On Donald Trump, Marine Iguanas and the Dog People
The Galapagos sure are a long way to travel to discover perhaps the most important life lesson you will ever learn. Administered by Ecuador, the islands in the South Pacific are so remote they weren’t discovered until 1535 by Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, looking for souls to convert to his own train of thought, but the iguanas on the islands were too busy basking to pay any attention to religion. Iguanas are excellent baskers and they will lie semi-comatose endlessly in the tropical sun until them became peckish, at which time when they changed the world. Just ask Charles Darwin.
This life changing lesson from the iguanas applies directly today to Donald Trump and his rabid followers the Dog People who love the fact that he is both a con man and a criminal. Arf arf! Heck, they say, many American heroes were bad guys, prone to shoot first and ask for breakfast later. Bonnie and Clyde! Jesse James! John Dillinger! First, however, allow me a quick moment to explain how iguanas, dog people and lizards like Trump are killing their own country through their adherence to what has become known over time as Social Darwinism. Yes, it’s MAGA time! Let’s Make America Gasp Again! So let’s start with Darwin himself. It’s really important.
Darwin’s discoveries about evolution were contained in his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species published in 1859, This was when the young botanist first noticed the local finches in the Galapagos using tools to build their nests. That is, they used twigs to move other twigs. The finches in Europe were either too stupid to use twigs, or didn’t need to, but small birds were not supposed to use tools. Evidently the finches that first arrived in the Galapagos had been forced to innovate by circumstance. Adapt to this new strange environment or die! As boring as this info about finches may be to the average person today, Darwin’s subsequent discovery of the habits of the marine iguanas proved far more interesting.
One smells the iguanas before seeing them, and they are not hard to see. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, doing exactly what iguanas are supposed to do, which is lie on the sand or rocks and bask in the sun. Who more surprised than Darwin when he first spotted some of them crawling down to the ocean and slithering right in for a swim, looking for a new source of food. Iguanas don’t swim! But it was a case of adapt our die. It must have been like hearing a politician like Trump tell the truth for the first time.
What Darwin learned about the blue-footed boobies, frigate birds and marine iguanas in the Galapagos, and eventually published in his groundbreaking book, had a very profound effect on the world then and continues to do so today. Darwin not only did not coin the now well-known phrase “survival of the fittest” (invented by philosopher Herbert Spencer, his fierce critic), or its eventual evolvement into the “dog-eat-dog” philosophy that permeates the far right of the American electorate today. Darwin’s work argued directly against that lame expression about “fittest.”
Darwin goes so far as to tie the success of human evolution (and even “lower animals”) to the evolution of compassion instead. What Darwin wrote after his research in the Galapagos was the total opposite of dog-eat-dog. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives,” he wrote, in perhaps the most brilliant example in history of insight into the human soul, “nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”
It was The Principles of Biology by opponent Herbert Spencer (1864) that introduced the expression “survival of the fittest.” According to the British Library, Spencer’s work included writings on religion, economics, literature, biology, sociology, and political theory, little of which has stood the test of time. He argued fiercely against the theories of Darwin and has been credited with the mistaken idea that “might is right,” also known as “social Darwinism.”
Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species did not include human beings in its discussions of species evolution but his ideas were soon applied to human groups and organizations. The shorthand term “Darwinian” appeared very quickly after 1859 and by the late 1870s the phrase “social Darwinism” also began to be heard. In the following decades it was used to describe and justify a whole range of nasty political and ideological positions to take advantage of your fellow man.
The scale of social change during the 19th century because of industrialization, urbanization and technological innovation was unprecedented and led to Britain’s competitive capitalist economy in which some people became enormously wealthy and others struggled amidst the direst poverty. Sound familiar? It was argued that markets should be allowed to operate freely, without government intervention, allowing wealth creation to flourish through competition.
Social Darwinism confirmed a singular view: People compete and struggle and only some (i.e. “the fittest and best”) survive. Actually, Darwin wrote that cooperation was equally important, especially for those creatures, including humans, who live and work in groups. This observation went over the heads of those who had their craniums tightly tucked into other body cavities with wallets bulging. Spencer argued that to try to help the weak flied in the face of nature. Attempts to aid the weakest in society, such as improving the living and working conditions of the poorest people, he said, were dangerously mistaken and “risked impeding the forces of evolutionary advancement.”
Notions of “competitiveness” often appeared in justifications of Britain’s imperial ambitions of that time. For instance, at the end of the 19th century there was fierce rivalry amongst European colonizers keen to exploit mineral and other natural resources (i.e. “human”) in Africa. Social Darwinists argued that Indigenous populations unable to withstand the greater military and economic power of a colonizing force must inevitably be pushed aside to make room for “fitter” competitors.
Similar ideas were important for Robert Knox, whose 1850 book The Races of Man classified and evaluated all human beings according to their race, and insisted that race was the most important determining feature of behavior and character. Arguments such as his were used to support the retention of slavery in the southern states of America, to the great profit of the American slave drivers. Darwin was horrified by slavery and his revolutionary ideas helped many Victorians at that time to imagine and fulfil a dynamic world of progress.
Towards the end of the 19th century, however, Darwin’s theories of evolution became the basis of fears for social, racial and cultural degeneration and decline. Evolution was countered by frightening examples of “devolution,” like Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whose gentlemanly Jekyll turns into the beastly Hyde upon drinking a potion, whose squat, ape-like body, dark, hairy hands, and animal energy all signal a “primitive” state. That argument continues to this very day and “survival of the fittest” is used as a lame excuse by the Dog People in America to continue to exploit their fellow man any chances they get. Not getting caught in a crime, they say, is the same as “doing the right thing.” Whatever you can get away with is just fine as long as you don’t get caught. Up is down, right is wrong, black is white, and pass the Kibbles and Bits.
But I am reminded of another Darwin’s quote, perhaps less well known, but far more profound and relevant to events today, where the Great Orange Blob runs for high office on an unending series of habitual lies: “If the misery of the poor not be caused by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
