At a Washington science conference in the early summer of 1918, as the
First World War was drawing towards its finale, the noted American
biologist Raymond Pearl rebuked his fellow naturalists for failing to
conceive of war as a biological event, ' a gigantic experiment in human
evolution'. Reluctantly he traced the war back to his hero, 'that gentlest
and kindest of souls', Charles Darwin: 'I believe it to be literally true that
the one event in the history of Western Europe which more than any other
single one laid the foundation for the situation in which Western Europe
finds itself today, was the publication of a book called The Origin of
Species.,' Pearl exemplified the schizoid tendencies that often prevailed in
western thought about the connection between Darwinism and war. On
the one hand, he blamed 'the frightful welter of blood' on the 'gross
perversion' of Darwin's views by German biologists, who ignored the
mental and moral qualities of humankind. On the other hand, Pearl
himself saw humans as innately pugnacious and war an adaptive response
to long-term evolutionary pressures.1
In this he anticipated the neoDarwinist
doctrine of modern sociobiology. In fact the ancestors of
sociobiology on war and human aggression are to be discovered in the era
from 1880 to 1919.