3 Reasons Why Darwinism Fails to Define Human Nature

You’ve heard of ‘survival of the fittest’, the Darwinian paradigm that has shaped at least the last 1000 years or more of civilization? 

 It turns out, that though Darwin had some interesting observations of the natural world, he was gravely mistaken about human nature, and its ability to evolve in what is defined as an overly competitive world.

Since at least the 1850s Darwin created a world view that was based on concepts like transmutation of the species and an evolutionary construct detailed in his greatest work, On the Origin of Species, which included concepts on natural selection, the Weismann barrier (the principle that hereditary information moves only from genes to the body cells, and never in reverse) and dogmatic definitions of molecular biology. His concepts were against a ‘divine’ design, or the possibilities of other influences like extraterrestrial interference in our bloodlines and DNA.

Arguably, no one has a hard-and-fast grasp on the way life forms and is created and sustained in this world, but there are at least three solid reasons why Darwinism is an outdated, dusty paradigm which we can make a leap from in order to shape a better future.


1. We are a cooperative species.

In Darwinistic terms animals, especially human beings, will always act in their own best interest, as part of the ‘survival of the fittest’ impetus to propel biologically the genes that are fastest, smartest, and strongest. English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), who popularized Charles Darwin’s ideas of evolution, once said, “The animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show… whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest (sic) live to fight another day.” Hollywood and the mass media has perpetuated these ideas. They give us the same plot lines, the same convoluted news about aggression and violence repeatedly, brainwashing us into believing it is our very nature to fight one another.

Conversely, there is mounting evidence that the biological world actually exists in altruism and cooperation instead. The theory of natural selection proposed that an ape, for example, would always look to gain his own reproductive advantage, and even steal food from his own mother if it meant he could outlive her. Darwin himself started to explore this interesting phenomenon – of animals and people actually putting the needs of others ahead of their own in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, but did not follow it to its logical conclusions. In 1902, the Russian zoologist, Peter Kroptokin, picked up where Darwin left off in his anarchist book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.” ~ Peter Kroptokin

In an argument against Darwinism, Robert Augros and George Stanciu, published The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom of Nature, which points out that cooperation, not competition, is the norm in nature, because it is energy-efficient and because predators and their prey maintain a kind of balanced coexistence. They found that “nature uses extraordinarily ingenious techniques to avoid conflict and competition, and that cooperation is extraordinarily widespread throughout all of nature.” read more