I think that you are overstating the lack of link between Malthus and Darwin. Another aspect of this is not just Darwin, but also Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-developer of the theory of evolution. I remind you that although Darwin's _Origin of the Species_ was the most influential book, Darwin and Wallace initially co-presented the discovery to the Royal Society. Let me quote from Wallace's 1891 book (p. 20, as quoted in my 1992 JEBO paper, p. 197):
"After writing the preceding paper the question of how changes of species could have been brought about was rarely out of my mind, but no satisfactory conclusion was reached till February 1858. At that time I was suffering from a rather severe attack of intermittent fever at Ternate in the Moluccas, wrapped in blankets, though the thermometer ws 88 F, the problem again presented itself to me, and something led me to think of the "positive checks" described by Malthus in "Essay on Population", a work I had read several years before, and which had made a deep and permanent impression on my mind. These checks---war, disease, famine and the like---must, it occurred to me, act on animals, causing these checks to be much more effective in them than in the case of man; and while pondering vaguely on this fact there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest---that the individuals removed by these checks must be on the whole inferior to those that survived. In the two hours that elapsed before my ague fit was over I had thought out almost the whole of the theory, and the same evening I sketched the draft of my paper, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin."
I note that Schumpeter is among those who has disputed the influence of Malthus on Darwin and Wallace. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 15 Aug 1998 00:10:27 -0400 (EDT) Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at PHOENIX.Princeton.EDU> wrote:
> I am forwarding this.
> What great discussion on this list so far!
> Yours, Rakesh
>
> > Isn't it interestng how Malthus struck a vain for both Marx and Darwin.
> > Regards.
> > Ed EVans
>
> I think Darwin's debt to Malthus is much exaggerated. However, it is true
> that the Malthusian overpopulation scenario of acute, immediate human
> struggle on the basis of a competitive exclusion principle over a limited
> food supply did help Darwin discover that survivorship is non
> fortuituously linked to intraspecific heritable differences. Darwin's
> possible debt to Malthus is no recent discovery; August Weismann had
> suggested it before the publication of Darwin's notebooks in which Darwin
> does announce that Malthus finally gave him a theory to work by. But note
> first that logically the theory of natural selection does not depend on
> Malthusian populaton foundations. Competition need not be a matter of
> differential deaths; it could result from differential fecundity based on
> comparative efficiency in the use and partition of resources, factors such
> as better ability to find mates, to enjoy longer reproductive years, to
> have more offspring. That was pointed out by RA Fisher. I think in 1837
> Darwin had already entertained the possibility of "benign replacement of
> one form by another without explicit struggle"! Moreover, as a polemic
> against Godwin and Condorcet, Malthus' Essay on Population was more
> interested to demonstrate how overpopulation rendered change impossible;
> Darwin's vision of species divergence and incessant continuous change is
> at odds with the parson's conservative vision. For Darwin death is a
> creative force, not a stabilizing one as with Malthus. Perhaps Darwin
> thought that natural selection would take too long to work if operated
> solely through differential fecundity--that is "benign replacement".
>
> Perhaps it was easier to imagine
> descent with modification if we we keep foremost in our minds the active
> and relentless operation of the Malthusian checks of mass starvation
> deaths of the greater number of descendants, disease and famine.
> And so Darwin urged his readers (along with brilliant use of the
> metaphor of animal breeding, though Wallace urged him to dispath
> that metaphor)
>
> Darwin's theory was challenged because the ascertained age of the earth
> was too young to have allowed descent with modification. My guess is that
> Darwin thought the invocation of the Malthusian competitive exclusion
> principle made it more believable that natural selection could have
> effected observable modifications in descent in the little time the earth
> was thought to have possibly supported life. Lord Kelvin had laid down the
> challenge to Darwin that earth was simply not old enough for natural
> selection to have done so much work. But this is only my guess, I don't
> know if it washes, I haven't seen it argued anywhere else.
>
> I think economists get pretty obnoxiously puffed up contemplating the
> scientific revolutionary's possible debt to one of their own. But as I
> have suggested, the theory of natural selction does not depend logically
> on Malthus' overpopulation scenario, however realistic or paradigmatic
> that may be in the natural world; Darwin predicts "wedging" and incessant
> change at odds with Malthus' static world view; and Darwin's theory is
> much more fundamentally based on the analogy to artificial
> selection/animal breeding to comprehend natural selection as a force and
> for awareness that intra-specific variety as the material of selection
> (much is made of Malthus' emphasis on intra-specific competition as
> crucial to Darwin).
>
> best, rakesh
>
> ps unrelated note: what a period of scientific creativity, the mid-19th
> century: Darwin, Mendel, Maxwell and Marx!
>
>
>
>
>
> --- from list marxism-theory at lists.econ.utah.edu ---
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu