This file is a single review-essay/comment on C. D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. Hayek’s argument is not a rejection of biology: he praises Darlington’s historical range and accepts that heredity matters. The essay’s purpose is narrower and sharper: to prevent Darlington’s genetic interpretation of history from swallowing the distinct process by which cultures transmit practices, skills, and rules.
The point I want to consider here is whether in looking at history from the special point of view of the geneticist, Dr Darlington has not much exaggerated the importance of the factor in which he is chiefly interested.
Hayek’s central objection is that Darlington treats whatever is not consciously rational as if it must be innate. Against this, Hayek inserts a third category between genetic instinct and deliberate reason: pre-rational learning, especially imitation in early childhood. This is the essay’s decisive conceptual move. Human conduct is not exhausted by biology on one side and conscious calculation on the other.
If so, there is certainly no justification for assuming that what is not rational must be innate and genetically determined.
Hayek links this point to his broader theory of tacit knowledge. Much of what persons can do is “knowledge how,” not explicit “knowledge that.” It is acquired before reflective reasoning, embodied in habits, and selected through social success rather than chosen by design. Hence upbringing can transmit durable dispositions without transmitting genes.
Most of an individual’s aptitudes, propensities, and skills are probably acquired in early infancy, and firmly entrenched by the time he becomes capable of rational thought.
The essay therefore distinguishes inherited capacity from inherited content. Humans may be biologically adapted to learn, imitate, and absorb traditions, but that does not mean the particular practices they acquire are genetically encoded.
But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.
Hayek then generalizes the point into a theory of cultural evolution. Customs, aptitudes, and institutions can be selected because groups practicing them survive and flourish. This makes cultural evolution analogous to biological evolution without reducing it to genes. The resemblance between the two processes is precisely why Darlington’s evidence can mislead: similar patterns may arise through different mechanisms.
This process of cultural evolution follows in many respects the same pattern as biological evolution.
The crucial difference is that culture can transmit acquired characters. A parent’s hard-won skill, discovered by trial and error, may become a child’s starting point through imitation. This gives cultural inheritance a speed and flexibility genetic inheritance lacks, but also makes civilization fragile, since traditions can be lost more rapidly than biological endowments.
Cultural transmission has however one great advantage over the genetic: it includes the transmission of acquired characters.
The later sections criticize Darlington for not supplying a test that would distinguish genetic inheritance from cultural continuity. Hayek is skeptical of claims that artistic, narrative, or social patterns demonstrate genetic transmission unless they show marks specific to genetic inheritance. The argument is methodological as much as political: the burden of proof lies with genetic explanation when cultural transmission can plausibly account for the same phenomena.
It would be very helpful if we had a test to decide such questions, but I fear that in the present state of knowledge we can hardly hope for one.
Hayek’s conclusion is balanced but not neutral. He rejects behaviorist egalitarianism as much as genetic reductionism, and he does not deny stratification, inherited differences, or the limits of planned environmental reform. Yet he insists that human order depends on the interaction of biological and cultural selection. The relevance of the essay lies in this gene-culture distinction: it defends evolutionary explanation while resisting the simplification that all durable human differences must be genetic. In Hayek’s closing formulation, the old opposition itself has become misleading.
On the whole we must probably conclude, as does Sir Gavin de Beer in a book on a similar theme (Streams of Culture, New York, 1969) which appeared about the same time as Dr Darlington’s, that the old controversy between ‘Nature’ and ‘Nurture’ ought to be allowed to die because ‘it is necessary to regard both nature and nurture as cooperating, without our being able to say in any one case exactly how much has been contributed by either. . . .’
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