was also opposed to him, especially his ‘progressiveness toward perfection’. He opposes the claims of self-preservation too. But he does accept his theory of natural selection.

The basic framework is this:

1. Variation: a population is made up of entities with different characteristics.
2. Inheritance (or Transmission): entities multiply or reproduce, and pass on at least some of their characteristics to descendants.
3. Differential reproduction: some of the different characteristics of entities influence the likelihood that they will survive and reproduce. Many writers, including (on most interpretations) Darwin himself, also add one more feature:
4. Competition: there is a biting limit on the multiplication of the population as a whole, so that if some entities reproduce rapidly there is less opportunity for others to do so.

The last point is the ‘struggle for life’. Unlike the other three principles, this one is optional rather than basic: we can think of evolutionary systems without such competition. For example, we can think of a world where all characteristics are increasingly present in absolute terms in a growing population, and differential reproduction only effects their relative frequencies.

No particular mechanism of inheritance is specified, but only a correlation in fitness between parent and offspring. The population would evolve whether the correlation between parent and offspring arose from Mendelian, cytoplasmic, or cultural inheritance.

We can think of a drive as an important kind of trait. Traits are characteristics – of physiology, morphology, or behaviour – that may be more or less prevalent in individual bodies, can be found in different individual bodies, and can be passed on across bodies. This is how we will transfer the language of evolutionary biology onto Nietzsche’s psycho-physiology.

Darwinian principles applied to drives

(1) Inheritance or Transmission. Drives are reproduced within the same individual bodies: that is, individuals repeatedly follow the same patterns of valuing, desiring, and acting over spans of time. And drives spread between bodies: patterns of valuing, desiring and acting are ‘adopted’ by others. We can think of these phenomena in terms of processes whereby ‘ancestor’ drives transmit their patterns, or at least elements of them, to future ‘descendent’ drives.

(2) Variation. There are multiple, various, drives. Any individual body is already a diverse population of drives. There is still more variation in social environments made up of numerous individuals.

(3) Differential Reproduction. Some ancestor drive patterns are more prolific than others, transmitting to numerous descendents. As in genetic and other forms of evolution, there is no one cause of this ‘success’: it is the outcome of many contingent interactions within the ecologies that drives inhabit.

Contra-Darwin

Germ line features of organisms are those that are transmitted to offspring through reproduction; somatic features may develop over an individual organism’s lifetime, but are not passed on. The genetic theory initiated by Gregor Mendel entrenched this principle by identifying the germ line with genes; and in the second half of the 20th century genes became identified with sequences of chromosomal DNA. To summarise some of the very basics: sequences of DNA molecules ‘code for’ or cause the production of strands of messenger RNA (another nucleic acid), which in turn code for particular cell proteins, which make up the structures of cells, which join together to form multicellular organisms like us. Crick’s ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology says that this ‘coding’ process works in one direction only: changes in proteins cannot be ‘reverse translated’ back into changes in DNA.

The modern neo-Darwinian approach can be summarised using the key distinction between genotype and phenotype. The genotype is the inherited potential of what an organism can become, transmitted very largely intact across generations through DNA reproduction. DNA reproduction is a highly precise process, admitting only a small degree of gradual change through ‘copying errors’ and other rare mutations. And crucially, these mutations are viewed as random: for example, the presence of harmful mutagens can increase the rate of mutation, but not ‘direct’ it. The phenotype is the form an organism actually takes – its morphology, physiology, and behaviour – as the genotype is ‘expressed’ through environmentally contingent development. In this picture there is no room for Lamarckism: no amount of blacksmithing or giraffe neck-stretching will effect DNA. There are only two sources of genetic variation: (a) rare random mutation; and (b) the combinatory shuffling of parents’ DNA in sexual reproduction. To simplify somewhat: we have a clear separation between evolutionary processes, which work exclusively on the genotype; and developmental processes, through which the phenotype is then constructed as the product of the interaction of the organism’s genotype and its environment.

Richard Dawkins’ particular take on neo-Darwinism has had a wide influence in biology and beyond. Dawkins’ first key contribution is to argue strongly for the ‘gene’s eye view’ in biological evolution, in which genes themselves, rather than individual organisms or groups (e.g. species), are the exclusive focus of selection. But Dawkins also holds that human social evolution has substantially broken free of genetic determination. We can describe Dawkins’ approach to non-genetic cultural evolution as a case of generalised neo-Darwinism. The key conceptual move here is the theory of the replicator, which generalises the properties of the neo-Darwinian gene. Replicators are transmitted intact between their ‘vehicles’ save for transformations that result from random mutations; evolving replicators then interact with environmental features to develop phenotypic traits. The cultural variant of the replicator is called the meme – which Dawkins sees as a feature of brain neurology that is phenotypically expressed as an idea, belief, desire, symbol, etc.

If we apply this approach to the evolution of values, desires, and practices, we have a picture something like the following. A drive pattern is a phenotypic trait that is produced by the interaction of three distinct factors: (i) genetic inheritance (or replication of genes); (ii) cultural (memetic) inheritance, (or replication of memes); and (iii) environmentally contingent development. One common way of thinking about how these processes combine is captured in theories of ‘gene/culture co-evolution’.

On this view, to simplify, genetic evolution takes place over very long stretches of time, as selection works on variations (mutations and sexual recombinations) over generations. These genetic dispositions are ‘expressed’ as basic psychological dispositions – perhaps ‘instincts’, or the ‘modules’ of evolutionary psychology – in the development of each individual organism. Of course, because individuals develop in varying environments, phenotypic expressions of genes will also vary to some degree. Cultural evolution, which can work over much shorter timeframes within individual lifetimes, then gets to work within the limits of genetically ‘hardwired’ structure, again in interaction with the environment in which an individual further develops throughout her life.

Nietzsche’s Lamarckism

How does Nietzsche fit into the frame? First, he thinks that some patterns are carried ‘in the blood’, through biological inheritance
between parents and offspring. Secondly, many drive patterns are transmitted through unconscious imitative or ‘mimetic’ processes. Thirdly, some drive patterns can be acquired through more conscious forms of linguistic communication, learning or ‘education’.

There is a hierarchy of strength of these three kinds of processes. Conscious educative processes are the weakest: drives acquired in this way are less stable and fixed than those incorporated through unconscious mimesis, Nietzsche also believes that some drive patterns are rooted even deeper, and more strongly, in the ‘blood’. Nietzsche insists that some forms of ‘noble’ behaviour cannot be learnt through education or imitation, but must be ‘bred’ into new generations.

We will take issue with two distinct evolutionary domains of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ selection, working on distinct units called ‘drives’ and ‘practices’ and we will look at Nietzsche through a Lamarckian lense:

Just what is meant by Lamarckism?

Roughly put, Lamarckism involves organisms inheriting characteristics acquired by their biological parents.

But we can read this in various ways. On a very broad reading (Lamarckism 1), Lamarckism would involve offspring inheriting acquired characteristics through any evolutionary process. But this would make some cases of ‘Lamarckism’ uncontroversial for contemporary neo-Darwinians like Dawkins who embrace cultural evolution: children clearly can, on that account, inherit characteristics acquired by their parents through cultural inheritance processes. If Lamarckism is to remain heretical, we need a narrower reading, perhaps this (Lamarckism 2): offspring inherit acquired characteristics through ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ transmission processes, as opposed to ‘cultural’ transmission. In short, one way to identify Lamarckism from orthodoxy is to clearly distinguish ‘cultural’ from ‘natural’ inheritance. But how to define and distinguish ‘nature’ and ‘culture’? 20th century neo-Darwinism seems to provide a ready answer: in the context of evolutionary processes, ‘nature’ refers to genetics. So we can get a still narrower, and more precise, definition of the target (Lamarckism 3): offspring inherit acquired characteristics through genetic heredity.

In the broadest sense, Nietzsche is very Lamarckian:
 

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species.

Here we see traits that are originally ‘acquired’ by the intellectual production of individuals and social groups, and then become inherited and selected across generations.

Nietzsche also appears to be Lamarckian in a narrower sense (Lamarckism 2). These include those where he refers to inheritance by blood, where he suggests that species have ‘translated the morality of custom definitively into their own flesh and blood’.

He claims that ‘many generations must have laboured to prepare the origin of the philosopher; every one of his virtues must have been acquired, nurtured, inherited, and digested singly’ until eventually some have a ‘right to philosophy’ by virtue of ‘one’s ancestors, one’s blood’.

Then, in one of his more racist passages: ‘one cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors liked most to do and did most constantly’ – ‘plebeian’ characteristics are ‘transferred to the child as corrupted blood’.

I want to relate Nietzsche’s Lamarckism to a more general feature of his evolutionary approach: he does not (in general) distinguish heredity processes in terms of what things they transmit. He does not think in terms of different types of ‘replicators’, or distinguish (as in Richardson’s reading) cultural and natural ‘units’. The same drive pattern may be transmitted by one or more of these routes: education, mimesis, or ‘blood’. Take, for instance, a normative evaluation of a practice as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Such valuing may be a conscious thought that can be communicated with language, or an embodied feeling, or perhaps an instinct that is entirely unconscious.

This general feature is not Lamarckian in itself. Lamarckism (type 2) enters with Nietzsche’s idea that drives can switch or ‘translate’ across transmission processes. Moral customs, or the first ‘acquired’ forms of philosophers’ ‘virtues’, or plebeian work habits (blacksmithing, for example), are initially developed as cultural artefacts, and first of all spread through education or mimesis. But over time, with the repetition of constant practice, they turn into deep instincts that are inherited by ‘blood’.

A value, desire, or practice that starts out on a more ‘superficial’, conscious level as a ‘thought’ can, given time and repetition, become dug or burnt into the body. More deeply incorporated drives, drives that have become ‘instincts’, tend to be stronger in a number of senses: in their power to move the body to act; in their recurrence within an individual body; and in terms of their power to spread across bodies.

In other threads, I have mentioned incorporation. Nietzsche thinks that incorporation also has a further dimension: not only do drives take on deeper, stronger, forms within individual bodies, they also become subject to further, stronger, inheritance processes. We can thus see them moving along a second spectrum line from education to mimesis to blood inheritance. In short: translation into ‘blood’ inheritance is an outcome of particularly deep incorporation.

Nietzsche’s Lamarckism, then, not as a peripheral anomaly, but as closely tied to his core idea of incorporation. As Walter Kaufmann puts it: ‘Lamarckism is not just an odd fact about Nietzsche but systematic of his conception of body and spirit’.

Of course, this does not make it right. If Nietzsche were writing a century later, in the late 20th century, he could have incorporated the intellectual productions of 20th century genetics into his view of body and spirit. He would, we can imagine, no longer talk about inheritance by ‘blood’, and he would reject Type 3 Lamarckism.

He could still think that drives can become embodied through processes working within an individual’s lifetime (particularly in early childhood), and may be transmitted across generations through cultural – including unconscious mimetic and performative – processes.