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A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

Natural History, Sept, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

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As the years wore on, Lankester became ever more stuffy and isolated in his elitist attitudes and fealty to a romanticized vision of a more gracious past. He opposed the vote for women and became increasingly wary of democracy and mass action, writing in 1900: "Germany did not acquire its admirable educational system by popular demand.... The crowd cannot guide itself, cannot help itself in its blind impotence." He excoriated all "modern" trends in the arts, especially cubism in painting and self-expression (rather than old-fashioned storytelling) in literature. Writing to H.G. Wells in 1919, he stated: "The rubbish and self-satisfied bosh which pours out now in magazines and novels is astonishing. The authors are so set upon being `clever,' `analytical,' and `up-to-date,' and are really mere prattling infants."

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As a senior statesman of science, Lankester kept his earlier relationship with Marx safely hidden. He confessed to his dearest friend and near contemporary, H.G. Wells, that he had known Karl Marx, but he never told the young communist J.B.S. Haldane, whom he befriended late in life and admired greatly. When, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Highgate burial, the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow tried to obtain reminiscences from all those who had known Karl Marx, Lankester, by then the only living witness of Marx's funeral, replied curtly that he had no letters and would offer no personal comments.

Needless to say, neither the fate of the world nor the continued progress of evolutionary biology depend to the slightest perceptible degree upon a resolution of this strange affinity between two such different people. But little puzzles gnaw at the soul of any scholar, and answers to small problems sometimes lead to larger insights rooted in the principles utilized for explanation. I believe that I have developed a solution, satisfactory (at least) for the dissolution of my own former puzzlement. But, surprisingly to me, no decisive fact emerged from the literature in which I finally found enough information to write this essay--the recent Lankester biography mentioned above and two excellent articles on the relationship of Marx and Lankester: "The friendship of Edwin Ray Lankester and Karl Marx," by Lewis S. Feuer (Journal of the History of Ideas 40, 1979) and "Marx's Darwinism: a historical note," by Diane B. Paul (Socialist Review 13, 1983). Rather, my proposed solution invokes a principle that may seem disappointing and entirely uninteresting at first but that may embody a generality worth discussing, particularly for the analysis of historical sequences--a common form of inquiry in both human biography and evolutionary biology. In short, I finally realized I had been asking the wrong question all along.

A conventional solution would try to dissolve the anomaly by arguing that Marx and Lankester shared far more similarity in belief or personality than appearances would indicate, or at least that each man hoped to gain something direct and practical from the relationship. But I do not think that this ordinary form of argument can possibly prevail in this case.

A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

Natural History, Sept, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

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