In _Ever Since Darwin_, the essay "Darwin's Delay", Stephen Jay Gould says:
"The most ardent materialists of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, were quick to recognize what Darwin had accomplished and to exploit its radical content. In 1869 Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin's _Origin_:
'Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.'
Marx later offered to dedicate volume 2 o Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin gently declined, stating that he did not want to imply approval of a work he had not read. (I have seen Darwin's copy of volume 1 in his library at Down House. It is inscribed by Marx who calls himself a "sincere admirere" of Darwin. Its pages are uncut. Darwin was no devotee of the German language.)
Darwin was indeed, a gentle revolutionary. Not only did he delay his work for so long, but he also assiduously avoided any public statement about the philosophical implication of his theory. In 1880, he wrote to Karl Marx:
It seems to me(rightly or wrongly)that direct argument against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science. " (end quote of Gould)
(Darwin was a gentle revolutionary indeed. He was an evolutionary, a gradualist, sort of like Kautsky. But at least he focussed on change. C.B)
So, Engels wrote:
"The proof which Darwin first developed in connected form, that the stock of organic products of nature surrounding us today, including mankind is the result of a long perriod of evolution of a few unicellular germs, and that these again have arisen from protoplasm or albumen which came into existence by chemical means...
Nature is the test of dialectics... nature's process is dialectical and not metaphysical; that does not move in the eternal oneness of perpetually repeated cycle but goes through a real historical evolution..
before all that, mention should be made of Darwin who dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the whole of organic nature today, plants,animals and therefore also man, is the product of a process of evolution which has gone through millions of years. But the scientists who have learned to think scientifically are still few and far between."
(end of quote of Engels)
Engels said somewhere (sorry) "Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distibution are carried on in a planned way can lift mankind above the rest of the animal kingdom."
Charles Brown: This passage suggests an interesting implication that might be derived from the idea that humans ("man") is the social animal or the social being. If sociality is eminently human than individualism, the opposite of sociality, is more animal and less human. The bourgeoisie's emphasis on individuality and individualism ("we hold the individual to be sacred" , as Ronald Reagan put it) is more animallike and less human like. Animals are more solitary than humans. This is the implication of the proposition that humans are more social than animals.
A further implication of this thought is that to understand individualality requires more attention to natural or animal characterisics than one would think from the bourgeois glorification of the individualcentrism as the most human attitude.
Also, in this vain an important nicety of neo-Darwinian biology is that evolutionary selection works on individuals not groups (Stephen Jay Gould)
In _The Use and Abuse of Biology_ a polemic against socio-biology by Marshall Sahlins says
"Since the seventeenth century we seem to have been caught up in this vicious cycle, alternately applying the model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this bourgeoisified animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society. My intent in adopting the Macpherson reading of Hobbes was just to imply that most of the elements and stages of the biological theory of natural selection -from differential success to the competitive struggle to reproduce one's stock and the transfer of powers -already existed in _Leviatthn_. As a critic of this capitalist conception, it was left to Marx to discern its realization in Darwinian theory.
In a letter to Engels, Marx wrote:
"It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour (read, diversification), competition, opening up of new markets (niches), "inventions" (variations), and the Malthusian "struggle for existence". It is Hobbes's "bellum omnium conra omnes," and one of reminded of Hegel's Phenomenolgy where civil society is described as a "spiritual animal kingdom," while for Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society."
In a letter to Lavrov, Engels described the ensuing dialectical return, the representation of culture to itself in the form of a capitalist nature:
"The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of "bellum omnium contra omnes" and o fthe bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed ...the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and now it is claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved."
(end quote of Sahlins)
Charles Brown: So, Marx and Engels had a full critique of social Darwinism. On the other hand they had great respect for Darwin.
Charles Brown _______________________
>>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb at jmu.edu> 08/15 3:44 PM >>>
Since Mat has brought it up, the article in question is (by me, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.) "The Dialogue Between the Economic and the Ecologic Theories of Evolution," _Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization_, March 1992, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 195-215.
I simply note here that Malthus may well have been the economist that Marx despised the most. But I would also agree with Brad De Long that there are "undigested lumps of Malthusianism" in Marx's writings.
There is controversy about the degree of influence of Malthus on Darwin, as has been noted, but there certainly was influence. Darwin in turn influenced Marx and Engels because they saw evolution applying to society and they saw the gradualistic version of it contributing to a materialist assault on traditional idealist religion. They then had to resolve the contradiction as to how human evolution could proceed in a discontinuous dialectical fashion (see my article for further discussion on that).
BTW, a major generally forgotten figure in all this is the execrable Herbert Spencer. It was he who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and who also was very influential in tying biological and economic concepts together in Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century. Barkley Rosser