Globaldarwin

Gene therapy deserves a fresh chanceInitial interest in gene therapy waned after the technology failed to live up to expectation. Progress made

since has received little attention, but suggests that the pervading sense of disillusionment is misplaced.

In the early 1990s, when the first human trials got under way, it seemed to many that the era of gene therapy was at hand: the tech-niques of modern molecular biotechnology would make it pos-

sible to repair genetic defects by inserting healthy DNA directly into a patient’s cells. The excitement was short-lived. Lasting effects proved difficult to obtain in early trials, and the community quickly grew sceptical. Then, in 2003, when it was announced that several gene-therapy patients in a Paris-based clinical trial had devel-oped leukaemia, and that one of them had died, the mood became bleak. Subsequent reports of successful and effective gene-therapy trials have done little to lift the prevailing sense of doom. For most researchers, gene therapy now seems like a dead end.

But it doesn’t have to be a dead end — not if scientists shift their perspective on the risks of gene therapy to be more in line with that of clinicians.

Scientists are trained to focus on understanding the systems that they study in great detail. And when they devise therapeutic interven-tions — for example, harnessing a viral shell to insert a therapeutic gene into a patient’s DNA — they naturally want those systems to be engineered with equally great care, and for them to be as near to risk-free perfection as possible.

Clinicians, by contrast, care for real patients in real time, which makes treatment decisions a matter of pragmatism. How do the risks stack up against the benefits for each available alternative — given that the risks are never zero? Clinicians are certainly not cavalier about their patients’ well-being, but they may well end up prescribing a therapy that has a poorly understood mechanism and potentially large side effects because it gives the patient the best odds of recovery or survival. If they — and patients — had shied away from such dangers in the past, life-saving interventions such as organ grafts and bone-marrow transplants might never have been developed.

From that perspective, the fact that, collectively, the Paris trial and others carried out since have produced positive results in some 20 patients out of a total of two dozen looms at least as large as the handful of leukaemia cases. To clinicians, such results suggest a treat-ment that is risky, but potentially life-saving — a new option for peo-ple for whom there are no alternatives.

However, this was not the view that prevailed. When the viral delivery vehicle itself turned out to be responsible for the leukaemia cases in the Paris trial, scientists deemed the trial a failure. Bad press ensued, pro-posals for gene-therapy clinical tri-als came under increased regulatory scrutiny and standards for demonstrating safety were set higher than for other approaches. Unsurprisingly in such a climate, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries gradually dropped out of the gene-therapy pursuit. This corporate disinterest slowed clinical progress: academic centres are ill-equipped to make gene-therapy vectors of clinical grade and scale, and research funding is typically insufficient to support clinical trials. More insidiously, it has become harder to recruit young talent to a field that is perceived as falling short of its promises.

To reverse this trend, it is time for researchers and industry to refresh their perspective on gene therapy and to consider its suc-cesses with as much intensity as its setbacks. The focus on adverse events has had positive consequences: researchers dissected the exact molecular mechanisms that led to cancer, designed better vectors, devised animal models to test these vectors and developed sophis-ticated assays for monitoring patients. As a result, both scientists and clinicians now have a battery of extraordinarily refined tools for preclinical and clinical studies of gene therapy. The field is ripe for further successes. ■

Darwin and cultureA new series of essays traces the astounding

variety of reactions to the theory of evolution.

The public reception of scientific ideas depends largely on two factors: people’s ability to grasp factual information and the cultural lens through which that information is filtered. The

former is what scientists tend to focus on when they give popular accounts of issues such as climate change. The assumption is that if they explain things very, very clearly, everyone will understand. Unfortunately, this is an uphill battle. The general public’s average capacity to weigh facts and numbers is notoriously poor — although

there is encouraging evidence that probabilistic reasoning can be improved by targeted education early in life (see page 1189).

Even more crucial, however, are the effects of the cultural lens. Over the coming month, Nature’s Opinion pages will explore particularly vivid examples of these effects in the world’s widely divergent reac-tions to Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see page 1200).

In England, for example, the Church reacted badly to Darwin’s theory, going so far as to say that to believe it was to imperil your soul. But the notion that Darwin’s ideas ‘killed’ God and were a threat to religion was by no means the universal response in the nineteenth century.

Darwin’s theory reached the world at a time when many people were looking for explanations for social, political and racial inequalities,

“The results suggest a treatment that is risky, but potentially life-saving.”

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and in many parts of the world were wondering how to improve their lot in the face of Europe’s global imperialism. So from Egypt to India, China and Japan, many religious scholars embraced Darwin’s ideas, often showing how their own schools of thought had anticipated the notion of evolution. Against the threat of Western imperialism and Western charges of ‘backwardness’, it was to their advantage to high-light the rationality of their creed.

In China, Darwin’s ideas were seen as supporting Confucians’ belief in the perfectibility of the cosmic order. Evolutionary theory also became fodder for political movements of revolution and reform, and eventually laid the groundwork for communism. Latin American politicians initially reacted to Darwin’s ideas by attempting to entice white Europeans to emigrate and intermarry with local populations, believing that this would ‘improve the stock’. But after two world wars had made European culture look less impressive, Latin America began to see its racial diversity as an advantage, and moved towards a social view that favoured a homogeneous blend of cultures.

In nineteenth-century Russia, meanwhile, a tendency to distrust rabid, dog-eat-dog capitalism helped incline naturalists away from

a view of evolution that emphasized competition between species. Instead they embraced a ‘theory of mutual aid’, an account that focused on the role of cooperation in ensuring survival in a harsh environment.

The lesson for today’s scientists and policy-makers is simple: they cannot assume that a public presented with ‘the facts’ will come to the same conclusion as themselves. They must take value systems, cultural backdrops and local knowledge gaps into account and frame their arguments accordingly. Such approaches will be crucial in facing current global challenges, from recessions to pandemics and climate change. These issues will be perceived and dealt with differently by different nations — not because they misunderstand, but because their understanding is in part locally dependent.

Darwin once said: “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trust-worthy.” Researchers and policy-makers would do well to mimic his humility when presenting science, and remember how people’s minds truly work. ■

Mind the spinScientists — and their institutions — should resist

the ever-present temptation to hype their results.

The circumstances surrounding the recent announcement of results from an HIV vaccine trial in Thailand are troubling. The sponsors of the US$119-million phase III clinical trial, a

consortium led by the US Army, the National Institutes of Health and the Thai government, announced on 24 September that the trial had been a success: an analysis of the data showed that the vaccine had a statistically significant effect on preventing infection.

Other scientists could not immediately assess that claim, however: the full data from the trial were not made available until 20 October, when they were presented at an AIDS vaccine conference in Paris and in an article published online the same day (S. Rerks-Ngarm et al. N. Engl. J. Med. doi:10.1056/nejmoa0908492; 2009). The arti-cle contained two other data analyses, not mentioned in the initial announcement, showing smaller effects that were not statistically significant (see page 1187).

The trial’s sponsors defend the premature announcement on the grounds that they had promised to inform the Thai people of the results first ; 24 September is also Mahidol Day, the anniversary of the death of the king’s father and a day of national observance in Thailand. The sponsors also argue that announcing the less-upbeat analyses along with the positive result would have been too compli-cated for the public to understand ; they wanted to quickly deliver a clear-cut message on the trial’s findings. Making the full data immediately available to scientists on 24 September would also have been impossible, they add, because of the conference and journal embargoes.

To their credit, the scientists involved did emphasize in their public statements that any vaccine effect was “modest”, and that

the vaccine itself was of no immediate public-health utility. At the same time, however, they hammered home the message that this was “the first time an HIV vaccine has successfully prevented HIV infection in humans” , and implied that the event was somehow historic. Such statements, together with the selective initial presentation of the data, are well outside the scientific norms for presenting the results of clinical trials. They inevitably create suspi-cion that the trial sponsors may have put an excessively positive spin on results that are far from clear-cut, in a trial that has long been contro-versial (T. V. Padma Nature Med. 10, 1267; 2004) . The trial has also been six years in the works, and so there seems no particular public-health urgency to justify publication by press conference.

Fortunately, such stories are still rare in science. Witness the way sci-entists have behaved since the begin-ning of the current H1N1 flu pandemic, in which the urgent threat to health creates legitimate tensions between getting results out fast and respecting peer review. Most researchers have negotiated this tension well, through a combination of fast-track publication by journals and online pre-publication sharing of preliminary data — but not through hyping their results.

Yet the temptation for scientists and their institutions to spin their research to the media, or to go publicity-mongering, is always there. And — as illustrated by the excessive public-relations campaign sur-rounding Ida, a fossil presented as a missing link in human evolution (see Nature 459, 484; 2009 and 461, 1040; 2009) — too many in the media will buy into the initial hype.

Such behaviour is corrosive to the process of scholarly scientific communication. Research institutions must not allow it to become the norm. ■

“The trial sponsors argue that announcing the less-upbeat analyses along with the positive result would have been too complicated for the public to understand.”

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Global Darwin: Eastern enchantmentPeople from Egypt to Japan used Darwin’s ideas to reinvent and reignite their core philosophies and religions,

says Marwa Elshakry in the first of four weekly pieces on how evolution was received around the world.

No other nineteenth-century scientist possessed Charles Dar-win’s global renown. Between

the appearance of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex some 12 years later, his works were discussed in scores of languages. Darwin noted in his autobiography, published in 1887, that the theory was debated as far afield as Japan, and added with some surprise that he’d even seen an essay on the Origin in Hebrew showing that “the theory is contained in the Old Testament!”

His worldwide fame was, in part, thanks to technology. The first telegraphic cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean floor around the time the Origin was published, and the next two decades saw Europe connected in the same way to India, China and Australasia. Mean-while, mechanical advances in paper making and printing helped to move ideas across the globe at record speeds.

Yet the main reason for the worldwide success of Darwin’s ideas was the ease with which they were assimilated into local traditions of thought — as the example of the Jewish attempt to reconcile science with scripture hints. Although Darwin himself may have found such recon-ciliation surprising, it was certainly not as unusual as he might have imagined. Scholars from Calcutta to Tokyo and Beijing constructed their own lineage for the theory of evolution by natural selection, tracing it to older and more familiar schools of thought and claiming owner-ship of what they saw as the precursors to these ideas. Although some, particularly in Europe, saw Darwin as a weapon beating down religious beliefs, around the world he was as much a force for religious resurgence and revivification as for religious scepticism. Even nineteenth-century Muslim thinkers reconciled Darwinian ideas with their own past religious and philosophical texts; which may seem ironic, given the rise of Muslim creationists today.

Cosmic orderTake as one example the work of Chinese scholar Yan Fu. In the late 1890s, Yan pub-lished a popular translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in which he reinterpreted both Huxley and Darwin in the light of Confucian ethical debates.

Huxley, one of Darwin’s most vocal

supporters, had argued that humans acted against the natural order of things when putting the interests of others above themselves. But for Yan, this gloomy view of nature ran counter to what he understood to be Darwin’s — and Confucius’s — belief

in the perfectibility of the cosmic order. Echo-ing older Confucian ethical debates while drawing on his own reading of Darwin and other Victorian naturalists, Yan argued that selfishness and selflessness were part of the natural order, and that each has its place in the journey towards an ideal state: the key is to achieve the right balance between the two. This was how Darwin effectively gave Yan, and many of Yan’s readers, new licence to endorse one of Confucianism’s ethical prescriptions.

Darwin’s ideas were similarly used by late-nineteenth-century Bengali intelligentsia to support long-standing Hindu cosmological beliefs. Some of these thinkers wrote of how modern theories of positivism (the idea that true knowledge is that based on verifiable sensory experience) and evolutionism had ech-oes in Hindu theories of creation.

For example, Satish Mukherjee, a leading member of the Indian Positivist Society, saw Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Hindu philosophy, as a precursor to the modern view of evolution. Under Samkhya, the world unfolds as a result of a continual cycle between creation and dissolution: consciousness, self or spirit becomes realized in matter and then separated from it, and so on. These cycles are seen to account for the creation of species as well as for the evolution of different stages of the Universe. For Mukherjee, as for many later Indian thinkers, Samkhya was therefore the theory of evolution applied to the entire cosmos.

Muslim readers found their heritage in Darwin’s theory too. Supporters and crit-ics pointed out that Muslim philosophers had long referred to the idea that species or ‘kinds’, as the Arabic term anwa‘ suggests, could change over time. For this reason the great classics of early Muslim philosophy and cosmology were almost always cited whenever Darwin was discussed in Arabic, Farsi or Urdu.

Muslim writings from the tenth and eleventh centuries referred to a hierarchy of beings, from minerals to flora and fauna, and even argued that apes were lower forms of humans — more evidence for nineteenth-century Mus-lims that Darwin’s theory was ‘nothing new’.

Empire and evolutionOne of the driving forces behind many of these scholars’ work was a desire to push back against the forces of Western imperialism. At the height of European imperial power, claims about white superiority were widespread. In response, defenders of non-Western faiths drew attention to the greater rationality of their creeds to defend themselves against Western charges of backwardness and super-stition. Many were keen to show that their traditions, unlike those of Western Europe, accepted, reinforced or had even anticipated the findings of modern science. By embracing Darwin’s ideas, they emphasized that Christi-anity alone was in conflict with science.

Muhammad Abduh, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, for instance, was worried about the inroads that missionaries had made into the educational system of the Muslim Ottoman lands. He was also tired of critics pointing to Islam’s supposed inability to accommodate modern pedagogy and science. In Science and Civilization in Christianity and Islam (1902), Abduh argued that, in contrast to Christianity,

Islam was free of the con-flict with science that had so violently plagued Chris-tian civilization in Europe. To stress this difference, he repeatedly wove references to Darwin and evolution

into lectures on the exegesis of the Koran.Although many used Darwin to highlight

the glory of their founding civilizations, they also co-opted his theory to explain their falling behind the Western world in modern times. It was seen as a way to explain both the rise of the West’s technological and imperial superiority in the present, and the path to success for the rest of the world in the future.

At the height of the scramble for Africa in 1899, for instance, the Egyptian intellectual and women’s-rights advocate Qasim Amin warned that “Western civilization, speeded by steam and electricity, is advancing and

“By embracing Darwin’s ideas, they emphasized that

Christianity alone was in conflict with science.”

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has expanded from its origins to all parts of the earth”. The weak, he warned, would be unable to survive the onslaught. For civil serv-ant Amin, this meant that social reform was needed. ‘Self-strengthening’ state reformers in Korea and Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century felt much the same way, and they too turned to evolution’s advocates for instruction while pushing key governmental reforms. Of course, the battle cry of intellectu-als was not always heeded.

In promoting political ‘evolution’, most of Darwin’s proponents outside Europe sub-scribed not to revolution, but to change of a very gradual sort, mimicking the step-by-step slow change of natural selection.

Hiroyuki Kato, an instructor of law at the Tokyo Imperial University, used Darwin’s theory to defend Japan’s imperial rule at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time, a rise of democratic movements was challenging the power of the Emperor Meiji. Kato, who also gave weekly lectures to the Emperor on constitutional and international law, supported a strongly centralized imperial line of rule. He found in Darwinism a new lan-guage in which to dress his arguments and a scientific explanation for why radical change wasn’t the answer to Japan’s problems.

Kato reinterpreted Darwin’s ‘struggle for life’ as a slow, steady ‘struggle for ethics’. The ethic he favoured could be counted as part of the samurai principle of self-sacrifice, which in this case he took to mean absolute allegiance to the Emperor above all other commitments. Just as through death the samurai was said to become the perfect winner, so the ulti-mate victor in the struggle for ethics was the

martyr dying for the sake of something bigger.This demonstrates another characteristic

common to non-European responses to Dar-winism: the real question most saw lurking behind the theory of evolution was whether one could draw a moral code from nature. For Kato as for so many others, mere survival was not enough to comprise a true ethics — evolution-ary or otherwise. There had to be something beyond life to give life itself a purpose. As Mus-lim reformer Muhammad Iqbal later put it, the main problem with Darwin’s view of evolution was that it gave death ‘no constructive mean-ing’. Perhaps for this reason, many attached their own meanings and linked Darwin to long-standing ethical systems of their own.

Paragon of scepticism?If the ease with which Darwin’s ideas were assimilated into local traditions of thought is little known today, it is because much of the discussion about Darwin in the West has focused on the supposed clash between his theory of evolution and Christianity. Cer-tainly, ever since 1859, Darwin’s name has been invoked by supporters of the forces of science in their battle against religion, and the image of Darwin as a paragon of religious scepticism has helped him to become an enduring icon of the modern sciences.

Darwin’s theory did indeed help to sharpen the sense of a boundary between ideas of science and of religious faith. For disciples such as Huxley, Darwin’s empirical approach offered a way to distinguish knowledge from belief, or fact from fiction. The Church of Eng-land, along with many other establishments, fought back: bishops preached that to believe

Darwin was to risk endangering one’s soul. Yet in truth, things were never this simple.

Darwin was indefinite and at times incon-sistent on the question of religion in his own writings. He famously left the ultimate origin of species ambiguous in the last line of the Origin — speaking of the power of life as ‘originally breathed’ into one or several forms, deploying a key Christian metaphor for creation — and he often conveyed himself as an agnostic in his let-ters. Not all Christians recoiled from Darwin’s ideas; some Protestants and Catholics believed that they too could reconcile their doctrines with his theory and were spurred to revisit their own interpretation of scripture.

Then, as now, Darwin meant different things to different people. Globally, he was not so much a revolutionary or a scourge of faiths, as he was a revivifier of traditions. He straddled worlds between the moderns and the ancients, giving a new lease of life to ancient philosophers, ethical debates and even dynastic loyalties.

In an age in which advocates of intelligent design battle to have evolution removed from classrooms, we would do well to recall how Darwin once captured and captivated the world — not by ridding it of the forces of enchantment, faith or even God, but by revi-talizing traditions of belief and re-enchanting so many. ■

Marwa Elshakry is associate professor of history

at Columbia University, 611 Fayerweather Hall,

New York, New York 10027, USA, and is the

author of the forthcoming Reading Darwin in the

Middle East (University of Chicago Press).

See Editorial, page 1173. Further reading accompanies this article online. For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin

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Global Darwin: Contempt for competitionDarwin’s idea of the ‘struggle for existence’ struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected

the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged his intellec-tual debt to the Reverend Thomas

Robert Malthus. That debt had radi-cally different consequences for his British and Russian readers.

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improve-ment of Society (1798), Malthus argued against believers in social progress by citing an inexo-rable natural law: population tends to increase geometrically and food supply only arithmeti-cally. These imbalanced progressions lead to a “struggle for existence” in which the winners prospered and the losers suffered privation and premature death. Nature itself decreed that human misery was inevitable.

By Darwin’s day, Malthus’s theory had entered the mainstream of British thought. Pondering possible mechanisms of evolution in 1838, the 29-year-old Darwin picked up Malthus’s essay. Never a full-throated Malthu-sian in his political attitudes, he nevertheless adapted Malthus’s idea to his science. “As more individuals are produced than can pos-sibly survive,” he explained in On the Origin of Species (1859), “there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”

Darwin recognized that he was using the term “struggle for existence in a large and metaphorical sense” to encompass a variety of natural relations that one wouldn’t neces-sarily conceive of as a battle: not just two dogs fighting over a scrap of food, but also a plant seek-ing moisture in the desert, or the dependence of one being on another.

For Darwin and other leading British evolution-ists, this appealed to common sense. Living on a crowded island with a capitalist economy and highly individualist culture, struggle for existence did not seem a metaphor at all, but, rather, a simple and eloquent description of nature and society.

Russians, however, lived in a very different land. Their own cultural values and experiences

would lead them to reject Darwin’s Malthusian metaphor. This in turn affected a wide range of research — from studies of the mutual aid among migrating fish to a Nobel prizewin-ning theory of inflammation and immunity — and echoed well into

the twentieth century, perhaps even playing a part in the enthronement of Lysenkoism. This Russian response provides a striking exam-ple of the way in which metaphors — and the experiences and cultural traditions that they capture — shape scientific thought.

The experiences of leading Russian natu-ralists were in many ways opposite to those of Darwin and his fellow proposer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. The two men shared seminal field experiences in densely populated tropical environments. The contest between organisms seemed obvious there. Most Russian naturalists, by contrast, investigated a vast under-populated continental plain. For them, nature was not an “entangled bank” — the image Darwin took from the Brazilian jungle. It was a largely empty Siberian expanse in which overpopulation was rare and only the struggle of organisms against a harsh environment was dramatic.

Cultural divideRussia’s economy, political structure and culture also contrasted sharply with those in the United Kingdom. Capitalism was only weakly devel-oped and political supporters of the two most important classes, rich landlords and peasants, spoke the language of communalism — stress-ing not individual initiative and struggle, but the importance of cooperation within social groups

and the virtues of social harmony. Russian political commentators of the left, right and centre reviled Malthus as an apologist for predatory capitalism and soulless individualism.

The cultural gulf between the two lands was captured by demographer and biologist Nikolai Danilevskii’s summary of the British character in his book Russia and Europe (1869). The typi-cal Englishman, he wrote, “accepts [struggle] with all its consequences, demands it as his right, tolerates no limits upon it”. In his two vol-umes on Darwinism (1885, 1889), he catalogued

the lengths to which the English went to indulge their passion for individualistic conflict. They boxed one-on-one (not in groups, as Russians liked to spar), founded debating societies for the “struggle of opinions”, and even established mountain-climbing clubs, not for scholarly purposes, “but solely to allow oneself the satisfaction of overcoming difficulties and dangers … in competition with others”.

Small wonder, then, that few Russians shared Darwin and Wallace’s respect for Malthus, and that many saw the struggle for existence as an infusion of the British enthusiasm for indi-vidualistic competition into natural science. Darwin’s theory, as Danilevskii put it, was “a purely English doctrine”.

Most Russian naturalists, many of whom were evolutionists before 1859, shared that view. Yet they also admired Darwin and didn’t think his association with Malthus justified complete rejection of his theory. Their com-mon response was to break down Darwin’s Malthusian metaphor into its component parts, to explore their relationship and relative importance in nature and to conclude that he had greatly exaggerated the role of the two parts most closely associated with Malthus: overpopulation as the generator of conflict, and intraspecific competition as its result.

This common response defined a general direction, but individual scientists took different paths. Russia’s leading botanist, Andrei Beketov, concluded that intraspecific struggle was a minor note within the general “harmony of nature”. Devaluing natural selection, he reaffirmed his long-standing view that evolution resulted chiefly from the direct action of the environ-ment on organisms. Botanical geographer Sergei Korzhinskii was led to his ‘theory of heterogen-esis’ — the idea that mutations create large, step changes that could yield new species in a single move. This theory, he emphasized, offered the great advantage of denying any creative evolutionary role to the struggle for existence, which he thought merely pruned the rich tree of nature. Zoologist Ilya Mechnikov empha-sized interspecific struggle. This proved crucial to his development of the ‘phagocytic theory of inflammation and immunity’, for which he received a share of a Nobel prize in 1908.

The critique of Darwin’s metaphor led many Russian naturalists to the theory of mutual aid, which emphasized the importance of

“In the Siberian expanse, only the struggle of

organisms against a harsh environment was dramatic.”

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cooperation. Darwin too had called attention to such cooperation, but the theory of mutual aid went further. It held that the central aspect of the struggle for existence is an organism’s struggle with abiotic conditions, that organ-isms join forces in this struggle, that such mutual aid is favoured by natural selection, and that cooperation so vitiated intraspecific competition as to render it unimportant in the origin of new species. Often voiced in the 1860s and 1870s by lay intellectuals and scientists of every political stripe, this view was first systematized by St Petersburg Uni-versity’s ichthyologist Karl Kessler, whose oral presentation On the Law of Mutual Aid (1879) transformed this widespread sentiment into a staple of Russian evolutionary thought.

Anarchistic associationWesterners, however, soon came to associate this view with one of Kessler’s admirers, the exiled anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin. In a mirror image of the Russian response to Dar-win’s invocation of Malthus, western Europeans often dismissed the theory of mutual aid as a simplistic expression of Kropotkin’s anarchism.

Yet Kropotkin’s critique of Darwin’s Malthu-sianism had originated in 1862–67, long before he became a committed anarchist. He had trav-elled through Siberia with a series of military and commercial expeditions, traversing more than 80,000 kilometres in the same role of gentleman-observer that had taken Darwin, decades earlier, to the tropics. Already an evo-lutionist, Kropotkin read Origin in the Siberian wilderness, and found the emphasis on over-population and intraspecific competition unconvincing. As an exile in England years later,

an appalled Kropotkin read Huxley’s “atrocious article” on The Struggle for Existence in Human Society (1888). His responses, brought together in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), reflected the basic logic of the Russian national style, just as Huxley’s essay reflected that of his own homeland.

The struggle for existence remained a preoccupation for Russian evolutionists well into the 1920s and 1930s. Among them was Georgii Gause, who developed the ‘competi-tive exclusion principle’ (which held that no two species could share the same ecological niche in a stable environment). His laboratory experi-ments and mathematical analyses confirmed the importance of intraspecific competition, contrary to the traditional Russian consensus.

In 1948, Joseph Stalin himself encouraged Trofim Lysenko to add an extensive critique of Darwin’s “Malthusian error” to Lysenko’s landmark speech about his own ‘creative’ Darwinism. As a young revolutionary at the turn of the century, Stalin had read Dar-win and taken an interest in evolutionary theory. Lysenko’s doctrine, which was forci-bly imposed on Soviet biology from 1948 to 1964 by Stalin and his minions, endorsed the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired character-istics, rejected the gene as a material unit of heredity, and denied the evolutionary role of overpopulation and intraspecific competition. The long-standing Russian critique of Darwin’s Malthusianism did not cause Lysenkoism, but it seems possible that, by influencing Stalin, it contributed to this tragedy.

A different metaphor caused Darwin prob-lems in his native land. Wallace remarked, in his article Mr. Darwin’s Metaphors Liable to

Misconception (1868), that the Malthusian progressions and struggle for existence were self-evident “facts”. Yet because natural selection seemed to personify a perceptive and forward-thinking selector, or god, he urged Darwin to replace the term with “survival of the fittest”.

Darwin, however, had brushed him off. “Every one knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions,” he had demurred. “And they are almost necessary for brevity.”

On this point Darwin was surely mistaken. Metaphors are brief, but they are fruitful and powerful precisely because they are not clear. They propose open-ended associations that acquire specific meaning only in the mind of individuals who consider for themselves, based on their experiences, how precisely existence is a ‘struggle’, an animal is a ‘machine’ or DNA a ‘code’. Those associations and meanings often have a cultural component.

Researchers bring their life experiences and culture with them into the field and labora-tory, and in the course of their investigations actively originate, interpret, develop and reject metaphorical pathways. As is shown by the reception of Darwin’s theory in Russia, the deployment and criticism of metaphors are part of the ineffably human process by which scientists mobilize their experiences and values to explore the infinite complexity of nature. ■Daniel Todes is at the Institute of the History of

Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, 1900 East

Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.

He is currently completing a biography of Ivan Pavlov.

e-mail: [email protected]

For further reading, see go.nature.com/c8Abz5For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin

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Global Darwin: Revolutionary road In China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin’s ideas paved the way for

Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory.

Charles Darwin’s banner was first unfurled in China dur-ing the Reform Movement

of 1895–98, in response to China’s defeat in the Sino–Japanese War. This had been the most crushing moment in what the Chinese call their century of humiliation, during which the Manchu Qing Dynasty barely survived five great rebellions, and lost four wars against for-eign imperialists: Britain, Britain and France, France, and — most galling of all — Japan. This last defeat was the most frightening, not because the Chinese feared ‘puny Japan’, as they often called it, but because they feared that the European powers, emboldened by this dem-onstration of weakness, would “carve up the Chinese melon” into colonies.

The watchword of the reform movement was ‘bianfa’, meaning ‘change our insti-tutions’. But the very word ‘change’ was anathema to the conservative officialdom of China. So reformers turned to Darwin as a foreign authority on change, presenting him not first and foremost as a natural scientist who had discovered an amazing fact of life, but as a political scientist who had discov-ered a cosmic imperative for change.

Meanwhile, the Europeans waved Darwin’s banner to justify imperialism. Dubbing them-selves ‘the fit’, they declared their right to rule the ‘unfit’. And some Chinese accepted this argument. Liang Qichao, one of the lead-ing reformers, said in 1898: “If a country can strengthen itself and make itself one of the fit-test, then, even if it annihilates the unfit and the weak, it can still not be said to be immoral. Why? Because it is a law of evolution.”

The reformers had to find hope in On the Origin of Species. And they did, but their most optimistic interpretations were based on a handful of mistranslations, themselves based on a series of misunderstandings. (Westerners leapt to these misunderstandings as well — without the benefit of mistranslations.)

Chinese readings of Darwin inspired two groups — reformers and revolutionaries — to attempt to change their society through dif-ferent means. Ultimately, after the failure of both groups and an erosion of traditional phi-losophies, Chinese Darwinian thinking pre-pared the nation for the rhetoric of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Mao Zedong.

The man who introduced Darwinian evolution to the reform-ers of 1895 was Yan Fu. Yan had graduated from the naval academy at Fuzhou, and was sent to England in 1877 for further study of the naval arts, which patriots hoped would

one day help drive European imperialists out of the China Sea. But in England, Yan discov-ered political philosophy, which he came to think of as the true secret of Britain’s ‘fitness’. He returned to China in 1879 with a bundle of books, by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Dar-win and others, that he thought could rescue China from extinction. He meant to translate them, but did not publish anything for about 15 years, when goaded into action by the insult and injury of the war with Japan.

In 1895 Yan published his first essay, Whence Strength?, soon followed by a brilliant, periphrastic translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, which Yan wrote in such elegant classical Chinese that even conserva-tives respected the text. The Origin itself was too long and too difficult for Yan to tackle. But Yan’s translations were enough to introduce to China the basic ideas of evolution and, more importantly, the handful of Darwinian slo-gans that were taken up by social Darwinists around the world.

Subtle errors of translation, however, went with them: “natural selection” came out as “natural elimination”; the “survival of the fittest” became the “superior survive and the inferior are defeated”; and, causing the most confusion of all, “evolution” became jinhua lun, “the theory of progressive change”. Strictly speaking, Darwin did not prove that evolution led to progress; to this day, that mis-translation makes it hard to discuss evolution in Chinese. As Confucius said: “If terms are not correct, discourse is difficult.”

Just before Darwin’s ideas reached China, the scholar and bureaucrat Kang Youwei argued that Confucius had delineated three stages of world progress: chaos, ascending peace and great peace. A mixture of these ideas soon spawned a plethora of ‘stage theories’ of his-tory, all of which claimed to outline the natural and inevitable development of all ‘fit races’. This seemingly benign idea — that cosmic forces

or natural laws were perfecting mankind and human society — eventually led to racist or class philosophies that killed people.

Natural lawAt the start of the reform movement, the promise of Darwinian progress (which was not really Darwinian) seemed to hold the key to China’s salvation. China was in the monarchy stage and should hence move on to the consti-tutional monarchy stage. The fittest nation on Earth, Great Britain, had shown the way.

Yan wanted democracy for China — even anarchic democracy, without presidential rule. In Whence Strength? his call for reform was revolutionary: “Establish a parliament at the capital and let each province and county elect its own officials.” But ‘Darwin’ held him back from real revolution. Yan believed that step-by-step progress was a fixed natural law, so stages had to be taken in order. America had skipped constitutional monarchy and gone straight to democracy, but a resulting class war, he felt, would be their undoing. “Should we, then, now throw away all loyalty to our ruler?” he asked in his essay. “We most certainly should not! Because the time has not arrived. … Our people are not yet ready to rule themselves.” (An argument that Chinese governments have

used ever since to postpone democracy.)

Sun Yat-sen, later dubiously dubbed the father or George Washington of his country, was also a professed Darwinian, and an advocate of democracy.

But Sun was as convinced that Darwinism was for revolution as Yan, Kang and Liang were convinced that it was for reform. One of Sun’s followers, Zou Rong, put it most succinctly: “Revolution is a law of Evolution.”

Taking advantage of the war against Japan, Sun and his would-be revolutionaries put their philosophy into action in 1895, hiring an ‘army’ from a secret society in Hong Kong in an attempt to capture the city of Guangzhou and trigger a revolution. It was an almost farcical failure. They arrived in Guangzhou by ferry, but their weapons were on the wrong boat, leaving them unarmed for their grand revolution. The police easily quashed them, although Sun man-aged to escape, eventually to Japan.

A few years later, the reformers had only a

“Chinese readings of Darwin inspired two groups — reformers and revolutionaries.”

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little more luck. They won the ear of the young Guangxu Emperor and established a constitu-tional monarchy — on paper — in the summer of 1898. But the Emperor’s aunt, the Empress Dowager, crushed the reform movement, beheaded the six leaders she could catch and put the Emperor under lifelong house arrest. Yan was somehow left alone. Others, led by Kang and Liang, took refuge in Japan.

The two self-professed Darwinian camps had much in common. Both believed in stage theories of history. Both were for democracy — but not yet. Confucian philosophy led them to believe that the fit were those who made them-selves fit, and Daoist thinking made it easy to believe in a natural path that the fit could fol-low to survive. Both believed, at once, in deter-minism and ‘determinationism’ — a potent if illogical mix that at once met impatient patriots’ demand for action and promised victory.

Sadly, both camps also accepted the per-vasive Western view that Darwin had proven races unequal — that one race was ‘fitter’ and therefore better than another. The reformers had originally done so to disassociate them-selves from those who had fallen prey to the imperialists, such as the Africans and Indians. But in their exile in Japan, reformers and revo-lutionaries alike turned angrily on the Manchus as scapegoats, labelling them evolutionary low life, whose ‘unnatural’ conquest of the Han Chinese was responsible for China’s peril.

There were also crucial differences between the camps. The reformers, despite everything, remained loyal to the Guangxu Emperor. They were convinced that the stage of consti-tutional monarchy could not be skipped, and

they were against civil war. The revolutionaries believed that the Qing dynasty needed to be overthrown, that China could ‘lie deng’ (leap over stages) to catch up to the West and that civil war was an indispensable precondition of China’s evolution or progress. For a decade the two groups debated the reform or revolution question in Chinese journals smuggled back to China from Japan — with both sides wildly waving Darwin’s banner.

Enter the MarxistsIn the end, the debate between reformers and revolutionaries was settled by a nearly acciden-tal success. On a truly dark and stormy night in October 1911, Sun’s followers pulled off an uprising in Wuchang. The dynasty soon fell, with Yuan Shikai, the leading ‘loyalist’ general, bought off with a gift of the presidency. But Yuan killed the Republic by trying to crown himself Emperor. Yuan’s generals baulked. Yuan died. China fell to pieces, ruled by warlords. The debate over reform and revolution revived. Eventually the New Culture Movement arose, with Darwinian reruns, as reformers gave up on politics, embracing instead cultural reform — until 1919, when the Western powers betrayed China when they signed the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, granting Ger-many’s ‘possessions’ in China to Japan.

In all of this, “politics”, as Mao would later say, were “in command”. Few Chinese seemed shocked by the fact of evolution, or indeed overly interested in it. Unlike Europeans, few perceived, at first, any threat to their traditional philosophies or religions. But in the decade that followed the failure of the Reform Movement,

Chinese philosophies — Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism — did come under attack, as pacifistic doctrines that were unfit because they had rendered China unfit to sur-vive. And so, both philosophically and politically, reformers and revolutionaries together created a naturally abhorrent vacuum.

Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intel-lectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive.

This was not, of course, all Darwin’s doing, but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped). One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a ‘racial’ struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.

Who taught Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin. ■

James Pusey is a professor of Chinese Studies

at Bucknell University, 701 Moore Avenue,

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837, USA. He is the

author of China and Charles Darwin (1983) and

Lu Xun and Evolution (1998).


See go.nature.com/jCS3QL for further reading. For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin

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Global Darwin: Multicultural mergersLatin Americans first saw evolution as a reason to ‘whiten’ their societies, then as a reason to take pride in

their mixed lineage, says Jürgen Buchenau in the last of four pieces on Darwin’s global influence.

On 28 February 1832, the HMS Beagle arrived at the port of Bahia, Brazil, its second

stop on a five-year exploration of the globe. The impressions that the continent’s peculiar animal and plant life made on the 22-year-old Charles Darwin have been well documented. Less well known is the effect Darwin had on the people of Latin America.

In the late 1800s, Latin American intellectuals, many of whom were politicians, used Dar-win’s ideas to promote mass immigration from Europe to ‘whiten’ and so ‘evolve’ their people. Some 50 years later, Latin American thinkers abandoned this emphasis on European superi-ority and instead supported the racial mixing, education and unification of the region’s exist-ing populations. That the social implications of evolution were interpreted so differently in such a short period of time is testament to the extraordinary ability of people to bend Darwin’s ideas to fit ever-changing intellectual and political contexts.

Darwin’s life and work coincided with the beginnings of modernization of the larger Latin American nations after a long period of chaos. By 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico had suffered decades of economic stagnation and political instability after achiev-ing independence from European countries in the 1820s. Their largely Catholic societies were made up of African American and Amerindian majorities dominated by a small white elite.

Throughout the continent, this elite tended to divide into liberals and conservatives, with each group having different takes on how to improve society. The conservatives, wary of Protestant nations such as the United States, favoured the development of internal economic markets. The liberals, many of whom had stud-ied overseas, believed that foreign investment was key to building their countries’ infrastruc-ture. In the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury, when industrial production skyrocketed in western Europe and North America, liberals gained power throughout Latin America, and directed the destinies of most nations until the Great Depression of the 1930s.

As well as developing export economies to feed Western demand for raw materials, lib-eral politicians sought to evolve their societies

based on their own version of social Darwinism. They soaked up the latest ideas from Europe, and read the works of philosophers such as Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the inventor of eugenics. Most Latin Americans

thought that society, like nature, evolved from primitive to complex structures, and saw the industrial societies of western Europe as being more culturally sophisticated than their own. They maintained that Latin American societies could evolve towards the supposedly superior European and US models.

Modernizers held various views on how best to achieve this progressive change. Some embraced the ‘hard inheritance’ theory of Ger-man priest and biologist Gregor Mendel, and argued that ‘whitening’ their nations’ stock through interbreeding was the only path to societal improvement. Others followed the ‘soft inheritance’ notion of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and countered that peo-ple’s inheritable traits could be changed simply by altering their environment, including their education, diet and living conditions.

Initially, the Mendelians prevailed. Latin American governments attempted to recruit prospective European immi-grants. The surge of Euro-peans that had entered the United States had shown the draw of available farmland in attracting foreigners. With scant funds, governments sponsored colonizing com-panies to send recruiters to Europe to lure farmers to underpopulated rural areas in Latin America.

Those countries with ample farmland and a climate similar to that of western Europe suc-ceeded in pulling people across. Between 1870 and 1930, more than 11 million Britons, Ger-mans, Irish, Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards settled in Argentina, southern Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. By 1900, people of European origin dominated society in Argentina and Uruguay. Other nations with large indigenous populations and little available farmland — such as Mexico and Peru — saw much less immigration from Europe.

European ideas and values spread across Latin America at the expense of Amerindian

and African American ones, with the estab-lishment of European-style cities and institu-tions. For example, the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz remodelled parts of Mexico City, importing Italian marble to replace local build-ing materials and following European trends in architecture and street design. They pushed the poor majority out of sight when foreign investors came to visit the capital.

No European supermanAttempts to westernize Latin Americans were short-lived: the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century destroyed the liberal mod-ernizers’ belief in European superiority — and with it, the idea of historical evolution through white immigration.

The death toll of the First World War demonstrated that Europeans had not evolved into superior human beings. A decade later, the Great Depression swept away the export econo-mies underlying modernization in Argentina at least as much as it did in Mexico and Peru, bely-ing the notion that the whitening of the popu-lation would lead to permanent social progress. And amid the global economic crisis, the rise of totalitarian systems in Germany and the Soviet Union stripped away most of the remaining

admiration Latin American intellectuals held for Euro-pean models.

Instead of rejecting Dar-win’s ideas outright, a new group of intellectuals — the cultural nationalists — came up with a revised formulation of how their societies should

evolve. Although Darwin wasn’t specifically invoked in such theories, his body of thought was still influential; so much so that the cul-tural nationalists might today be described as having adopted their own brand of social Darwinism. In particular, Mexican and Bra-zilian thinkers began to see the unique ethnic mixtures that shaped their nations as assets rather than liabilities — as long as those of Afri-can, European and Amerindian descent could be fused into a single culture. They increasingly began to tout the blending of racial groups as a way to forge new and improved social sys-tems — societies that would not suffer from Europe’s many ills. Not all agreed: for much of the twentieth century, Argentines continued

“Most Latin Americans thought that society, like nature, evolved

from primitive to complex structures.”

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to hope that their largely European-populated capital of Buenos Aires would someday emerge as the Paris of the New World.

Instead of encouraging immigration and with that, greater technological and societal complexity, Latin American cultural nation-alists wanted to unify society through public education. Education had been available to no more than 15% of the population in most countries, and cultural nationalists knew that the expansion of literacy among the poor, non-European majority was crucial to instilling a sense of national pride and citizenship. Even more importantly, they knew that literacy campaigns would give them an opportunity to promote an official version of history — one that emphasized racial and ethnic blending as a source of national pride.

The cosmic raceJosé Vasconcelos, Mexico’s first cabinet-level education secretary and a university-educated man of European descent, was one person who adopted this viewpoint. He argued that traditions of the past were something people should be proud of but that progress in the present required eroding cultural diversity by means of mass education. His La Raza Cós-mica (The Cosmic Race) essay, published in 1925, presented Mexican history as an evolu-tionary process that led from Aztec and Euro-pean beginnings to the mestizo, a mixture of European and Amerindian ancestry. Vascon-celos thought that the mestizo was a ‘cosmic race’ that was superior to its component parts. He highlighted the cultural achievements of the pre-Columbian civilizations, but argued that social progress would come from assimi-lating their descendants into the mestizo iden-tity. Vasconcelos designed a rural education

programme intended to bring literacy to those who could not read, and Spanish to the Amer-indian minority that spoke more than 60 dif-ferent languages and dialects. It took decades for the programme to succeed.

In the 1930s, Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre similarly proposed that Brazil was a “racial democracy” whose people considered racial blending an advantage rather than a dis-advantage. In an argument that became known as Lusotropicalism, Freyre maintained that the Portuguese colonists who brought African slaves to Brazil were uniquely suited to survive in the tropics and that the subsequent inter-mixing had created a harmonious society that contrasted positively with the racism persisting in the United States.

Freyre’s ideas, most famously laid out in his 1933 Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), contradicted the stark realities in Brazil where social status was largely predicated on the degree of African ancestry, and Brazilians of European descent held virtually all important political and economic positions. Like Vascon-celos, Freyre can be interpreted as borrowing from Darwin in arguing for the melding of races as a positive evolutionary step. Freyre also did so in part to play down social problems.

After Vasconcelos and Freyre, Darwin-inspired thought in Latin America became unfashionable, in large part due to the effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Just as the First World War had eroded the idea of European superiority, the Second World War dealt a serious blow to notions of human history as a progressive process. After the war, Latin Americans still found themselves lagging behind the industrialized world in terms of economic development. Influenced by social-ism, many Latin American intellectuals and

politicians discarded the idea of evolutionary, gradual progress, embracing instead social revolution as the solution to the region’s prob-lems. Rather than imitating the Europeans and the United States, socialists saw the industri-alized North Atlantic societies as part of the problem. In 1959, the Cuban Revolution set up Latin America’s first communist government, and in the 1970s, socialist governments were established in Chile and Nicaragua.

From roughly 1870 to about 1930, Darwin’s ideas resonated in Latin American political thought. During this relatively short period, Latin America’s intellectuals went from thinking that evolution by natural selection explained European geopolitical superiority to using evolutionary models to promote cultural nationalism and the unification of the multi-racial societies in which they lived. Either way, they found Darwin’s notion of evolution use-ful in developing their ideas. As these nations struggled to unify their mix of indigenous, European and African populations, they saw themselves — as did their counterparts in the United States, Canada and Australia — as societies under construction from scratch. Throughout, Latin American political thinkers shared an optimistic belief that these societies could and would ‘evolve’ in a positive direction — whatever that direction might be. ■

Jürgen Buchenau is chair of the department

of history at the University of North Carolina

at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard,

Charlotte, North Carolina 28223, USA, and is the

author of Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico.


See go.nature.com/5bHVBD for further reading.For more on Darwin see www.nature.com/darwin, or to discuss all four pieces in the Global Darwin series see go.nature.com/Figu8x.

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