Darwin vs Marx: Evolution, Eugenics, and Society

[00:00:05]hi welcome to philosophy tube I teach people about philosophy today we're learning about Charles Darwin we're gonna talk about where he got his ideas how he impacted the way a lot of us still think about loads of stuff today and some of the people who took his ideas and did interesting sometimes horrible things with them we'll talk a little bit about what Victorian Britain was like there's some stuff later on about God and religion and we're also going to touch on eugenics and social Darwinism - when I started researching this video I found that it is surprisingly very relevant to current events although this video will hopefully just be a nice relaxed ramble through the woods you'll have seen that it's sponsored but I'm not gonna keep any of that money if you stick around at the end you'll find out where I'm donating it so I've got my backpack I've got my sunscreen I've got my water bottle let's go on an adventure we're walking through quite a famous and ancient bit of English woodland I won't say where exactly but it's it's really quite beautiful can sometimes see deer in here and there's a spot a bit further in where you can pick wild blackberries although it's possibly a little early in the season for blackberries at the moment but it's really atmospheric there's a lot of beautiful animal and plant life in the English countryside and if you and I were walking along here together in the early 1800s we might have had a chat on the latest theories about where all this life came from people back then they knew about fossils they discovered the remains of all these weird and wonderful creatures that they knew weren't around anymore including some dinosaurs so they knew that life on Earth hadn't always been the way it is now they could see that species go extinct but they were curious about where new species come from so what was Charles Darwin's theory what did he actually say well in a nutshell he said that a species like a wood pigeons is made up of individuals who all very ever-so-slightly from each other you might think that wood pigeons are all the same but if you take your time and look close each individual has different traits traitor's a word here that means characteristic or property nobody at that time knew why animals are the same species vary but they could see very clearly that they do and species breed obviously which means they increase in numbers but at the same time most of them die like a salmon can lay thousands of eggs but most of them never reach maturity I mean they can't do otherwise we'd all be knee-deep in salmon by now there's disease and there's predation a great struggle for survival that's an important idea their struggle for survival hang on to that one we're gonna come back to it later and at the same time we can see that offspring tend to resemble their parents like you know you get to tall people and they have a baby and the baby grows up to be tall well you get to spotted wood pigeons and they produce a spotted wood pigeon you never get like two pigeons and they make a jellyfish so there seems to be a kind of general rule the offspring get their traits from their parents and Darwin realized maybe some of the individuals in a species will have traits that give them a tiny advantage in the struggle for survival again don't know why but maybe some of the pigeons are born with just slightly different shaped feathers that allow them to fly a tiny bit faster and they outrun the hawk and they'll be more likely to survive and breed than the pigeons that don't have a special feathers and since we know that offspring tend to resemble their parents that means that advantageous traits are more likely to get passed on and he called this tendency natural selection holy crap now we know when new species come from because if you let that process play out on a long enough time line the advantageous traits are always the ones that get passed on the species will very gradually change and if it goes long enough eventually the organism you end up with will be something totally different than what you started with and that is where all of this including me came from that's wild isn't it I love these I love these trees just off to the side here look at this look at how it's all like it's all bunched up and all Carl bond call this like a like an old witch who's been imprisoned inside out or something I don't know have I get like that but it's really quite pretty Darwin wasn't actually the first guy to come up with an idea like this he figured out the natural selection stuff yeah but even when he was a kid people were already talking about evolution and discussing his implications and there was this other scientist called Jean Baptiste Lamarck who came up with a theory of evolution that was wrong as it turns out but was very very influential Lamarr was a Frenchman and he was like oh ha ha I have solves a mystery he said that if an animal acquires a trait during its lifetime then it will pass that tray on the classic example is giraffes you start off with an animal that looks a little bit like a deer and over its lifetime it's always stretching up its neck to get the leaves that are just a little bit higher and after a lifetime of doing that its neck actually gets a tiny tiny bit longer and then it passes that trait onto its kids and it's kids do the second thing and after enough generations of stretching and stretching they get really long necks and you get a giraffe and that's where new species come from and they were wrong as it turns out evolution doesn't doesn't really work like that nowadays we're pretty sure I know not apologist that our organisms don't pass on traits that they acquired during their lifetime seems to more be about they pass on the traits that they're born with what Darwin said but Lamarckism as it was called was a pretty solid go figure in all this out so that's Darwin and that is all kushti but the title of the video is Charles Darwin versus Karl Marx and the most important question is obviously who would win in a fight to which the answer is obvious Charles Darwin was a pretty sickly guy whereas Marx was always getting into scraps and scrapes he would almost certainly win unless he was drunk which he often was so yeah probably actually it'd be a draw Darwin puts his theory in a very famous book called on the Origin of Species comes out 1859 we know that Marx read it unless a lot of people he was very impressed eight years later Karl comes out with his own book very famous philosophy in economics book called capital and he actually sent Darwin a copy which Darwin only read the first 100 pages of which is kind of fair enough because capital is a thousand pages long and the first 200 are pretty dull and then it gets to the spicy stuff so you probably already know that Marx was a communist so what does that mean all right well I will try to explain it simply communists say there's two kinds of people in the world right there's the people who get money by working for a living and there's the people who get money by owning stuff specifically the stuff that other people make like Elon Musk he doesn't put the Tesla's together he doesn't even design them he's got other people who do the actual work and yeah you know he he puts up the capital and he takes the quote-unquote risk but you can throw as much money and as much risk as you want at a sheet of metal it will not turn into a Tesla the only reason the whole operation runs is because we're doing the work he just owns the company and when they sell the Tesla's that somehow means he gets to keep the lion's share of the money that comes in and communists are like that's a silly system hook him up with that what if instead all the people who do the actual work owned the factory together and then they could share the money between them so we don't really need you on musk he says like an extra level on the top kind of siphoning off the cream we don't really need him he should go and get an actual job instead of mooching off the work that we do and actually if we do that and then we own the factory between us we can vote on how long we want our shifts to be we can vote on how we want to invest the profits we can control the working environment a lot more like I'll be just like what's that word and democracy an Elon Musk goes no no you can't do that because I own it it's my property and the Communists go so so we're supposed to be living in a democracy but 99% of the time we spend living and working in an environment there's like a mini dictatorship you just control it and you control what happens to all money and the only thing stopping us from having full democracy and having a better quality of life for everyone is property law well I mean that sounds like an easy fix but why don't we just reform property laws and then Elon Musk goes that's communism I'm calling the police I think I'm probably gonna have some communists to be a little bit across at me in the comments cuz I know I've simplified it I know I have but that's because this video isn't about communism just like there were people who believed in evolution before Darwin there were people who were communists before Marx there are a lot of people who are like this job sucks our jobs suck we we want full democracy we want to get rid of Elon Musk we don't need him and a lot of them were actually quite fond of Lamarque they were like wow you know by by struggling the working people of the world will be improving ourselves and then what will pass those traits on and a lot of them believe that human beings descended from apes that was an idea that was already flying around before Darwin and they were like if her all the sin of whom apes that's a pretty solid basis for assuming that we're all equal God didn't make Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla we can change society if we want to man so Marx reads Darwin and he's like oh my god yes this guy he's saying that species emerged through natural laws that can be explained by science and that's that's what I'm trying to do with Elon Musk Marx thought that he could explain loads of stuff about society and an sellers are really big questions by doing a kind of natural law science look why does Elon Musk own so much stuff like like how come your job feels like a miserable grind all the time how come your rent goes up but your wages don't why do we have economic crashes and recessions why do the richest countries in the world always have an unlimited supply of tear gas and riot shields but they can't manufacture enough masks for everyone during a pandemic Marx was like lads I figured it out I've done I've done a science and I've done a Natural History but I've done it on society and it explains everything and it's all in my thousand page book starting to get a little bit muddy here gonna have to watch off footing I think don't want to have filth welling up around my ankles speaking of their filth though what was society actually like back in those days what was the what was the vibe in Victorian Britain well the vibes were not good at that time Britain was very very seriously engaged in invading other countries and murdering people and stealing their stuff I mean we loved doing it man we love stealing people's stuff we even loved it so much that we put up a bunch of statues to the people who were best at murdering people are stealing their stuff and a whole cultural and scientific discourse springs up to try and justify this so along comes Charles Darwin he's born into a very very wealthy family very very elite but he's a bit of a waste man as we say in England like he studies medicine for a beer and he studies theology for a beard but he's always goofing off while he's always going out because his real passion is Natural History he likes being in nature and collecting insects and stuff so one day he's aged 22 and he gets this invitation to go on a boat called the Beagle that's sailing around the world mainly he gets invited so that the captain can have someone to talk to who isn't working class but Darwin really wants to go he begs his dad and eventually his dad says yeah go on so he sets off on this voyage around the world it turns out to take five years and also on board the people are three wages that's people from Tierra del Fuego her name's where elihpa roof or in Delic oh and your cuishle and they had been kidnapped or possibly bought we aren't really sure during a previous voyage and taken back to England and they were they were exotic curiosities basically people were interested in can we can we improve the savages can we civilize them you know they were given new names and they were dressed up all fancy and they were taught to use a knife and fork and they met the king people wanted to see in a kind of Lamarckian way can we give them traits that we want them to have and then we can send them back and then they'll pass on those traits to the other savages and that will make it easier for us to exterminate their way of life and steal all of their stuff and so on the Beagle these three guys were brought back to Tierra del Fuego and when they get there Ella Peru or Angelica and your cuishle happily rejoin their original society they're like oh thank god you'll never believe what all these weird white people are doing in Victorian Britain give me back my loincloth this tie is ridiculous much to the dismay of their captors and this encounter has a strong impact on Darwin we've got his notes from the voyage and we can see that wherever he goes around the world he's always very interested in people that he sees as primitive or savage not always in an unsympathetic way but always he looks at the world having grown up in this society that thought it was okay to treat other people as if they're animals and in fact not only did I think it was okay the whole economy depended on that happening but there is this really interesting bit in his notes where he says that although the Fagin's may seem savage they're very well adapted to their environment they might stick out a bit in London but they're very well fitted to Tierra del Fuego so way before he starts talking about Galapagos Tortoises and finches and all the famous stuff he might have heard of in school we can see that the pieces are starting to come together but colonialism was not the only vibe that Darwin was picking up on he was also very influenced by a philosopher called Thomas Malthus Thomas Malthus was an English scholar and 11 years before Darwin was born he wrote a very famous work called an essay on the principle of population which was hugely influential and still is alarmingly because as we will see Malthus was wrong Malthus says there are two things human beings need to continue the species and they both start with the letter F number one is food and number two is mating but he says our ability to breed is much stronger than our ability to produce food and he also predicted wrongly as it turns out that the more food we make the more we will breed and he predicted this can't go on forever sooner or later we will exhaust our ability to produce food and we will have an enormous hungry population and this idea of the struggle for survival in which not everyone can live was a major influence on Darwyn who cites Malthus by name a couple of times in origin Malthus was specifically interested in humans though and in a very Thanos like way he thinks he has a solution to this overpopulation problem he says that all benefits and aid to the poor should be stopped and furthermore that to be poor and dependent on other people is morally disgraceful he says that providing for those in need will make them wasteful and unable to think of anything but satisfying their immediate desires the poor all spent too much time in the Ale houses he says when they should be working hard and saving responsibly because if we make life too easy for them they'll breed us into oblivion I know how to treat the poor my taxes go to pay for the prisons and the poorhouses the homeless must go there if they'd rather die then they better do it and decrease the surplus population it's rare that people are as explicitly Malthusian as scrooge these days but a lot of that stuff is still hanging around when people talk about overpopulation as if it's the cause of climate change when they talk about humanity being the real virus or we need to sacrifice grandma to reopen the economy or just fan us in the Avengers the idea that there isn't enough to go round and so some people usually the ones who don't have very much to begin with need to be sacrificed so the rest of us can live is not true but a lot of people still think and act like it is sometimes good news though it isn't true Malthus was just factually incorrect because we are a lot better at producing food now than we were in his day we now have enough resources to give food shelter and clothing to every human being on earth we could even increase the population some and we would still have enough the idea that we are overpopulated or there are too many mouths to feed or there isn't room is a myth he was also wrong when he predicted that birth rates would just keep rising a lot of affluent countries including mine have seen their birth rates falling or holding steady for a while now for a lot of reasons one of which is that we have reliable birth control but this is in fact Stubbe this is philosophy tube and there are some even more interesting philosophy problems here because philosophy is kind of like jazz is less about the arguments you make it's more about the arguments that you don't make and Marx might point out that Malthus conveniently misses a lot of stuff he rails against the poor who spend their money on beer instead of saving it responsibly but the idea that working in the Tesla factory might make you so miserable that you spend your money on instant gratification just to feel happy doesn't seem to occur to him the fact that saving money is no guarantee of anything because rich a-holes can tank the economy and wipe your savings with no consequence to them so why would you bother saving in the first place also doesn't occur to him he seems to think that poor people are just fools rather than perfectly sensible people operating inside a framework that he has never seen the inside of he also doesn't seem to seriously consider the possibility of redistributing resources he says there isn't enough food and there isn't enough food for everyone to eat like a lord fair enough but Marx might say that we don't have to have Lourdes Malthus says that everyone including rich people should have fewer children but he misses the fact that rich families with fewer children still consume more resources than poorer families with more children most human beings have and consume very little and the danger is coming from a tiny number of people who own everything who consume the rest of us off a cliff Malthus treats that situation as unalterable and Marx would be like well actually if we had full democracy we could change it if we wanted to no wait Ilan don't call the police again Malthus doctrines are still useful to explain away the disasters of the wealthy as the biological and moral defaults of the poor through a Malthusian lens redistribution looks ludicrous if there is simply not enough to go around no system of resource distribution will solve the problem all of this is rather convenient if you're the one with the resources to start with so Malthus is often portrayed as this cruel inhuman Scrooge or a Lackey of the bourgeoisie as Marx called him but I want to emphasize that he was also Christian men stirrer and I think that might help explain why he believed this stuff and why he didn't see the problems Malthus says that we should remove all the social safety nets so human beings who are naturally lazy and irresponsible will work hard and by working hard they will not only be happier but also worthy of heaven his last two chapters in particular talked about how the struggle for survival inspires Christian virtue and how all this cruelty is ultimately for the best because we have a chance at eternal life there's a spiritual idea here that hard painful work is what you are on earth to do an idea that Marx would strongly disagree with I think we need to read Malthus as a theodicy of theodicy is a technical term for an argument that tries to explain why there is evil in the world but why God still exists and loves us and given that Malthus had such a religious outlook it's kind of ironic that he ended up influencing Darwin I've stopped for a bit of a break it's always important to stay hydrated when you're on a hike hmm refreshing so Darwin was very influenced by Malthus there's all that stuff about sex and death and the environment but his theories also had profound implications for religion and the reason they did is that Darwinism seems to show that we were not designed we weren't created I mean I I studied Christian theology at university and I was told that humankind was made so that we could know and love God and through His Son Jesus eventually come to occupy a state where we exist with God forever in the afterlife that's that's the meaning of life that's what I was told and Darwin showed that the first bit of that the idea that we were created isn't true the fact that natural selection happens on its own is a very serious challenge to the idea that humanity has any kind of divine Destinee and in his time as now there were people who said well how can all of this have come about by chance there's an example I've seen somebody use where he says oh if I if I look at my fridge and the fridge magnets the letters they're all jumbled up then it's fair to say that someone's just Chuck were letters on there randomly but if I look at it and it spells out a message like please buy some milk then then I know that someone put out there there's no way that happened by chance right and this is based on a very old misunderstanding of what chance and randomness actually mean variation does happen by chance but natural selection is not random it's not random that the slower pigeons get eaten they get eaten because the slower natural selection is a kind of filter that weeds out all the Verrett all the variations that don't survive as effectively so if we were chuck in fridge moments like a fridge but they're special magnets that only stick to the fridge if the message makes sense then we would actually expect to see messages that make sense and in Darwin's day there were some who came back and they said okay you don't know why variation happens though you've not figured that one out yeah you know maybe natural selection is a godless process but perhaps God is is controlling evolution behind the scenes maybe God is where the variations come from nowadays though we do actually know where variations come from they come from genetic mutation and the thing about mutation is just because a mutation would be useful doesn't affect its chances of happening you might think that if we take a bunch of mice and we put them in a very snowy environment and then we hop in our TARDIS and we travel forward a million years there's going to be a bunch of adorable woolly mice running around because they'll have mutated thicker coats and the ones with thicker coats that keep them warm will have survived and reproduced but no it's very possible that we get to the future and there's just a bunch of dead mice because the genetic mutation that would have caused them to develop thicker coats just never happened just because the mutation would be useful doesn't mean it's going to happen and most mutations are actually harmful or neutral in terms of your chances of surviving so again the processes that produced all life including us don't require a designer to keep going so theism the position that there is a God who created us for a reason and loves us and cares about us might be in serious trouble not that there aren't replies to this and not that it isn't still a very popular position including with evolutionary biologists it must be said so if that's how you wanna live your life then hey no worries okay that was a nice lunch break and I think it's probably time to keep going Oh someone's been building spooky structures in the woods I've seen Blair Witch Project I know you shouldn't interfere with stuff like this religion wasn't the only controversy that Darwin became embroiled in Darwin was a Whig that's wh IG and so were most of his family they were a political party the Whigs and in his lifetime their ideology came to dominate British society to the point where even today a lot of people's ideas in Britain about what society is and what it's capable of have descended from or evolved from you might say Whig philosophy and in the 19th century they believed in things like free market competition and free trade they supported the abolition of slavery and they wanted this society in which everyone was on equal footing and everyone could compete they thought that would lead to the best outcome Marx and the Marxists not a big fan of this idea not the freeing the slave stuff they were obviously in support of that but they did some natural laws and some science and they predicted that if you have free market competition and free trade then over enough time it will funnel wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of elon musk's the advantages of free markets will then begin to become undermined as that group of people tries to hold on to their money and power I did a video about this awhile ago talking about the video game industry they predicted that it would happen over a century ago so the Whigs had this egalitarian spirit like kinda like ish Darwin was also very against slavery for instance but they had also read a lot of Malthus and they wanted to get rid of all the benefits and all the aid for the poor and they pretty much succeeded during darwin's lifetime this philosophy became government policy they really did strip back a lot of the social safety nets and it didn't work because what it actually does is intensify competition for jobs by putting the squeeze on the poor so wages go down profits Freelon must go up but everyone else is kind of miserable so miserable in fact that these policies were very unpopular there were riots there was a general strike in the 1840s the British Army and the police were sent in and they just murdered working-class people in the streets and the right-wing press took the side of the murderers meanwhile to Darwin's left there were these radicals and these socialists and these atheists who were saying that Malthusian policies were cruel and unnecessary and also remember they were the ones saying human beings descended from apes and so we don't need to finally appointed Elon Musk's and Darwin was kind of caught in the middle because scientifically he agreed with the radicals but he was also a Whig he owned property in terms of his social circle and his personal beliefs he supported the Whig establishment and in this atmosphere Darwinism was downright dangerous in the same way that global warming is kind of a dangerous idea now because it kind of makes it look like the people in charge of society shouldn't be in charge and Darwin delayed publishing for a long time because of this where he succeeded was not just figuring out the actual mechanism of natural selection but also framing it in such a way that it didn't seem too radical when he did eventually put out origin of species in 1859 decades after he'd started working on it he very deliberately did not comment on human evolution and there's a lot of Malthus in there so he wrote a version of evolution that the middle class could kind of roll with again kind of like global warming you know you can frame it in terms of we need to do communism now or everyone on earth will boil and even if you're right Elon Musk is still gonna call the police or you can be like hey why don't our line companies promised to plant some trees by 2075 and the establishment goes oh okay cool so we don't actually have to change anything then and in particular there was one establishment philosopher who was just waiting for someone like Darwin to come along and that guy's name was Herbert Spencer Herbert Spencer was a philosopher alive at the same time as Darwin he published his famous book social static just a few years before Darwin brought that origin and he - for that all social safety nets and aid for the poet should be scrapped he supported what's called less a fair where you have a small government that doesn't do a lot of regulations or interference because they'll only end up messing it up government he says is a necessary evil at best and Spencer was very influenced by Malthus he kept a lot of the stuff about hard work being what you're here to do and the brutality all being part of a grander plan but he wasn't a Christian and he cut out all the religious stuff the poverty of the incapable the de-stresses that come upon the imprudent the starvation of the idle and those shouldering 'aa side of the weak by the strong of the decrees of a large far-seeing benevolence so by the time we get to Spencer this idea that hard work is your lot in life has been secularized with Malthus you have a miserable life of toil but maybe you get to go to heaven afterwards with Spencer now you have a miserable life of toil but markets and competitions and Wars are ultimately good for society even though Spencer's ideas were around before Darwin published nowadays we would call them social Darwinism the idea that we just need to step back and allow competition and that will improve society even though it means there will be some losers and when Darwin published Origin Spencer was all over it like Marx he too went yes everything I've been saying it's all right here science vindicates my ideas competition and struggle means progress survival of the fittest Spencer reminds me a little of some modern conservatives are be keen to hear from conservatives in the comments if you think I'm way off please tell me but he's not saying that things have to stay the same on the contrary he's saying the opposite things will change naturally and for the better if we use a light touch and don't do a lot of government regulations cuz they always mess things up there's a British science writer called Matt Ridley who wrote a book in 2010 called the rational optimist in which he says basically that society will evolve and progress naturally with the help of the free market if we just stand back and don't jump in to mess it up and if you're the sort of person like Spencer or Darwin or Malthus or Matt Ridley who is born pretty near the top of society and generally improves your lot in life over time then we can see how that makes sense why mess with a system that for you and everyone you know seems to be working Matt Ridley is a vie count he inherited his land and his title and his position as the chairman of a major bank in my hometown which he then crashed destroying thousands of people's jobs and wiping their savings and he didn't go to prison or lose his mansion he's a famous author now and was made a lord it seems strange to me that a man like that could have paused the value of free markets when as far as I can see he's never been near one in his life but of course he thinks that things will just improve if we don't do anything nobody's ever forced him to face consequences before and his life just keeps getting better and better if you believe that evolution is a process of improvement then you will understandably not want anyone to mess with it but here's a counter-argument you could make evolution doesn't really make progress in the sense that we think of technological or moral progress it doesn't improve anything every organism on earth is already about as well adapted to its environment as it can be they have to be otherwise they'll be dead you might think oh pandas aren't very well evolved they only one thing and it takes them ages to breed but pandas have been on earth for 20 million years and it's not their fault that they're dying out it's ours evolution is not a process of improvement it's a process of change diversification and specialization people in Victorian England might have liked to think of themselves as more evolved than four agents but that's not really how it works Spencer might've thought Darwin's ideas vindicated his philosophy but it's a bit of a reach Spencer wasn't completely heartless though he says of course this seems harsh and of course people want the government to help the poor that seems like it's the compassionate thing to do but if a mother only gave her child sweets out of compassion we wouldn't say that was good and if a doctor refused to perform a necessary operation out of compassion because it would be painful then we wouldn't say that was good either I think you can sometimes tell quite a bit by the examples that a philosopher uses Spencer says that private charity is great but people who want the government to help the poor are like irresponsible parents or cowardly doctors and that's quite telling because that means he thinks poor people are like children or patients those are both situations in which there's someone in a position of authority Spencer identifies with that person and wants you to identify with them too whereas Marx might say why is it your decision what happens to the poor why isn't it their decision in contrast to the social Darwinists who said things can only get better Mark's tried to offer a different perspective and say no look this is what it's actually like when you have to work for a living the struggle for survival is getting worse for most people and when progress is made it isn't because the market evolves it it's because they refuse to go back to work until their demands are met poetically Spencer and Marx are buried opposite each other the opposite of progress of course is degeneration or going backwards and as soon as Darwin published Origin a lot of folks with social Darwinist values suddenly got very worried about degeneration and they opened the book on one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century [Music] did you know there's a mathematical formula for making the perfect cup of tea you must heat the water to 82 degrees Celsius that's 180 Fahrenheit for all you Americans and you must let it sit for eight minutes perfect there's something very comforting about a cup of tea you know as a parent you want the best for your child don't you want to give them every ease and comfort in life and certainly to protect them from making any sort of permanent decision that might weaken their chances in life there's a terrible fear that comes with Parenthood the fear that something beyond your control might happen to them that despite every effort the Apple might fall far from the tree and even though it isn't your fault what they choose to do with their life you blame yourself I'm sorry I suppose it's on my mind because ordinarily I'm a traveling salesman I like to get about all over but because of this virus business I've been stuck indoors reconnecting with my family and with that fear I think about my son might might my daughter my little girl she's having some trouble finding who she is and I worry for her you know a while ago I was on a farm nattering away to the farmer and he was explaining how they can breed animals with certain characteristics you know you you breed a bigger car when you get more roast beef out of it that sort of thing it took millions of years for them to evolve naturally but now in a few generations we can improve them isn't that ingenious and I thought gosh wouldn't it be a relief if we could do that with people if we could improve ourselves in the same way we could raise an entire generation of Einsteins or Churchill's I think it would be an enormous comfort to a parent to have the power to select the best possible future for one's child it's taken millions of years for mankind to progress to where we are but now it seems that progress is stopped we aren't out with the Lions and the Tigers anymore we're all stuck indoors natural selection doesn't apply oh the population is ballooning some people can't seem to take responsibility for their reproductive habits but genetically we aren't going anywhere it's more a sort of stagnation and that's not good for the nation is it not to mention the expenditure my God look at this virus how much it's costing us to keep large numbers mainly economically inactive numbers alive oh it's terrible of course in an ideal world we would have enough for everyone to earn their place but there simply isn't any slack in the system [Music] human history is one of sacrifice and I think it's naive to assume that we can create a society that lasts a thousand years without sacrificing a few a few things [Music] do you have a match [Music] eugenics was developed by Francis Galton who was Charles Darwin's cousin in a nutshell it's the idea that people with good traits should reproduce more whilst those with bad traits should reproduce less Galton worried that natural selection had stopped operating on humans he thought that people with inferior traits who would otherwise have died because they weren't fit to survive were being kept alive through things like vaccinations and insane asylums and were in danger of out breeding these superior people he believed that traits like intelligence morality and even whether or not you're likely to break the law could be taught yeah but were strongly biologically heritable heritable means capable of being passed on to children so far not too different from social Darwinism there's similar stuff here about there not being enough competition these days and worries about unfit people breeding but what Galton took the next step was he wanted society to change so that we could artificially select for the best traits he was a little bit fuzzy on the details but he thought we should begin by gathering data on families and their traits and to do it he pioneered some statistical techniques that mathematicians still use if a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle what a galaxy of genius might we not create again this isn't fact tube but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the science here is dodgy even prehistoric humans cared for their sick and injured it's not a modern civilization thing that somehow stopped evolution arguably we evolved to do it as mentioned before evolution doesn't make progress so the idea of degeneration of backwards progress isn't supported and a lot of the science that's been done to try and prove that things like intelligence are heritable is very questionable so the usual story with eugenics is that Galton invented it and he perverted Darwin because he just wanted to be racist and then it really caught on in the USA where they forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of their own people because they believed they had inferior genes and then the Nazis copied the Americans and took it one step further and started exterminating people they thought were inferior and when the rest of the world found out what the Nazis had done we were also horrified that we stopped doing eugenics that's the version I was taught and it turns out it's a little bit more complicated than that eugenics meant a lot of very different things to different people you might have heard the phrase nature versus nurture some eugenicist s-- disagreed about how much traits really were determined by biology or nature and how much they were down to society some of them did say that race is a reliable predictor of inferiority others said no race has nothing to do with it anyone can have inferior genes some of them said it was horrible to contemplate doing eugenics in their own countries but that it was fine to do it to foreigners they also disagreed about how much violence they thought was okay some of them supported forced sterilization others just wanted to imprison the ones they thought were inferior some of them supported racist immigration laws to stop the racially inferior from coming in so it was a very broad class of views and ideas there were feminists eugenicist hsihu said women shouldn't be pressured into marriage because it allows men with inferior traits to reproduce there were anti-feminist eugenicist s-- who said women should have as many babies as possible to better the superior population there were white supremacists eugenicist Slyke the Nazis and in New Zealand there were Maori eugenicist hsihu worried about the inferior genes of Chinese immigrants Darwin definitely had some eugenic ideas but as a Whig he would have opposed the eugenics of the USA and the Nazis the United States did get very violent with racist immigration laws and forced sterilization it's true but when discussing eugenics it might be a mistake to only focus on forced sterilization for one thing countries like New Zealand Australia and the UK very nearly legalized it Winston Churchill was really pushing for feeble-minded people which was a catch-all term for the criminal the mentally ill and often LGBTQ folks to be forcibly sterilized so they couldn't pass on their inferior genes the fact that these countries didn't pass sterilization laws was often more down to luck than lack of desire and in some cases there was no law but they just did it anyway the Nazis did go in hard on eugenics and they did copy it from the Americans they started out sterilizing anybody with conditions like blindness deafness alcoholism or who was mixed-race and then they moved on to just murdering about 200,000 disabled or institutionalized Germans and then they worked their way up from there but it might also be a mistake to think that eugenics went away after the Nazis the word is pretty much tainted yeah no one calls themselves a eugenicist anymore but a lot of people still think like Malthus and the social Darwinists and still think it would be good science or ethics to control who breeds the United States still coerces prisoners into being sterilized to cut jail time countries like Finland and Japan still sterilize transgender people and that is eugenics you are inferior and we do not want you to breed because you will make more inferior people who is inferior and who is superior and who gets to decide that and what if the inferior people don't agree Marxists were divided on eugenics a few of them believed in it they did say we don't know how many folks with superior genes never get a chance to shine because they're born working-class but that's not objecting to eugenics on moral or scientific grounds they just didn't think Elon Musk should be in control of it other Marxists were very against it like trade unions here in the UK they knew from experience that the police were much more likely to arrest working-class people and call them degenerates and criminals than rich people they didn't much fancy getting arrested for nothing as usual and then also sterilized and interestingly Marxism can provide a strong critique of eugenics but in order to explain it I'm gonna have to make you breakfast welcome to my kitchen sorry it's a little bit of a mess I share it with three other people let's learn about fetishes this is an egg it's egg time Marx talked about fetishes but he didn't mean like a sexual fetish he meant an object that is used in a ritual and is thought to possess spiritual power like a voodoo doll again like Darwin he was picking up on the colonialism vibe because the idea of a fetish was invented by anthropologists who wanted to believe that West African people were incapable of abstract thought and needed a literal object to represent their beliefs like oh how silly they're worshiping the statue let's steal all their stuff and then I'm going to pray to a crucifix and eat a communion wafer which definitely aren't fetishes because of reasons and Marx was like well there's no reason a fetish object has to be used in a religious ritual like the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square is used in all kinds of British rituals it represents an idea it's thought to be very significant and powerful but just not in a magical way so breakfast there's a play called young marks about Karl's life Charles Darwin is a character in it and there's a brilliant scene where Marx is cooking breakfast for his family and he suddenly has an epiphany and he says I don't know who laid this egg and his daughter says chickens lay eggs daddy not people and he says no no no the point is in the olden days like say under feudalism I would know the guy in the village who made these sausages I would know the chicken keeper who kept the chickens who laid the eggs a sausage could explain my life it's a map of my social relations and a reminder that I am connected to my fellow human beings but nowadays no no no no those social connections aren't there I have no idea who provided my breakfast my only point of contact with the people who worked to make it is cash and cash tells me nothing about my connection to my fellow human beings it circulates everywhere I don't have those connections anymore I am in a word alienated from them instead of an interaction with a person I get product and after a lifetime of being surrounded by products I forget about the people but they're all still out there the only reason this food exists is because somebody worked to provide it I'm not talking about the people who owned the farm I don't mean the Elon Musk of farming no I mean the people who took care of the animals and turned them into food and delivered them what are those people's lives like are they paid enough about working conditions safe what are their problems what if we have the same problems what if our problems have the same political causes isn't that a dangerous idea I'm putting hot sauce in my omelet and the hot sauce is communism the commodity has become a fetish the thing that can be bought and sold in exchange for money has taken the place of people we are no longer a society of human beings we're a society of things also Marx doesn't really talk about this but there were also some animals involved here did they get a good deal did the chicken get a good deal probably not don't ask questions just consume product and then get excited for next product ok that's commodity fetishism but what does it have to do with eugenics well we can do commodity fetishism with traits or genes the trait like intelligence or the gene is like a product we fixate on that and we forget that the only reason it has any value at all is cuz it's inside of a person for example there's a great book by native studies professor Kim Tauber called Native American DNA in which she says that a lot of DNA ancestry companies market themselves to people who think they might have indigenous ancestry like hey you can discover what tribe you belong to you can find out your roots maybe you could claim that you're a minority but even assuming that the science is good and sometimes with these companies it's just tribal membership isn't genetic every tribe has their own citizenship rules you can have the ancestors but not be part of a living community just because you've got the DNA doesn't actually mean a fat lot because your genes cannot tell you who you are this is fetishism she says it's taking people and hiding them and replacing them with product and if you send your DNA to an ancestry company who owns that data do they sell it to Elon Musk Pharmaceuticals do they share it with the police remember Galton wanted to gather all that data on families so scientists could do statistical analysis with it gathering data is a form of surveillance in order to do it you have to be in a position of power over the person whose data you are gathering can they say no to that surveillance if they do can they still participate in normal life while the day to gather is elected or are they dictators if they lose it or there's a security problem or they misuse it can we vote them out not that you have to be a Marxist to object to that disability rights activists Marxist and otherwise have long-standing objections to eugenics for obvious reasons the philosophy of the disability rights movement is a bigger topic than I have time to get into it would take a lot of research that I haven't done to do it justice and I would rather own that then throw something slapdash out and convince you I'm an authority but if like me you are ignorant and curious there's a free link in the description to a very easy article by writer called mailbags that I found very interesting I wish I could give you a neat and easy way to avoid commodity fetishism and if this was a BBC documentary I'd probably wrap up with something like this so next time you buy a box of eggs why not take a moment to thank Britain's hard-working farmers giving us high-quality produce exactly when we need it but it doesn't work that way unfortunately marx didn't think that commodity fetishism was something we'd be able to overcome as individuals but rather that we would have to very drastically change society after Karl Marx died his buddy angles compared him to Darwin said he was like the Charles Darwin of politics and in a way he was probably more right than he could have known both men were very much shaped by a colonial Britain both of them had thousands of people coming after them adding to what they said and modifying it and being inspired by it and occasionally doing horrible things on the basis of it both men have had huge and ongoing impact on on society today and impact that I think we've yet to see the full extent off really and I think it's worthwhile to trace the ancestry of big philosophical ideas because now you know how these guys came up with their ideas then you can see it every little stage that it might have worked out a little differently and now you can be like what would I have thought about it that way or would I have thought something else I think that's quite intellectually empowering ok you know how in my last few videos whenever I quote a philosopher the text animates onto the screen I got a special computer program to learn how to do that but it's actually really hard I very nearly spent quite a bit of money on it on a course like going on a course to learn how to do it but then you know what I did I went to Skillshare you've probably seen them sponsoring YouTube videos before they're an online learning community they've got thousands of videos you can watch and you can learn how to do new skills a lot of them are geared towards creative people so I looked at their videos on After Effects and on text animation and I learned everything I needed to learn it was genuinely very useful normally membership of Skillshare is less than $10 a month with an annual subscription but there's a special link in the description and the first thousand people to click it will get a two-month trial of Skillshare premium absolutely free I don't think I'm allowed to say how much they gave me but I'm not keeping it anyway I'm donating it all to the Knights and orchids Society they're an organization that helps black LGBT people in rural areas specifically of the American South I figured that a lot of the attention lately has gone to black and queer people in major cities so I wanted to send some love to my fellow queers in the countryside right well I'm almost out of water so probably time to head back I've got no idea [Music] [Music] [Music] I know I do [Music] it's not [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we [Music] No [Music] it's [Music] [Music] it's time for egg