Dawkins shares the view of such writers on the theme of Darwinian
Ethics as Professor Anthony Flew. Bertrand Russell demolished such
thinking more than 50 years ago. He writes:
“The motive force of evolution, according to Darwin, is a kind of
biological economics in a world of free competition. It was Malthus’s
doctrine of population, extended to the world of animals and plants,
that suggested to Darwin the struggle for existence and the survival
of the fittest as the source of evolution.
Darwin himself was a liberal but his theories had consequences in
some degree inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men
are born equal, and that the differences between adults are due wholly
to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital dif-
ferences between members of the same species.
There is a further consequence of the theory of evolution, which is
independent of the particular mechanism suggested by Darwin. If
men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by
such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know
whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage
in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be equal?
A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative
will find himself forced to regard apes as the equals of human
beings. And why stop with apes? I do not see how he is to resist an
argument in favour of Votes for Oysters.
An adherent of evolution should maintain that not only the doctrine
of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must
be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction
between men and other animals.
In fact, though Darwin himself was a Liberal, and though Nietzshe never
mentions him except with contempt, Darwin’s “The Survival of the Fittest”
led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzshe’s
philosophy than like Bentham’s”.