The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

For example, the communist thinker Karl Marx believed that his theory of history was evolutionary because it spoke of a progression through historical stages determined by economic ‘laws of motion’. But the real theory of evolution has nothing to do with predicting the attributes of organisms from those of their ancestors. Marx also thought that Darwin’s theory of evolution ‘provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle’. He was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed competition between biological species. Fascist ideologies such as Nazism likewise used garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas, such as ‘the survival of the fittest’, to justify violence. But in fact the competition in biological evolution is not between different species, but between variants of genes within a species – which does not resemble the supposed ‘class struggle’ at all. It can give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce cooperation (such as the symbiosis between flowers and insects) and all sorts of intricate combinations of the two.