A review of Chris Knight’s Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. 2000

Timothy Mason (Universite de Paris 8) 2000.

The first academic anthropologists were much influenced by Darwin. The ways in which Tylor or Frazer applied the selectionist theory of evolution have often been summarily characterized as an Imperialistic and ethnocentric form of Social Darwinism, but in fact their thinking was more interesting and more complex than that. Nevertheless, when a new generation of anthropologists, closer to the terrain, less interested in historical questions, took over the baton, they renounced the search for the Key to All Mysteries, leaving Frazer to the poets and novelists. For Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the Savage ceases to be the witness to our prehistoric past, and becomes a man like others, his daily cares and fundamental needs being much like our own.

The anthropological community congratulated itself on having turned its back on Big Questions without answers. New, more properly scientific problems could now be tackled with new, more properly scientific methods. But, perhaps unfortunately, it may be that the social sciences are open to other pressures, other criteria, than are the hard sciences. Malinowski owed his success with the public to the tales and anecdotes that run through his work ; his theoretical contributions have never fully satisfied the specialists. However, in general, after the anthropologists abandoned their early attempts to outline a history of humankind, they found little favour with the ordinary reader. If some of their works still attracted attention, these were more likely to be moral tales of the kind that Colin Turnbull offered in his books on the M’Buti, whom he found in a state of grace, or on the Ik whom he saw as prefiguring our own terrifying future. As Chris Knight remarks, by renouncing the quest for origins, the anthropological community lost its readers and cut itself off from contact with the world at large.

The vacuum, argues Knight, was quickly to be filled by sociobiology, first launched by Edward O. Wilson, but then taken up, above all, by the primatologists working in the wake of De Vore and Goodall. The chimpanzees of Gombe or the baboons of ‘The Pumphouse Gang’ filled our Sunday colour supplements. So powerful were the stories told, that sometimes it was as if human beings were nothing but apes with language added on ; culture came to seem nothing more than a kind of varnish behind which one might espy the naked ape, armed with reproductive strategies and engaging in power struggles which were the very image of those of our primate cousins.

A fully evolutionist theory of culture had to await the publication of Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Selfish Gene’. At the centre of this theory is the ‘meme’, which plays the same role of ‘replicator’ as the gene fills in biological evolution. And just as in the biological world, memes must obey combinatory rules. Thus our history can be characterized as a struggle between memes for their survival, and the elaboration of structures which are more and more complex, but which follow a few basic principles. This thesis is more seductive for the humanist than are the constructs of the sociobiologists, for it points to a radical cut-off between biology and culture. Memes are the new replicators, the wave of the future, which means that humanity is to be at the centre of the new programme. Furthermore, the literary critic will recognize a familiar air, for ‘memology’ offers echoes of the work the Russian formalists, of Vladimir Propp’s analyses of folk-tales, or of Levi-Strauss’s work on mythologies.

Blood Relations; a Marxist sociobiology

It is in this context that Chris Knight’s book may be read. Knight is a theoretician rather than an ethnologist, and his writings are based on the observations made by others; the shadows of Frazer, Freud and Levi-Strauss lie across his pages. A militant socialist in the tradition of Engels, he sees his work as a left-wing response to sociobiology, which he characterizes as the Political Economy of our time. It is, he believes, up to Marxists to use and transform it. But he is a resolutely post-modern Marxist; one of the names he invokes - along with that of Mary Douglas - is Donna Haraway, for he has drawn much of his inspiration from her ‘Primate Visions’. Knight tells us that he will add his own story to the others, that it will be a resolutely political story, with no pretensions to objectivity.

The tale that he unfolds is, predictably, one of revolution - the fundamental revolution, centred on reproduction and sexuality. It is not, he assures us, true to say that human nature is such that revolution is impossible to accomplish - on the contrary, our humanity, our cultures, our relational networks come into being through and in a revolution initiated by women 100,000 years ago, and through the counter-revolution subsequently mounted by men. Thus it was that our humanity was forged by women, whose fundamental needs for food and for help in raising children form the foundations upon which culture was to be erected.

Let us follow one of his key illustrations: the Sharanahua is a South American people among whom one may regularly see a group of young women, arrayed in their finest garments and very visibly painted, form a line, dance together, and challenge the young men. Each of the women chooses a man whom she orders to go off into the forest and hunt for her. Off go the men; when they return, the women are waiting for them. Unhappy is the wretch who comes back empty-handed; he will do his best to creep into the village unperceived, and to hide in his hut. The lucky hunter, however, lays his prey down at the entry to the village, where the women are waiting, and goes off to prepare himself for the festivities. He knows that he will that very night enjoy the favours of the woman by whom he was chosen.

Knight tells us that this scenario is a distant echo of the birth of all human culture. Women need men - not as mere genitors, but as providers of goods and services. To persuade males to play a role so rare among primates, women have recourse to a ’sex-strike’. Knight sums this up in the formula: No meat, no sex. To underpin his theory, he follows two paths; first he carries out a rewrite of Levi-Strauss, and second he tries to show how the very specific physiology of the human female can be explained by the ’sex-strike’. To this anthropological theory, Knight adds in counter-point an account of his own development. Throughout his book, he reveals how his own intellectual and political evolution influenced his scientific choices. The chapters of his book do not simply follow an argumentative chain, tracing out the logical steps in the construction of his theory; they also trace out the pathways which lead from the youthful naivete of the early militant to the mature adult capable of making an honourable contribution to the revolutionary project.

Incest and ‘own-kill’

Levi-Strauss places the birth of culture under the sign of the incest-taboo. But, argues Knight, that does not go far enough; women are not just pawns in a game played out between groups of brothers. On the contrary, they are themselves the main players. The incest taboo cannot be understood unless it is placed in the context of a second taboo, the traces of which, he says, are to be found in virtually all hunter-gatherer societies: a hunter is forbidden to consume the meat of an animal that he has killed himself. This is what Knight calls ‘the own-kill rule’. In most cases, the hunter must offer the meat to one or another of his in-laws. Often enough, he must provide his wife’s family with meat and other services for years before he is admitted as a son-in-law. To taste the blood of an animal that one has brought down oneself is the equivalent of an incest - you should not sully your own blood. Knight writes:

“If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ’spirit’, ’substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ’self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy. According to this logic, a man’s sisters are inseparable from himself, and , sexually, they are therefore for others to take as sexual partners. A man’s hunting products - the game animals which he kills - are likewise inseparable from himself, and are his own flesh, his own blood, or his own essence which he is not allowed to eat. Not two rules are in force, but only one; the rule against ‘eating one’s own flesh’.”

Upon this basis is erected a cycle which lasts one lunar cycle. During the period of the new moon, women remain among their families of origin - the group of sisters, of mothers and of children, often living together under the same roof. The men, for their part, go out to hunt. During the period of the full moon, the women join their husbands or their lovers - if they have succeeded in bringing meat back to the village. The men, as we can see, sexually consume blood which is not their own. And the women, their sisters, their mothers, their children and their brothers, eating the meat which has been brought by their lovers, also consume blood which is not their own.

It has to be said that in his critique and extension of Levi-Strauss, Knight offers arguments which are pertinent and interesting, and that the quasi-symmetrical structure which he establishes from the different forms of taboo is pretty convincing. But Knight wants to go further than this; like Freud, whom he invokes, he is in the business of digging up a primary scene - the sex-strike. In the natural world, as we may learn from the writings of the primatologists, society is pretty much a collection of individuals, each of which has its own personal interests. Whether eating or reproducing, in the end, each individual is in it for him or herself. Some kind of rudimentary alliance can arise, but there is no true exchange - monkeys do not exchange food, do not exchange sexual partners, unless they are threatened by a stronger individual. Human beings, as Levi-Strauss understood, can do this.

The question that must be asked, claims Knight, is how women managed to escape from the control of the dominant males, and how they managed to persuade the other males to work for them, to free them from the need to spend all their time looking for food to the detriment of their maternal roles. This is indeed a critical question, for human babies are even more fragile than are monkey infants, of which many die while very small due to accidents occasioned by the mother’s need to be mobile in order to feed herself. Human females, then, have a strong interest in establishing a home base or semi-permanent camp, and in getting men to do the work of provisioning.

This brings us to a crucial point in the argument; Knight illustrates it by reference to another, altogether different species. Among sea-horses, monogamy is the rule. The females impose this form of sexual relationship through the synchronization of their ovulation - all the females produce their eggs at exactly the same time and so the males cannot easily fertilize a number of females. Female sea-horses use the moon as a cosmic clock. Human females, suggests Knight, did the same thing.

A group of women began to ovulate in synchrony, producing their eggs at the time of the full moon. Their menstruation, obviously, was also collective, and coincided with the new moon. The women’s sex-strike occurs, then, at the moment of the new moon, and is realized through collective menstruation. Let us see how the strike could have been put in place.

Women, periods and the moon

Human sexuality is rather different from that of our closest relatives, in particular as it concerns the females of the species, for whom the most marked characteristics are the absence of estrus and permanent receptivity. Although there are primate species with similar characteristics - particularly those which are monogamous - it is not usual and never as strongly pronounced. One explanation, put forward by Desmond Morris, among others, is that the female attempts to capture her mate’s long-term attention through offering a greater intensity and continuity of sexual pleasure. It has also been pointed out that the absence of estrus means that if a man wants to be sure of impregnating his partner, he must maintain sexual relations with her over a longer period than is the case among chimpanzees.

Knight remains unconvinced by all this. What is marked among the females of our species, he argues, is not her constant receptivity, but rather the moment when she is less receptive - her menstrual period. He writes:

“Despite oestrus loss, hormonally controlled sexual signals are not entirely missing from the human female menstrual cycle. On the contrary, menstruation in the human case has been accentuated as an external display. It is at menstruation rather than ovulation that the human female experiences her behaviour as hormonally influenced to a certain degree.”

And he adds :

“A woman loses considerably more blood during menstruation than does any other primate. This shedding of blood, although small, represents a significant loss - a loss which has to be made good by additional food intake, particularly of iron. The adaptive advantage of this has not yet been explained”.

Menstruation, he suggests, functions as a signal. It lets men know that the woman will refuse sexual intimacy. But this is not enough ; all fecundable women must signal their refusal at the same time. Knight needs to demonstrate that this is possible. He begins by noting that although the menstrual cycle is not necessarily linked to the phases of the moon - periodicity among primates is variable - the typical cycle of the human female lasts 28.5 days, and coincides exactly with the lunar cycle. Next, Knight cites the results of some research that indicates that when women spend enough time together - in a boarding school, for example, or a university dormitory - they tend to have their periods at the same time.

Women, then, are capable of menstrual solidarity, and of clearly demonstrating, all together, that they are not disposed to have sexual relations. They use the moon and the tides to synchronize ; at the new moon, women have their periods. They remain shut away in their homes. They mock the men, as Sharanahua women still do today : “There’s no meat in the house”, they say, “we’ll eat penises”. The men, thus reminded of their human duties - duties of exchange and reciprocity - get together to organize the hunt. They will return, says Knight, around the full moon, loaded with meat.

Women, men and culture

At first, the occasional sex-strike did not bring about a radical break between nature and culture. This only came about when our ancestors were forced to quit the coastal regions under the pressure of the new meteorological conditions brought about by the last Ice-Age. Knight situates the break very late, putting it at only 70,000 years ago. It was at this period that, deprived of the resources of the sea such as fish, crustaceans and baby seals, women began to feel the need to force men to go hunting regularly.

This required an elaborate social organization; one the one side, the women, who had to plan and put into effect the strike, and on the other the men, who had to plan and carry out the collective hunt. For the women, menstrual blood linked to menstrual synchronization was the basis of their solidarity. But at any one time, only a minority of women would be having regular periods: pregnant women, those with unweaned children, older women and the undernourished do not bleed. Even today, among hunter-gatherers, menstruation is rare, and very few women have the regular cycles that their counterparts in industrial societies undergo - indeed, anthropologists refer to this rarity of periods when they try to explain why such peoples hold menstrual blood in abhorrence. So there is not enough real blood to do the trick - particularly if the hunt lasts for several days, and the men who have remained at the home base must be kept at bay. Knight at this point in his argument brings in the fact that a good number of archeological sites show quite abundant traces of red ochre :

“… it is reasonable to suppose that on many occasions, humans would have experienced the need to make visible the source of the ‘magic’. The strike itself may have seemed in this context somewhat demanding of blood. If my hypothesis were correct, we might expect to find cultures to have evolved artifices serving to amplify the visual impact of women’s blood. Real menstrual blood dries, flakes and turns almost black rather than red within a few hours. If women wanted to declare themselves defiantly ‘powerful’ for longer and longer periods, and wanted to express this in some visually unmistakable way, they may well have felt the need to augment their blood with something which stayed red for longer and did not quickly flake. Could red juices, ochre, or mixtures of ochre with blood and/or animal fat, have fulfilled such a function?”

Understandably, Knight replies to his own question in the affirmative. Symbolic culture, according to this hypothesis, comes to light in the body-decoration of women. The first human message is that addressed to the male group by the female group who, covered in red, the emblem of their menstrual blood, say a collective ‘No’, and offer the first exchange. Sex, says Knight, for meat.

This is the source of two fundamental taboos: the women remain in the base camp, and with them are the children and the young males who are too young to hunt, old people, and a few males who are left behind to protect the group. The men who go on the hunt must be sure that the women will not lie with the men who stay behind: sons and nephews become taboo. At the same time, the men must promise not to keep the meat for themselves, and in this way, the own-kill taboo is put in place.

What kind of feminism?

Knight sees his work as contributing to those currents in anthropology and sociobiology which take account of the feminist perspective - but not just any feminist perspective:

“Influenced by friends and comrades who were feminists, I naturally felt feminism of any variety to be a liberating political force. But … for the women I was closest to (many of whom were involved in the Greenham Common anti-Cruise missile campaigns of the early 1980s), the construction of ‘female males’ was not what the struggle was all about, any more than joining the capitalists was the essence of working-class emancipation. The struggle was more about refusing to collaborate with the whole masculinist political set-up, organising autonomously as women, drawing on support for real change from the wider class struggle - and fighting to bring men as allies into a world transformed on women’s terms.”

It may be - at least in part - for this reason that Knight takes such pains to reject the idea that the exchange offered by the women could be seen as a form of prostitution. He insists that among hunter-gatherers, it would be immoral in a woman to offer sex without demanding a gift in return, rather than in insisting on payment. In South America, in Melanesia, in Africa, the woman always expects the lover or husband to offer her gifts each time she makes love to him. The prostitute, says Knight, is not she who insists on the strict application of the basic rules imposed by the sex-strike. On the contrary, it is the strike-breaker, who offers her body to men on demand - by thus undermining feminine solidarity, she threatens society itself. Prostitution does not consist in the simple demand of a reward for sexual services, but in undercutting the trade-union price and offering up one’s body in the place of other women. The woman who openly demands a gift makes the rules clear; the prostitute muddies them.

How is it, then, that the prostitute is present in almost all human societies, and is so common in modern societies? According to Knight, she will only proliferate in societies which are dominated by men, in patriarchal societies. How is it, then, that if women gave birth to culture, women in all cultures find themselves under the masculine thumb?

Knight’s reply to this is that after the revolution, there was a counter-revolution. This counter-revolution is clearly recognized and celebrated by men. To demonstrate this, he takes the case of Australian Aboriginal peoples, among whom the myth of the Rainbow Snake is widely disseminated. This serpent, which swallows menstruating women, and which brings members of the same blood line together, where they should remain separate, is the very symbol of feminine solidarity, founded on the sex-strike and on synchronized menstruation, says Knight. But, in Aboriginal mythology, it can be seen that the men have hijacked the snake, putting themselves in the place of the women at the moment of collective menstruation. Women, they say, do not have ‘real periods’ - which is why they must be socially isolated when they bleed. Kept apart from one another while they menstruate, women are no longer able to synchronize, are not longer able to announce and celebrate the strike. Men, on the other hand, through sub-incision or other forms of self-mutilation, practiced collectively, particularly during rites of initiation, substitute themselves for women, taking their place as the guarantors of the social system. Knight cites one of the male participants in these rites:

“But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all woman’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wauwalak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women - everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing because men had been doing nothing ; we took these things from women.”

According to Knight, the Aborigines have maintained in their myths and ritual practices the memory trace of a critical moment in the evolution of culture - the moment when men overthrew the existing order and imposed masculine domination. This could only occur through a revolution in symbolic representations. The Snake would no longer swallow women.

The primal scene?

Knight knows that the story he tells is but one among many. But, he claims, his is a special kind of story, for though it is indeed a myth, it is a scientific myth. He believes that science must be liberating. His story, he says, may aid progressive forces in their struggle against the dominant ideology, and help give them back the confidence that they have lost since the 70s, to dream once more of revolution. In an England where the Left is in disarray, where the Labour Party is in the hands of an admirer of Mrs. Thatcher, one may understand why Knight - who cites Ken Livingstone in his list of acknowledgments - wants to find new foundations upon which to construct a radical critique of society. But at what price? In order to construct his myth, Knight is forced into simplification and abstraction from the cultural whole. Thus, he says at one point that for the populations from which our species sprang there is a moment when blood is only blood and all blood is alike. However, it is known that in hunter-gatherer societies, blood can only be understood in its relationship to other bodily fluids - milk, sperm and bile. And it is also the case that blood is multiple. But this complexity would put a brake upon the sociobiological imagination, just as the recognition of similar inter-relationships put a brake on the project of Taylor and Frazer. Perhaps that is why Knight - with much precaution - is willing to accept the concept of ‘meme’. As he says :

“I intend to draw on this parallel between ‘genes’ and ‘memes’ not because I find the analogies convincing … but because this way of looking at matters helps to validate my own narrative of a ‘human revolution’ which transported evolution beyond the parameters of ordinary Darwinism.”

Memology allows cultural elements to be abstracted from their contexts, and permits the identification within a rite or social practice of forms or formulas that are susceptible to being thus abstracted. But one of the problems of this approach is that it is always tempting to do nothing other than to project upon our distant past the configurations of our own desires. Knight sees the trap:

“Although I scarcely understood its scientific complexities, sociobiology by this stage did not simply repel me, despite its obvious political roots. Indeed, I warmed to its ideological excesses. They seemed to promise for the first time a publicly communicable way of validating my own narrative. If the stockbrokers, the company directors and the bourgeois feminists could be uninhibited about projecting their purely political constructs into primatological and palaeoanthropological debate - then how could they object to a socialist doing the same? Obviously, it seemed to me, they could not object in principle. The bone of contention could only be the extent to which - if at all - our respective grids worked.”

He admits, then, to projecting onto the canvas that he has imagined his own political values and hopes. But it is possible that other, less well-controlled material, has also made its way into the picture. At the centre of his myth, we find the moment of revolution itself. We have already caught a glimpse of what we may justifiably refer to as the ‘primal scene’ in the dance of the Sharanahua women. But how did the first fully human females put their revolt into practice?

“Let us return to the imagined protohuman population still only tentatively pursuing the new strategy. Genetically this population would be heterogeneous, with some females more desirable in male eyes - and more interested in sex - than others … In reality, the whole purpose of female strike action would have been not to avoid sex altogether, but to make males go away only temporarily - and then to come back home with meat. Not only does this assume that males are motivated to return to females. It also implies that females can enjoy sex sufficiently to have something to offer when the males do return … Because of this, the new system could have worked only on the reverse basis, with those females most wanted by males being among the first to get organised.”

At the very centre of our cultural revolution, then, we find the most voluptuous women. Knight goes on:

Given the logic just outlined, females set on following the new strategy would clearly have done best if they could (a) arouse the sexual motivations of males prior to each hunting exhibition whilst (b) making absolutely sure that no actual sex - no consummation or fulfilment - was allowed. The need, then, would have been to find a balance, sharpening the edge of the strike weapon not by disclaiming all sexual interests - but rather by dangling before the hunters’ eyes the rewards in store for them once their tasks had been performed.

Here it is that we find the origins of clothing. Quoting Lystistrata’s oath (”I will live at home without any sexual activity, wearing my best make-up and my most seductive dresses, to inflame my husband’s ardour”), he writes :

“Bangles, beads, necklaces and other adornments, many in the form of pierced marine shells, appear suddenly in the archaeological record in great abundance during the very earliest stages of the Upper Paleolithic. Doubtless, they were accompanied by pigments, pubic coverings, shawls, tassels and other items of ornamental clothing made of materials which have unfortunately not survived. Taken together - and leaving aside the possible physical functions such as protection or warmth - these items would have conveyed symbolic information on various levels. Firstly, they would have helped combine bodily concealment with allurement. We can imagine women deliberately dressing up - and very probably also dressing one another up - in order to mark the start of each ‘strike’.”

Knight sees a (fairly reduced) role for the older women, but at the centre of his vision we find the young women and the young men. Mature men, children - and one may imagine that in the emergence of humanity, the relationship between mother and child will have been of some importance - are thrust to one side. This is exactly what we see in the dance of the Sharanahua of which he makes so much, and in which only the young are involved. But while the rites that surround the sexuality and the alliance of the young are often of great importance in human societies, it is very rare for these questions to be left to the entire discretion of the adolescents themselves. We may wonder whether Knight has not - at the very centre of his construction - allowed memic simplification to reduce the play of culture to a sort of night-club for teenagers.

Conclusion

The philosopher Mary Midgely has said that evolution is our Creation Myth, and that we could characterize it as a religion. Scientists like Crick or Wilson base upon it their projections of a radiant future when scientists, finally getting rid of ordinary human beings, will be free to shape the world as they wish. Knight does not share their elitism - as we have seen he believes that his enterprise is a leftist response to the conservatism which he detects within sociobiology. But, similar in this to his adversaries, he has a teleological conception of evolution. Thus it is that, from time to time, one may detect a note of irritation towards our ancestors - why did it take them so long to invent culture? But while Kipling, in imagining the origins of the alphabet, projects the bourgeois family back into our prehistory, Knight sends the striker, the feminist, and the political militant back into the past.

Has he succeeded? If by that you mean has he made a contribution to the debates within the domain in which he situates his work, one may say that he has met with some recognition; Blood Relations has been read and commented on by palaeoanthropologists and sociobiologists - and a certain number of young researchers such as Camilla Power have signed themselves on board. Knight himself, as a militant socialist, has published articles intended to popularize his ideas in left-wing journals. Even if he has not gained the popular audience that Engels or Morgan achieved with their versions of evolutionary theory at the end of the 19th Century, he may imagine with some confidence that his works will be read in some working-class homes. Knight has also contributed to bringing about a renaissance of evolutionary cultural theory within academic anthropology - although he was not by any means on his own here. To some extent, he has benefited from the swing of the pendulum; a generation of anthropologists who read Ardrey or Lorenz in their youth has joined the few voices - like that of Robin Fox - which have steadily rejected the idea that culture is an autonomous domain, ultimately inexplicable, as Boaz had characterized it. But he has also contributed to it; it was under his impulsion that the colloquium ‘Ritual and the Origins of Culture’, held at the School of Oriental and African studies was held in 1994, and gave rise to an edited volume bringing together the work of psychologists, anthropologists and historians in an attempt to outline the biological origins of rites, and their place in the evolution of our species.

Problems remain: some paleoanthropologists still believe that traces of culture can be found among the Neanderthals - for Knight, it is important to argue that the latter were displaced by modern humans because they did not possess culture. And one may also add that Knight’s myth can only hold if one ignores the contributions to culture that must have been made by the long and intimate relationships between mother and child, between brothers and

sisters - among chimpanzees, where infants remain attached to their mothers for a long time, social placement and a rough version of lineage can be seen.

But to conclude, we shall need to leave the field that Knight claims as his own. Well before he studied anthropology, Knight did an MPhil in Russian Literature at Sussex University. His first culture is literary - as one might expect, he cites Robert Graves, he quotes Propp, and he has read Girard. As a story-teller, he is not naive. He knows that he is offering at the same time a myth, a scientific theory and an autobiographical novel. It is a Dickensian story - ‘Great Expectations’, perhaps - that of a young man who seeks to make his way in a world both threatening and exciting, a young man who catches a glimpse of the love of his life in the light of a palaeolithic camp-fire, who loses sight of her in his quest for the truth of the world and the authenticity of his soul, but who nevertheless keeps his flame alight, hoping to find her again in a better world towards the forging of which he will himself have contributed. Knight’s hero is worthy of love, for as a true Romantic lover, he has long laboured at the construction of his beloved.

Is it because he inserts himself into the story he tells, because he continually lets the reader know that he himself is not duped by the tale, that he manages at least to suggest that, while he may not completely convince, he does offer a way out of the present impasse? Sociobiology, even when practiced by those who are not inveterate conservatives - and not all of its adepts are - has trouble doing much other than to sing to what is - or at least to what they imagine is inscribed in our genes. Memology, in its turn, submits us to the tyranny of ideas or of rites - Dawkins, for example, sees religion as a kind of virus against which ordinary men have little defence. Knight offers us a model of the birth of culture in which, born in the practices and needs which are firmly rooted in our biological nature, it nevertheless takes form in the real will of our ancestors to impose a collective and liberatory solution to a common problem.

Bibliography

Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, London & New York, 1986.

Dunbar, Robin, Chris Knight & Camilla Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999.

Frazer, James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic & Religion, (Abridged Edition), Papermac, London, 1987.

Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions : Gender, Race & Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, New York & London, 1989.

Knight, Chris, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1991.

Knight, Chris, Sex and Language as Pretend Play, in Dunbar, Knight & Power, 1999, pp. 228-247.

Midgely, Mary, Evolution as Religion: A Comparison of Prophecies, Zygon, vol. 22, No. 2 (June 1987), pp. 179-194. 10

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Arnold, K. & K. Zuberbühler 2006 The Alarm-calling System of Adult Male Putty-nosed Monkeys

Austin, J 1962 How To Do Things With Words

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Chomsky, N 2005 Three factors in language design

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Hare, B & M Tomasello 2004 Chimpanzees are More Skilful in Competitive than in Cooperative Tasks

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Hurford, J R 2004 Human Uniqueness, Learned Symbols, and Recursive Thought

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Knight, C 1999 Sex and Language as Pretend-Play

Knight, C 2000 The Evolution of Cooperative Communication

Knight, C 2000 Play as Precursor of Phonology and Syntax

Knight, C 2000 Culture, Cognition and Conflict

Knight, C 2002 Language and Revolutionary Consciousness

Knight, C 2003 Noam Chomsky: Politics or Science?

Knight, C 2004 Decoding Chomsky

MacNeilage, P 1998 Evolution of the Mechanism of Language Output

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Tomasello, M et al. 2007 The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis

Ulbaek, I 1998 The Origin of Language and Cognition

‘Science’, according to Leon Trotsky, ‘is knowledge that endows us with power.’[1] In the natural sciences, the search has been for power over natural forces and processes. Astronomy made possible the earliest calendars, predictions of eclipses, accurate marine navigation. The development of medical science permitted an increasing freedom from and conquest of disease. The modern advances of physics, chemistry and the other natural sciences have today given us an immense power to harness natural forces of all kinds and have utterly transformed the world in which we live.

Potentially at least, the resulting empowerment is that of our whole species. Science is the self-knowledge and power of humanity at this stage of our evolution on this planet — and not merely the political power of one group of human beings over others. From the standpoint of Marxism, it is this intrinsic internationalism of science — the global, species-wide nature of the human power it represents — which is its strength, and which distinguishes science from mere local, national, territorial or class‑based (i.e. religious, political etc.) forms of consciousness. Ideologies express only the power of certain sections of society; science belongs to the human species as such.

Social research, however, has been a search for power and freedom in a different sense. It has always been a question of particular classes or sectional interests which have sought the freedom to exploit or to constrain the behaviour of other human beings. In other words, the search for power in the social sciences has always been political. Even the development of natural science itself — although intrinsically international and of value to the species as a whole — has necessarily taken place within this limited and limiting social context. It has always been torn between two conflicting demands — between the long‑term requirements of the human species as such on the one hand, and the immediate requirements of particular social classes or sectional interests in opposition to wider needs on the other.

Political power and species‑power — these are the two poles between which science has always oscillated. Between these two extremes, the various forms of knowledge have formed a continuum. At one end have been the sciences least directly concerned with social issues — mathematics, for example — while at the other have been fields such as history, politics and (relatively recently) sociology — fields whose social implications have been immediate and direct. The more direct the social implications of each field, the more direct and inescapable have been the political pressures upon it. And wherever political pressures have prevailed, knowledge has been distorted and blown off course. Instead of expressing the power of the human species generally, it has expressed only the conflict ing powers of various social groups. Among the social sciences, the case of social anthropology affords a particularly clear example. It is probably true to say that twentieth century social anthro pology has contributed not one iota to the power of the human species generally, however much it may have proved useful to Europeans interested in understanding and thereby facilitating the mastery of the “primitive” cultures of the world.

From this standpoint, social anthropology may seem to differ little from other forms of political ideology. It is not “pure” science. It may be rooted at one end in objective reality — in the “traditional” cultures which anthropologists have described. But, at the other end, it has always been rooted in the evolving requirements of one particular section of humanity in opposition to others. “Anthropology”, to put it bluntly, is the child of colonialism and imperialism — forces which have directly served the needs only of a minute fraction of the human race as a whole.

It is the narrowness and contradictory nature of the interests served which accounts for the distortions which anthropological knowledge has suffered. An anthropology which was a genuine “science of humankind” — an anthropology which was genuinely rooted not only in the needs of the peoples under study but also in the needs of the human species as a whole — would be very different. Such a form of knowledge would differ from natural science in being about people rather than objects — in being concerned with ourselves, not just “nature” conceived as outside ourselves. But it would be similar to natural science in the sense that it would be genuinely universal and in that sense “objective” — an expression of the self-knowledge of the human species as such. 

Social conditions of scientific objectivity

The ideological characteristics of twentieth century anthropological theory have been well documented.[2] But what of the Marxism against which so much of this ideology was for so long directed? Was not Marx’s work equally ideological? 

In an intense polemical attack upon Marxism, Karl Wittfogel — author of Oriental Despotism — concedes that Marx was in principle firmly committed to the independence and autonomy of science. Soviet authorities, he writes, always cited Lenin’s concept of “par tisanship” (partiinost) to justify “bending” science — even to the point of falsifying data — in order to render it more suitable for political use. This idea of “utility” or “manipulation” seemed to follow naturally, according to Wittfogel, from Marx’s initial premise that all knowledge was socially conditioned — produced by social classes only to suit their economic and political needs. To the Soviet authorities, scientific truth was always something to be manipulated for political ends. But Wittfogel continues: 

“Marx, however, did not hold this view. He not only empha sized that a member of a given class might espouse ideas that were disadvantageous to his class — this is not denied by Lenin and his followers — but he also demanded that a genuine scholar be oriented toward the interests of mankind as a whole and seek the truth in accordance with the immanent needs of science, no matter how this affected the fate of any particular class, capitalists, landowners or workers. Marx praised Ricardo for taking this attitude, which he called “not only scientifically honest but scientifically required.” For the same reason, he condemned as “mean” a person who subor dinated scientific objectivity to extraneous purposes: “…a man who tries to accommodate science to a standpoint which is not derived from its own interests, however erroneous, but from outside, alien, and extraneous interests, I call ‘mean’ (gemein)”.

Marx was entirely consistent when he called the refusal to accommodate science to the interests of any class — the workers included — “stoic, objective, scientific.” And he was equally consistent when he branded the reverse behaviour a “sin against science”.

These are strong words. They show Marx determined to maintain the proud tradition which characterized independent scholarship throughout the ages. True, the author of Das Capital did not always — and particularly not in his political writings — live up to his scientific standards. His attitude, nevertheless, remains extremely significant. The camp followers of “partisan” science can hardly be blamed for disregarding principles of scientific objectivity which they do not profess. But Marx, who accepted these principles without reservation, may be legitimately criticised for violating them’.[3]

Karl Marx, writes Wittfogel, played two mutually incompatible roles. He was a great scientist, but he was also a political revolutionary. He championed — as every scientist must do — ‘the interests of mankind as a whole’, but he also championed the interests of the international working class. The self-evident incompatibility (as Wittfogel sees it) of these two activities meant that ‘Marx’s own theories…are, at decisive points, affected by what he himself called “extraneous interests”’.[4]

Wittfogel is cited by the social anthropologist Marvin Harris,[5] whose views on this issue appear to be quite similar. Harris counterposes Marxism’s “scientific” component against its “dialectical and revolutionary” aspect, his aim being to render the former serviceable by decontaminating it of all traces of the latter. According to Harris, “Marx himself took pains to elevate scientific responsibility over class interests.” But this was only in his scientific work. Much of Marx’s work was political, and here, science was subordinated to political ends — and therefore misused. According to Harris, if science is championed for political reasons, this must lead to the betrayal of science’s own objectivity and aims:

“If the point is to change the world, rather than to interpret it, the Marxist sociologist ought not to hesitate to falsify data in order to make it more useful.”[6]

Wittfogel’s point that Marx tried to base his science on “the interests of mankind as a whole” is a valuable one. We may also agree with Harris that Marx “took pains to elevate scientific responsibility over class interests” — if by “class interests” are meant interests of a purely sectional, limited, narrowly local or national kind. But the difficulty is precisely here. Like Einstein, and like all great scientists down through the ages, Marx believed that it was his responsibility as a scientist to place before all sectional interests the general interests of humanity. The question he faced is the one which still faces us today: in what concrete form, in the modern world, are these general interests expressed?

Marx came to the conclusion, on the basis of his scientific studies, that the general interests of humanity were not represented by the various ruling classes of nineteenth century Europe. These interests conflicted not only with one another but also with those of the human species as such. They could not, therefore, form the social basis for a genuinely objective social science.

The weakness in the position of both Wittfogel and Harris is that they have nothing to say on this issue. They are in the peculiar position of both agreeing with Marx’s basic premises and yet refusing even to discuss the possibility that his conclusions might have been correct. They fully agree that science must base itself upon general human interests. Marx, basing himself on this idea, reached the conclusions (a) that science was itself politically revolutionary to the extent that it was genuinely true to itself and universal, (b) that it was this kind of ‘politics’ (i.e. the politics of science itself) that the modern revolutionary movement required and (c) that the only possible social basis for such a science-inspired politics was the one class in society which was itself a product of science, which was already as intrinsically international as scientific development and whose interests countered all existing sectional interests. But neither Wittfogel nor Harris mount any argument on all this. They simply take it as self-evident that the interests of humankind are one thing whereas working class interests are another.

Karl Marx knew — and every Marxist worthy of the name knows — that it is not worth committing oneself to a social force unless it genuinely does represent by its own very existence the wider interests of humanity. And every Marxist worthy of the name knows that it is only real science — the real discoveries of scientists working independently and for science’s own autonomous ends — which can be utilised by humanity as a means to self-enlightenment and emancipation. From this standpoint we can see the absurdity of Harris’ argument that if the point is to change the world, the Marxist sociologist ‘ought not to hesitate to falsify data in order to make it more useful’. How can ‘falsified data’ conceivably be of value to humankind? How can it be useful to anyone interested in changing the world?

Harris is right to insist that when a sectional political interest — be it ‘Marxist’ or not — takes hold of scientific work, science itself will suffer. A particular, national and therefore limited political party or a particular group ruling a particular state (as, for example, the Soviet bureaucracy and ‘Communist’ apparatus during the ‘cold war’) may well feel itself to have particular interests of its own, which it sets above the wider interests which it claims to represent. In that case, to the extent that scientists are involved, science will certainly be distorted. But a distortion of science (i.e. its partial transformation into ideology) can only involve a limitation of its long‑term ultimate appeal and of its human usefulness. Wherever such things happen, therefore, the particular group concerned reduces rather than enhances its power to ‘change the world.’

All distortions, falsifications or mystifications express the power only of sectional social interests in opposition to wider ones. Marx at no time advocated tailoring science to suit the felt needs of this, that, or the other sectional interest — whether working class or not:

“It is not a matter of knowing what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, conceives as its aims at any particular moment. It is a question of knowing what the proletariat is, and what it must historically accomplish in accordance with its nature”.[7]

For Marx, to know “what the proletariat is” constituted a scientific question, which could only be given a scientific answer in complete independence of any immediate political pressures or concerns. Far from arguing for the subordination of science to politics, Marx insisted on the subordination of politics to science.

Engels wrote: “….the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers.”[8] We can be confident that this accurately expressed Marx’s own views. Science, as humanity’s only universal, international, species‑unifying form of knowledge, had to come first. If it had to be rooted in the interests of the working class, this was only in the sense that all science has to be rooted in the interests of the human species as a whole, the international working class embodying these interests in the modern epoch (just as the requirements of production have always embodied these interests in previous periods). There was no question here of any subordination to sectional needs. In being placed first, science cut across sectional divisions and became the medium of expression for a new form of political consciousness. In this sense, it even created “the international working class” itself. Without science, there were only sectional working class political movements; only through scientific analysis could the general interests be laid bare. While “science”, for Marx, was not an abstraction with power of its own — it could not descend as if from the skies and intervene in history or in political life — this did not detract from its significance. Admittedly, science — as itself a social product — could not add anything to the strength of the working class which was not already there. It could not impose itself upon the workers’ movement as if from outside.[9] It was in and through science alone that workers internationally could become aware of the global, species wide, strength which was already theirs. And it was only in becoming aware of its own power that the “international working class” could politically exist.[10] There was no question, therefore, of science being subordinated to a pre existing political force. The political force was science’s own and could not exist without it. The previously‑prevailing relationships between science and politics were reversed.

For Marx, social science — including his own — was as much a product of class relationships as any other form of social consciousness. His general formulation is well‑known:

“the ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material action at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it. The dominant ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant relationships grasped as ideas, and thus of the relationships which make one class the ruling one; they are consequently the ideas of its dominance”.[11]

For this reason, Marx did not consider it to be possible to change the prevailing ideas of society — or to produce a universally‑agreed science of society — without breaking the material power of those forces which distorted science. It was because Marx saw social contradictions as the source of mythological and ideological contradictions that he was able to insist that only the removal of the social contradictions themselves could remove their expressions in ideology and science. This is what Marx meant when he wrote:

“All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which lead theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice”.[12]

Or again:

“The resolution of theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is by no means, therefore, the task only of the understanding, but is a real task of life, a task which philosophy was unable to accomplish precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical problem.”[13]

So from the standpoint of Marx and Engels it was in order to remain true to the interests of science — to solve its internal theoretical contradictions — that they felt obliged, as scientists, (a) to identify with a material social force which could remove the ‘extraneous interests’ distorting the objectivity of science and (b) to take up the leadership of this material force themselves. Their idea was not that science is inadequate, and that politics must be added to it.[14] Their idea was that science — when true to itself — is itself revolutionary, and that it must recognize no other “politics” but its own.

Marx and Engels believed science could acquire this unprecedented political autonomy for a social reason: there had come into existence within society for the first time — and as a direct result of scientific development itself — a “class” which was not really a class at all, which had no traditional status or vested interests to protect, no power to dispense patronage, no power to divide man from man and therefore no power to distort science in any way. “Here”, wrote Engels of the working class, “there is no concern for careers, for profit‑making, or for gracious patronage from above.”[15] Only here could science be true to itself, for only here was a social force of a truly universal kind, capable of uniting the species as a whole. This was the condition for a truly independent, truly autonomous, truly universal science of humankind — the existence of:

“…a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a political wrong but wrong in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status, a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the….political system, a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, without therefore emancipating all these other spheres, which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemp tion of humanity.[16]

* * * * *

Much of the preceding argument may itself seem tendentious. Almost any political or social philosopher will claim, after all, that his or her theory expresses general human interests rather than narrow sectional ones. To use “fidelity to the interests of humanity” as a yardstick by which to measure the scientific value of a conceptual system is therefore not possible — unless some objective test for this fidelity or correspondence can be found. But what kind of test could this possibly be?

In the long term, no doubt, the test for any hypothesis in the natural sciences is workability. Is the idea useful to the specialists concerned? Does it lessen their mental effort in solving problems? In other words, does the hypothesis add to the power — be it purely intellectual or practical as well — of scientists in the relevant field?

If it does, then they should ultimately come to recognize the fact. Assuming efficiency to be their criterion (and they will not be scientists otherwise), support for the theory will spread. Internal coherence (agreement between the theory’s parts) will find expression in widespread social agreement. Such a capacity to produce agreement is the ultimate social test of science.[17]

In the long term, for Marxism or for social science, a similar test must be undergone. Science differs from mere ad hoc knowledge, technique or common sense by virtue of its abstract, symbolic, formal characteristics. Science is a symbolic system. Like any such system, its meaning depends on agreement. The figure “2” means “two” only because we all say it does. It could equally well mean “nine.” All symbolic systems — including myths and ideologies — depend in this sense upon social agreement. But, in the case of myths and ideologies, the scope of agreement extends only so far. A point is reached at which disagreement arises — a disagreement rooted in social contradictions. And when this happens, the need to reconcile incompatible meanings leads to contradictions of an internal kind — within the symbolic system itself.

Mythology and ideology are expressions of social division. This is the essential feature which distinguishes these forms of knowledge from science. Science expresses the power and the unity of the human species — a power which, in class‑divided societies, human beings have increasingly possessed in relation to nature even though not in relation to their own social world. A science of society, in order to prove itself as science, would have to prove that it was without internal contradictions, and that it was consistent with natural science and with science as a whole. In the long term, it could only prove this practically. It would have to demonstrate its internal consistency by demon strating its roots in social agreement of a kind uniting the human race. It would have to demonstrate in practice, in other words, that it formed part of a symbolic system — a global “language” woven out of the concepts of science — which was capable in practice of embracing and ultimately politically unifying the globe.[18]

Yet this is not the only test. In the case of every scientific advance, the first test is theoretical. Copernicus knew that the earth moved. And he knew it long before this fact had been proven to the satisfaction of others and universally agreed. Einstein knew that light was subject to gravitational laws. And he knew this long before it was demonstrated in 1919 during an eclipse watched from observatories in Cambridge and Greenwich (when it was shown that light-rays from a star were deflected by the gravitational pull of the sun). In scientific discovery it has always been the same. A scientific revolution is validated on the level of pure theory long before passing the final test of practice.

The only ultimate validation of Marxism as science would be the demonstration of its power to produce agreement on a global scale — its power to unify humanity. But if Marxism is genuine science, it ought to be possible to demonstrate this potential in purely theoretical terms in advance. The question arises: How? 

The structure of scientific revolutions

One of the most important books to have appeared in recent years is T. S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[19] It would be difficult to overestimate the impact which this work has had on the sociology and philosophy of science.

Kuhn does not discuss the relationship between scientific development and social and political events. His work concerns the internal structure of science. Nor does Kuhn accept any absolute distinction between science on the one hand, and myth or ideology on the other. For him, this distinction is always a relative one — a matter of the degree to which one conceptual system can produce agreement and prove fruitful in comparison with other conceptual systems. His main point is that a form of knowledge only acquires the status of “science” by demonstrating that it can produce very fundamental levels of agreement between thinkers which rival systems of knowledge cannot. Schools of thought which prove to be incapable of producing enduring levels of agreement — in scientific communities which cut across local or national barriers — tend not to be accorded the status of science. It is for this reason that “social science” is so suspect. It seems to be incapable of producing any real agreement at all.

In explaining how he came to work on the subject matter of his book, Kuhn writes:

“…I was struck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between social scientist about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology nornally fails to evoke the controversies over fundanentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists.”[20]

Kuhn’s point is that in the social sciences, thinkers not only cannot reach agreement with each other on fundamental issues — they cannot even find a conmon language of rules or concepts through which to communicate with each other in a rational way. There is a point at which rational debate breaks down and the opposing schools seem to each other to be “breaking the rules’; and resorting to illegitinate techniques of persuasion or even to force. In fact, it is not just that the rules are broken — it turns out that there are no rules. Each camp only obeys its own rules. This is in stark contrast to the nornal situation among, say, nuclear physicists, who, even when they do disagree with each other on fundamental issues, nevertheless possess a shared language — a set of agreed rules of procedure, concepts, traditions and ideas through which fruitful communication can be achieved.

But Kuhn’s most significant point is that the natural sciences themselves were once in a position similar in essentials to that of the social sciences today. They, too, in their early stages of development, were incapable of producing any enduring agreement or language on the basis of which a unified scientific comunity could form. And they, too — like the social sciences today — were divided by disagreements over fundanentals: disagreenents which often seemed to be of a political or even violent kind. On June 21 1633, Galileo de Galilei was interrogated by the Pope and by a tribunal made up of cardinals and high officials of the Catholic Church who threatened him with torture unless he withdrew his allegation that the earth circled around the sun. In these times, the conflict between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems of astronomy was a political one and anyone supporting Copernicus risked persecution, imprisonment or even death by being burned at the stake. If this example seems to belong only to the far distant past, it may be remembered that Charles Darwin and his supporters only a century ago were considered to be putting forward a theologically dangerous and politically subver sive theory when they argued that the human anatomy had evolved fron that of an ancestral ape like being. In the case of both Galileo and Darwin, it was only the political and ideological defeat of the Church on the issues concerned — defeats which formed part of a wider process of social and political change — which eventually lifted science fron the realm of political controversy. But conversely, it is only once its initial political colouration has faded away that science produces sufficient general agreement for it to be generally recognised as science. Science has to conquer politically before it can shed its political cloak.

Achievements such as those of Copernicus and Darwin are termed by Kuhn “paradigms”. Paradigms are “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”.[21] Such achievements are products of scientific revolutions. A scientific revolution is not simply an addition to pre‑existing knowledge. It is, within any given field, “a reconstruction of the field from new funda mentals….”[22] It is a complete demolition of an old theoretical and conceptual structure and its replacement by a new one based on entirely different interests, aims and premises. During the course of a scientific revolution, nothing is agreed, there are no common rules of procedure, everything seems to be ideological and political and issues are decided by “unconstitutional” means. The old paradigm is not defeated on the basis of its own rules but is attacked from outside. It cannot be defeated on the basis of its own rules, for these rules are not only inadequate to solve the new problems which have begun to arise — they actually preclude any discussion of these problems at all. 

For Kuhn, the parallelism with political and social revol utions was profound. He explains:

“Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all. Initially it is crisis alone that attenuates the role of political institutions… In increasing numbers individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it. Then, as the crisis deepens, many of those individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework. At that point the society is divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one. And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails. Because they differ about the institutional matrix within which political change is to be achieved and evaluated, because they acknowledge no supra institutional framework for the adjudication of revolutionary differerences, the parties to a revolutionary conflict must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force. Though revolutions have had a vital role in the evolution of political institutions, that role depends upon their being partially extrapolitical or extrainstitutional event.”[23]

It is just the same, writes, Kuhn, when, in the course of a scientific revolution, scientists polarize into opposite camps. The opposing camps cannot communicate. They talk ‘past’ each other, questioning each other’s most elementary premises and refusing to submit to each other’s logical or procedural rules. In periods of ‘normal science’‑i.e. in periods of consolidation which follow scientific revolutions, and during which all scientists in the field concerned accept the paradigm of the victorious party — everything can seem ‘rational’. Because a community exists which bases itself on a set of shared assumptions and traditions, scientists can appeal to certain written or unwritten agreements as to what constitutes ‘correct’ procedure and what does not, or what constitutes ‘rational’ behaviour and what does not. Disputes within the framework of a paradigm can be settled in an orderly way, on the basis of the rules laid down by the paradigm itself. This is what ‘normal science’ is all about. But when an entire paradigm is being challenged by another one, there is no ‘purely logical’ way to proceed. The supporters of the new paradigm may feel that their own franmwork is far more powerful, far simpler, more elegant and more logical than the old framework of their opponents. But they cannot convince their opponents of this on the basis of their opponents’ own rules. If the supporters of the old paradigm are to be won over, they must make a ‘leap’ which involves abandoning their former conceptions as to what constituted ‘logic’ and what did not:

“Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of nornal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defence.

The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who adopt the new view of nature. That exhibit can be immensley persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabil istically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that. As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice — there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.”[24]

Anomaly and normal science

It is not until a paradigm has been generally accepted that ‘scientific research’ in the normal sense can get under way. As Kuhn puts it:

“Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?”[25]

Once — following a scientific revolution — a paradigm has become accepted, a period of conservatism sets in. This is a period of “mopping-up operations” — period in which, over and over again, the validity of the new paradigm is “proven”. Kuhn writes:

“Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science. Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.[26]

The paradigm validates itself again and again, in ever greater detail, by in effect forbidding scientists to investigate any problems other than those for which the paradigm offers a solution. Only problems whose solutions, like those of a crossword puzzle are already “built in by their method of formulation are allowed. Other problems”, as Kuhn writes, “including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problem atic to be worth the time.”[27] After about 1630, for example, and particularly after the appearance of Descartes’ scientific writings, most physical scientists assumed that the universe was composed of microscopic corpuscles and that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of corpuscular shape, size, motion, and interaction. Hence the solar system was believed to function mechanically, like a clock. The same applied to all other systems, including living ones such as animals. This paradigm was extrenely powerful and led to immense advances of scientific knowledge, but it was also extremely narrow and limiting. Anyone in Descartes’ time who had drawn attention to, say, such phenomena as are nowadays associated with radioactivity simply could not have communicated in a coherent or logical way. All the problems which today form the subject matter of nuclear physics would — in Descartes’s time- have been irrelevant, illegitimate, metaphysical and unscientific even to discuss. And, of course, none of these problems was discussed or was even seen as a problem at all. It was “known” what the universe was composed of — it was composed not of curved space‑time, nor of electromagnetic fields but of very small, hard objects which collided with one another according to mechanical laws. 

However,it is not for us simply to condenm the rigid, conservative paradigms which scientific revolutions eventually produce. Kuhn presents instead a subtle, dialectical argument, showing that it is precisely through such conservatism that new scientific revolutions themselves are prepared. Only a rigid, conservative but extremely detailed and precise theoretical structure can be disturbed by some small finding which seems “wrong.” It is only a community of scientists who confidently expect to find everything “normal” who will genuinely know what an “abnormality” or “novelty” is — and who will be thrown into a crisis by it. A more easy‑going, open‑minded conmunity which never expected precise regularities in the first place would not let themselves be bothered by such things. The precious anomaly in that case would be missed and science would not be in a position to learn from it or advance. Kuhn explains:

“In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinenent of concepts that increasingly lessons their resemblances to their usual common‑sense prototypes. That professionalization leads on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientists’ vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation‑theory match that could be achieved in no other way. Furthermore, that detail and precision‑of‑match have a value that transcends their not always very high intrinsic interest. Without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur. And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The more precise and far‑reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. In the normal mode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use… By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anonalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core.”[28]

All scientific revolutions are precipitated by anomalies. A planet is in the wrong part of the sky. A photographic plate is clouded when it should not be. A fundamental law of nature is suddenly found to be wrong. A piece of laboratory equipment designed and constructed merely to add precision to a familiar finding of normal science behaves in a wholly unexpected way. To normal science, such anomlies are merely an irritation or a nuisance. In attepts to defend the old paradigm, efforts are made to suppress, obliterate or ignore the bothersome findings or events. New observations are made, new experiments are set up — with the sole intention of eliminating the anomaly concerned. But it is precisely these attempts to defend the old paradign which now begin to shake it to its foundations. Had the old, rigid, paradigm not had its ardent defenders, the anomaly concerned would probably not even have been noticed. Now, however, an entire community of scientists begins to feel challenged by it, and more and more attention is focused upon it. Attempts are made to explain it away. But the more such attempts are made, the more inconsistent and inadequate the old paradigm appears, the more strange the anomaly seems, and the more dissatisfied a section of the old scientific community becomes.

It is the internal inconsistencies now apparently permeating the old theoretical structure which convince some scientists — at first only a small number — that something is fundmnentally wrong. Writing of astronomical observations, Copernicus complained that in his day astronomers were so “inconsistent in these investigations… that they cannot even explain or observe the constant length of the seasonal year.” “With them”, he continued, “it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man.”[29] In the period immediately preceding every scientific revolution, similar complaints are made. There is no neat logical proof that the old paradigm is wrong. Rather, there arises a general sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling — on the part of some — that absolutely everything is wrong, and a gradual splintering of the scientific community into schools and factions between whom comunication is difficult or even impossible. Few things — not even the most elementary principles — seem to be agreed upon any more. Everything is questioned, anything is allowed. “The proliferation of competing articulations”, writes Kuhn, “the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research.”[30] All these are signs that the old theor etical edifice is crumbling and that a new one is about to take its place.

But how does the new paradigm arise? Kuhn argues that it cannot arise logically out of the premises of the old one because logic is a matter of symbolism — of the meaning of figures, equations and terms — whereas what is required is a complete restructuring of the semantic field itself. In fact, at first, logically it is unquestionably the old paradigm’s defenders who are right:

“The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be ‘curved’ — it was not that sort of thing — were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor were the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to develop a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogenous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter. If it had not been, Newtonian physics would not have worked. To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and motion had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion’. Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad.”[31]

So it is only in a sort of ‘madness’ — by the old standards — that a new paradigm can be conceived. It is not logically constructed, step by step. It is unusual for the new structure of thought to be consciously anticipated or viewed in advance:

“Instead, the new paradigm, or a sufficient hint to permit later articulation, emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis. What the nature of that final stage is — how an individual invents (or finds he has invented) a new way of giving order to data now all assembled — must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so. Let us here note only one thing about it. Almost always the men who achieve these fundanental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”[32]

In other words, even on the level of individuals and personalities, according to Kuhn, the attack on the old paradigm is an external one. Certain individuals or groups from outside the field manage to penetrate it and set about undermining and demolishing the structure around them, using the experience and the materials gained in doing so to build a more stable structure on new foundations in its place. the development is not a gradual or evolutionary one; the ‘revolutionaries’ possess, right from the beginning, a firm conviction of the necessity of what they are doing and a firm plan — however intuitive or embryonic — of the essentials of the structure they are about to build. And they themselves have been converted not gradually — 

“…but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ that ‘inundates’ a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution”.[33]

The same applies to the gradual conquest, by the revolutionaries, of the scientific field. Before the scientists can talk to each other again, every scientist in the old camp who is capable of it must undergo the same ‘sudden’ conversion as that experienced by the revolutionaries themselves:

“…before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all”.[34]

In this as in all other respects, scientific development is dialectical and revolutionary to the core.

[1]  “An individual scientist may not at all be concerned with the practical applications of his research. The wider his scope, the bolder his flight, the greater his freedom in his mental operations from practical daily necessity, the better. But science is not a function of individual scientists; it is a social function. The social evaluation of science, its historical evaluation is determined by its capacity to increase man’s power to foresee events and master nature.” L. D. Trotsky, “Dialectical Materialism and Science.” In: Isaac Deutscher (ed.) The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. Dell, New York, 1964, p. 344.

[2] C. Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 50-70.

[3] K. Wittfogel, “The Ruling Bureaucracy of Oriental Despotism: A Phenomenon that Paralysed Marx.” The Review of Politics, 15 (1953): 350-59; pp. 355-56. Wittfogel cites Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert. Aus dem nachgelaaenen Manuskript “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie”; published by K. Kautsky. 3 vols. 1921, II, 1: 310-313.

[4] Ibid., p. 356n.

[5]. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Routledge, London 1969.

[6] Ibid., pp. 4-5; 220-221.

[7] K. Marx and F. Engels, “The Holy Family” (1845). In T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 84.

[8] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’ In K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion. Moscow, 1957, p. 266.

[9] As long as the working class is weak, wrote Marx, the theoreticians aiming to help it “improvise systems and pursue a regenerative science.” But once the working class is strong, its theoreticians “have no further need to look for a science in their own minds; they have only to observe what is happening before their eyes and to make themselves its vehicle of expression… from this moment, the science produced by the historical movement, and which consciously associates itself with this movement, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary”. “The Poverty of Philosophy” (1847). In: Bottomore and Rubel (eds), op. cit., p. 81.

10. As Trotsky puts it: “…the consciousness of strength is the most important element of actual strength.” L. D. Trotsky, Whither France? Merit Publishers, New York, 1968, p. 116. Marx had the same idea in mind when he wrote: “…we must force these petrified relationships to dance by playing their own tune to them! So as to give then courage, we must teach the people to be shocked by themselves.” “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction” (1843‑4). In D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Texts. Blackwell, Oxford, 1972, p. 118.

[11] “The German Ideology” (1845‑6). In: Bottomore and Rubel (eds.), op. cit., p. 93.

[12] “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845). Thesis VIII. In Bottomore and Rubel (eds.), op. cit., p. 84.

[13]“The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” (1844). In: ibid. p. 87.

[14] Actually, Marx had a very low opinion of “political thought” in general precisely because of its inevitably subjective, unscientific, bias: “Political intelligence is political just because it thinks inside the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is the less capable it is of comprehending social evils…. the principle of politics is the will. The more one‑sided, and thus the more perfect political intelli gence is, the more it believes in the omnipotence of the will, and thus the more incapable it is of discovering the sources of social evils.” The King of Prussian and Social Reform (1844). In: McLellan (ed.), op. cit., p. 214. If Marx believed in the necessity for political struggle, it was because he understood the political nature of the obstacles to human emancipation and to the autonomy of science. It was not because of anything intrinsically political about this emancipation or its science. Socialism when realised is not political: “Revolution in general - the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of previous relationships - is a political act. Socialism cannot be realized without a revolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its peculiar aims, its soul comes forward, then socialism casts aside its political cloak” - ibid., p. 221.

[15] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.” In: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion. Moscow, 1957, p. 266.

[16] K. Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, (1833‑43). In. Bottomore and Rubel (eds.), op. cit., p. 190.

[17] T. S. Kuhn “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Inter national Encyclopaedia of Unified Science. Volume 2, Number 2. Second edition enlarged. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970, p. viii. Marx probably derived this idea at least in part from Feuerbach, although it is also a powerful theme in Hegel’s writings. Feuerbach writes:

“That is true in which another agrees with me - agreement is the first criterion of truth; but only because the species is the ultimate measure of truth. That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another, it can be conceived otherwise, it is an accidental, merely subjective, view. But that which I think according to the standard of the species, I think as man in general only can think, and consequently as every individual must think if he thinks normally… That is true which agrees with the nature of the species, that is false which contradicts it. There is no other rule of truth.”

Ludwig Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke. Vols. 1-12/13 (13 vols. in 12). Stuttgart‑Bad Canstatt, Fromann Verlag Günther Holzboog, 1960‑64. Vol.‑6, p. 191 (“The Essence of Christianity”). In E. Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Routledge, London, 1970, pp. 101‑02.

[18] For this idea as it was expressed during the Russian Revolution see C. D. Knight, “Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the work of V. V. Khlebnikov”. Unpublished M. Phil. thesis (1976) Brighton: University of Sussex.

[19] T. S. Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Inter national Encyclopaedia of Unified Science. Volume 2, Number 2. Second edition enlarged. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970.

[20] Ibid., p. viii.

[21] Loc. cit.  

[22] Op. cit., p, 85.

[23] Ibid., pp. 93-4.

[24] Ibid., p. 94

[25] Ibid., pp. 4-5.

[26] Ibid, p. 24.

[27] Ibid., p. 37. Kuhn adds: “It is no criterion of goodness in puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important. On the contrary, the really pressing problems, e.g. a cure for cancer or the design of a lasting peace, are often not puzzles at all, largely because they may not have a solution… A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies”. Loc. cit. Once a paradigm has been accepted by a scientific community, the problems which it cannot solve are felt to be illegitimate or “unscientific”. Anyone who then insists on the importance of these problems is excluded from the scientific community and considered eccentric or even mad.

[28] Ibid., pp. 64-5.

[29] Ibid., p. 83.

[30] Ibid., p. 91.

[31]Ibid., pp. 149-50.

[32] Ibid., pp. 89-90.

[33] Ibid., p. 122.

[34] Ibid., p. 150.

University of East London

In 1844, following a four-year voyage around the world, Charles Darwin confided to a close friend that he had come to a dangerous conclusion. For seven years, he wrote, he had been ‘engaged in a very presumptuous work’, perhaps ‘a very foolish one’. He had noticed that on each of the Galapagos Islands , the local finches ate slightly different foods, and had correspondingly modified beaks. In South America , he had examined many extraordinary fossils of extinct animals. Pondering the significance of all this, he had felt forced to change his mind about the origin of species. To his friend, Darwin wrote: ‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable’.

In those times, belief in transmutation — the idea that species could evolve into one another — was politically dangerous. Even as Darwin was writing to his friend, atheists and revolutionaries were circulating penny papers around London ’s streets, championing evolutionary idea s in opposition to the established doctrines of Church and State. At that time, the best-known evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was responsible for the displays of insects and worms at the Natural History Museum in Paris . Closely identified with atheism, Chartism and other forms of subversion held to emanate from revolutionary France , evolutionism in Britain was termed ‘Lamarckism’. Any ‘Lamarckian’ — in other words, any scientist who questioned the God-given immutability of species — risked being identified with communists, rioters and insurrectionaries. Caught between his cautious liberal politics and his science, Darwin was so anxious that he made himself ill, concealing and suppressing his findings as if he had secretly committed murder.

The period of revolutionary uprisings culminated in the events of 1848, when workers planned insurrections and took to the streets in Britain and across Europe . With the defeat of these uprisings, counterrevolution set in. During the subsequent decade, the threat from the left receded. By 1858, another scientist — Alfred Wallace — had independently hit upon the principle of evolution by natural selection; if Darwin did not publish, Wallace would gain all the scientific glory. With revolution no longer an immediate danger, Darwin ’s courage rose and in 1859 he at last published The Origin of Species.

In his great book, Darwin outlined a concept of evolution quite different from that of Lamarck. Lamarck had explained evolution as the outcome of all animals’ constant striving for self- improvement during their lifetimes. Darwin ’s grimmer, crueller idea was borrowed from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an economist employed by the East India Company. Malthus had no interest in the origin of species; his agenda was political. Human populations, he argued, will always increase faster than the supply of food. Struggle and starvation must inevitably result. Public charities, said Malthus, can only aggravate the problem: hand-outs will make the paupers feel comfortable, encouraging them to breed. More mouths to feed must lead to more poverty and so to yet further — insatiable — demands for welfare. The best policy is to let the poor die.

Darwin ’s genius was to link botany and geology with this politically motivated advocacy of free competition and the ‘struggle for survival’. Darwin saw Malthus’s ‘laissez-faire’ morality at work throughout nature. Population growth in the animal world would always outstrip the local food supply; hence the inevitability of competition resulting in starvation and death for the weakest. Whereas moralists or sentimentalists might have sought to tone down this image of a cruel and heartless Nature, Darwin followed Malthus in celebrating it. Just as capitalism brutally punished the poor and needy, so ‘natural selection’ weeded out those creatures less able to fend for themselves. As the less fit in each generation kept dying, so the survivors’ offspring would be disproportionately numerous, transmitting to all future generations their beneficial hereditary characteristics. Starvation and death, then, were positive factors, within an evolutionary dynamic which relentlessly punished failure while rewarding success.

In this way, Darwin succeeded in transforming the political implications of evolutionary theory. Far from serving to justify resistance to capitalist exploitation or social inequality, this Malthusian version of evolutionism was designed to serve a reverse political function. Darwin pictured nature as a world without morals. By implication, this lent justification to an economic system based on unrestrained competition, free of any misguided ‘moral’ interference from religion or state. During Darwin ’s lifetime, the major public controversies around his theory pitted evolutionists against those philosophers, clerics and others who worried that such a vision might lead to the collapse of all morals in society.

Following Darwin ’s death in 1881, many influential thinkers attempted to blunt the force of Darwin ’s apparently harsh, amoral reasoning, seeking ways to reconcile evolutionary theory with religious or humanistic values. In Russia , the anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid, in which he argued that co-operation, not competition, was the fundamental law of nature. One very popular way of rescuing a ‘moral’ dimension from Darwin ’s reasoning was to suggest that the competitive engine of evolutionary change pitted group against group, not individual against individual. The phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’ — so it was argued — meant survival of the fittest whole group or species, implying close co-operation within every species. According to this line of reasoning, individuals were created to subserve the interests of the species. Members of any one species had to co-operate with one another, their individual survival depending on the fate of the larger whole.

This idea became popular because it resonated with currents of moral philosophy including middle-class socialism and nationalism current around the turn of the century. Nations were associated with ‘races’ and likened to animal species. Each species, race or nation was supposed to be engaged in a life-and-death competitive struggle against its rivals. Those whose members co-operated with collective requirements would survive; those whose members acted ‘selfishly’ would go extinct. When animals or humans displayed co-operative behaviour, it was explained in ‘moral’ terms by reference to the requirements of the group.

In Britain , Winston Churchill argued that the poorest sections of society ought not to be permitted to breed, since if they did, this would only weaken the ‘national stock’. Eugenics became widely fashionable, including among many on the left; in Germany it played a key role in the formation of Nazi ideology. In the 1940s, pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz delighted Nazi propagandists when he argued that warfare is natural and valuable. He likened it to a widespread pattern in which male mammals during the mating season engage in ferocious mutual combat, the females mating only with the victors. This, argued Lorenz, is a healthy mechanism for eliminating weaklings, thereby preserving and improving the purity and vigour of the race.

The ‘group selection’ theory of evolution — as it is now called — received its most sophisticated and explicit formulation in 1962, when the Scott ish naturalist V. C. Wynne Edwards published a book entitled Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour. For Wynne-Edwards, following Malthus, the fundamental problem faced by each group or species was that of unrestrained breeding. Overpopulation would lead eventually to shortages, bringing starvation on a scale which might threaten the entire local population. What was the solution? According to Wynne-Edwards, it was for the species as a whole to take action. It would have to evolve special mechanisms to avoid reproducing beyond the carrying capacity of its environment. Individuals would be expected to restrain their fecundity in the interests of the group.

On the basis of this theory, Wynne Edwards sought to explain numerous puzzling features of animal and human social life. In particular, he claimed to explain seemingly repugnant behaviour such as cannibalism, infanticide and group-on-group combat or war. Superficially negative, at a deeper level such practices constituted a range of beneficial adaptations through which each species strove to limit its population. Many naturalists had been puzzled to observe instances of birds in large colonies destroying one another’s offspring, or lions lethally biting cubs as they were born. All this, said Wynne-Edwards, could now be understood. Those engaged in such behaviour were not acting selfishly or anti-socially; they were benefiting the species by keeping the population in check. In the human case, violent activities such as warfare served a similar function. Somehow, human population levels had to be kept down; warfare, along with other forms of violence, helped to achieve this.

‘Group selectionist’ thinking of this kind remained influential within Darwinism until the 1960s. But precisely by formulating it in such strident, explicit terms, Wynne-Edwards unwittingly exposed species-advantage reasoning to more clearly focused attack, undermining the whole theoretical edifice. As soon as scientists started thinking about the alleged ‘population reducing mechanisms’, it became clear on purely theoretical grounds why they could not work. How could a whole species mobilise its members for collective action, as if responding with foresight to future food shortages? Suppose, for the sake of argument, there was a gene which prompted or facilitated behaviour showing the following two features: (a) it would benefit the species at a future date while (b) it hindered the reproductive success of its poss