LAUSR

No, this editorial is not going to be about the famous question Juvenal posed: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ (‘Who guards the guardians?’), though the shenanigans of president Trump after losing the November presidential election, and theway the GOP responded to those threats to democracy, might have prepared the reader to think so. Instead, I want to return to a previous editorial of mine, in which I pointed out that the term ‘Darwinian’ is all too oftenmisused in economic and societal contexts.[1] There, I concluded that ‘Darwinian economy’ or ‘Darwinian society’ is NOT an accurate description of cut-throat capitalism or a society not geared toward social justice, as these both do not seem to encompass cooperation, care, or altruism, which are stressed as natural outcomes of selection by Darwin himself in ‘The Descent of Man’. There is thus nothing ‘Darwinian’ about unchecked greed or power. Not because individuals cannot be greedy or lust after unfettered power, but because social evolution will restrict their number. There are basic biological and ecological parallels: for example, only limited percentages of ‘users’ are sustainable. It all boils down to the fact that such descriptions oversimplify complex interactions: evolution is about trade-offs. Another way of saying this: fitness landscapes are defined alongmany competing dimensions. In my previous editorial, I was triggered by an interesting column of John Harris in the Guardian.[2] Since then, I was saddened to see that articles in the Guardian use the term inappropriately all the time. Let me give you two glaring examples (by the way, both in columns where I agree with their general tenor). Here is Jonathan Freedland discussing the ‘. . .Darwinian belief that the strong individual can and should dowhatever they like. . . ’ in the context of describing Trump and Trumpism.[3] And, in a very recent column, Gina Miller expresses the opinion ‘Johnsonism is ultimately Darwinism: ours will be a country where only the strongest and richest prosper. . . ’, while describing the descent of Britain into a corruption nation.[4] Of course, this misappropriation of Darwin’s ideas to justify existing inequalities in wealth, power and basic protections has much older roots. In that historical context, ‘social Darwinism’ and Herbert Spencer should be mentioned (both having excellent Wikipedia lemmas, which describe complexities I will skip here). However, that we keep using the term ‘Darwinism’ in only its most basic competitive sense at present, should worry us all. And that this pernicious use even occurs with writers who are clearly strongly opposed to the extreme, ‘dog eat dog’, libertarian worldview it reflects, should worry us even more. Why? Because words matter. They shape our reality and either open up or limit our imagination. This was also eloquently described in a previous editorial by AndrewMoore, when he discussed ‘caring language’ when talking about nature, to enhance chances of preserving more of it than we currently seem capable of.[5] He discusses the implicit tension between the necessarily precise, ‘objective’ language of (evolutionary) science and the subjective language of emotion, the latter urgently needed to make humanity more aware of the fact that we are an integral and vulnerable part of what we are describing. The distancing language of science can, for instance, easily be misused to justify the current mass extinction as ‘natural’ and unavoidable. Before concluding, I should stress that this repeated appeal for a more positive, historically correct, usage of ‘Darwinism’ does not come from a sense of frustration regarding the lack of effect of my previous editorial. A mental picture of the ‘Guardian headquarters in great turmoil asDaveSpeijer points out error’ shouldquickly dispel suchan idea. It goes without saying that framing the term in the way described, is deeply embedded in western culture by now. However, that a certain conceptual error seemspermanently ingrained shouldnotkeepus from pointing it out again and again: even The Guardian needs a scientific guardian. One might even conclude that the deep prejudices regarding nature’s mechanisms that this misuse highlights, oblige us to do so. So, for future reference: when using ‘Darwinian’ in a broader context, it must signify ‘in awe of the beauty and diversity of life, aware of its myriad interconnections and the value of cooperation’. Darwin would surely have approved.