博文
Reconstructing the Paradigm of Symbiosis
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Reconstructing the Paradigm of Symbiosis:
Evolution in China and its Ethical Implication
In 2003 I watched an interesting and symbolic sculpture at Nanwan Monkey Island of Hainan Province in China, which displayed a similar picture as the last frame of film Inherit the Wind (1960). The sculpture’s main body is a monkey instead of a human being, cupping its chin in left hand, with right hand holding a skeleton of man, right foot grasping a pair of compasses, left foot taking a pencil, and hip sitting on books, one of which is engraved a special word “DARWEN”.
What is “DARWEN “? It may be considered that there is no this word either in English or in Chinese so that there is no this thing at all in the real world. Wrong! In China there was and is really no pure Darwinism but we do meet lots of Darwinism like DARWENs, which can be seen as a portmanteau of English Darwin and Chinese pinyin Daerwen, taking place when two different culture encounter. Before Darwin’s theory was imported into Chinese, Rutherford Alcock (1809-1897), a consul and diplomatist of the British, wrote in 1855, four years before Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was published and 40 years its being translated into Chinese by Yan Fu, from Shanghai of “a natural and moral law which governs the life, and growth, and decay of nations, as clearly as it does the life of man…. Man’s efforts at civilization, invariably -- when the race to be benefited is inferior and weaker, intellectually and physically, than the nation civilizating – have had but one result: the weaker had gone down before the stronger.”(James Reeve Pusey, 1983, p.3)
Since the Opium War of 1840 and Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Qing-empire was shrouded in frustration and anger mood. The Chinese need something to explain the causal processes of China’s lose; Some Chinese elites were managing to be in search of wealth and power. Social need is a strong power according to Marxism. China then needed a special theory and finally Darwin’s (al least in his name) theory was chosen. Although missionary publications in China had mentioned Darwin’s name as early as in 1873, 1877, 1884, and 1891, but Darwin’s theory never was introduced. “Not even Allen’s famous periodical Wan kuo kung pao (The globe magazine) can claim to have widely publicized Darwin’s theory before Yen Fu (=Yan Fu) .” (Pusey, p.5) In 1895 Yan Fu’s translation firstly got widely read and accepted by Chinese intellectuals that was the readers Yan Fu advised. Since then (1895) through 1995, the image of evolution theory in Chinese minds was basically shaped by Yan Fu’s translation. Yan Fu’s translation embodied completely Darwin’s meaning? No. But this is only one of lots of factors of misreading. After reading lots of materials I find a set of causation for the science communication of Darwinian theory in China, which is constituted of {A, B, C, D, E}. Here A stands for true Darwin’s theory of evolution; B stands for Huxley’s articulation of Darwin’s theory; C stands for Yan Fu’s translation; D stands for Chinese people’s personal interpretation of Yan Fu’s translation and other books concerning evolution theories; and E stands for China’s social and political conditions at each stage of China’s social development which have been changing slowly but accumulatively speaking very considerable since 1895 through 1995 to now because China has been a powerful country now. Every element of the set {A, B, C, D} should be analyzed carefully and positively. However, doing all of these is still not sufficient for the topic of “evolution and ethics” because scientific theory of evolution since Darwin has been updated substantially.
What does it mean by evolution and the fittest? What is the very ethical implication of evolutionary theory to Chinese people? Only Chinese people misunderstood Darwin’s theory? Jacques Monod said: “A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.”
We also must point out the shortcomings in the ethical implication of self-confident scientific claims and propaganda of Darwinism. Weren’t misleading those slogans “the struggle for life”, “survival of the fittest” and “selfish gene”? Impartially speaking, the public have enough reasons to attack them from point of morality if scientists claim they are right. Is scientific evolution theory objective and freely theory-laden? Does it have nothing to do with the expansion of capitalism-imperialism? Without the aid of modernism’s logic and push, can scientific evolution theory as part of science prevail so thoroughly and replace religion’s role in life domain? Now the public and the society need what? Science or religion? If we do not use the special and politically sensitive word “religion”, we may ask science or ethics? Certainly the answer is both of them. Alexander Williamson (1824-1904, a Scottish Protestant missionary to China with the London Missionary Society) said: “Separating science from God will be a disaster for China.”(田勇,2006)
The year of 2009 is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Robert Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his great book On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution since 1859 has deeply affected Chinese society development. The philosophy of struggle for a long time is considered the most important revelation from Darwin's evolution theory for most of Chinese, and this kind of reading of it in the name of science destroys the ability of people to live together patiently and peacefully. In fact, diverse evolution theories could provide us another story: both competition and cooperation play key roles in evolution; Symbiogenesis by three Russian botanists and serial endosymbiosis by Lynn Margulis are important mechanisms and tactics in evolution, and also have very important significance for ethics and politics. Constructing the paradigm of symbiosis via historical studies of science and society will help improve the public image of evolution.
In fact, at the turn of the 19th century, another theory strengthening cooperation and symbiosis was also imported into China. That was Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution.
When Huxley issued, in 1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly; that is true Darwinism," was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have made of Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to you a letter which you may publish. "Unfortunately, it took me nearly seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published, Bates was no longer living.( Kropotkin, Introduction, in Mutual Aid,1902)
Many Chinese scholars compared Darwin’s theory with Kropotkin’s theory. Factually they compared Huxley’s book Evolution and Ethics translated and explained by Yan Fu (=Yen Fu, 严复，1853-1921) with Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Most of Chinese humane scholars liked the Mutual aid very much and anathematized Darwinian evolutionary theory because they thought Darwin’s theory also advocated the dogma that might is truth. The English phrase “Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest” was interpreted into “yousheng lietai, sizhe shengchun”(优胜劣汰，适者生存, the better will win and the worse will lose; and only the fittest organisms will prevail) by Japanese translator and the Japanese version expression of Natural Selection was imported into China later through Liang Qichao’s article in 1899. We find here that it is social Darwinism instead of Darwin’s theory that was considered to be true science and propagated by Chinese people year after year. Even today many people with higher scientific literacy think that is what Charles Darwin told us. Darwin first used Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869. Darwin meant it is a metaphor for "better adapted for immediate, local environment", not the common inference of "in the best physical shape". So “survival of the fittest” like Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene is not a scientific description and is misleading. However, Chinese first learnt theory of evolution in this way!
In the final decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century with the import of western theory of evolution into China many elites realized Chinese civilization might be not at its “fittest” stage when encountering with the foreign western civilization. This cultural ethos among intellectuals provided a chance for the acceptation of Marxism and Leninism in China.
Mao Zedong said in "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938) : “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ ”
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-222-385374.html
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