The Origin of Charles Darwin

Standing on the shoulders of giants...and dwarves.

(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Paris, France...

A mistake I strongly urge you to avoid for all you’re worth
An error in this matter you should give the widest berth
Namely don’t imagine that the bright lights of your eyes
Were purpose made so we could look ahead or that our thighs’
And calves were hinged together at the joints and set on feet
So we could walk with lengthy stride, or that forearms fit neat
To brawny upper arms, and are equipped on right and left
With helping hands, solely that we be dexterous and deft
At undertaking all the things we need to do to live
This rationale and all the others like it people give
Jumbles effect and cause, and puts the cart before the horse

~ De Rerum Natura, Lucretius

Darwin read Adam Smith. When he came back from his long voyage on the Beagle, he read Dugald Stewart’s biography of Adam Smith. He read Malthus. He read his own grandfather, Erasmus, an admirer and imitator of Lucretius. He was not alone. He was evolving.

Ideas fight for survival. Some succeed. Most don’t. Dozens of Christian heresies succumbed. Dozens of well-developed theories, too – about the movement of planets…the influence of the gods…the vapors…the air itself and the flux of nature. All of them lived, some briefly, and all died out; like dinosaurs and floppy disks, they were poorly adapted to the new world.

A Greater Revolution

But Smith’s new idea was an alpha idea…a Genghis Khan of an idea, one that would produce thousands of offspring. It wasn’t completely new. But it was new enough…and it was ready for a renaissance…a renewal – it was born again in the 19^th century and continues to shape our thinking after 150 years.  

What Darwin wrought, wrote Alfred Russel Wallace, “was a greater revolution in human thought within a quarter of a century than any of our time – or perhaps any time…a new conception of the world of life…”

The idea had been in the shadows for many centuries. And disappeared entirely for long stretches. While widely acknowledged today as useful and descriptive, its implications are still not fully appreciated. It explains why so many of our public policies are destined to fail…and why so many of the views and opinions you read in the New York Times and Washington Post are nonsense.

At first, the idea of ‘evolution’ was confined to biology. We saw the fossils… the skeletons…the footprints of ancient species; we noticed the legs taking shape…the arms…and the monkeys, swinging from the trees…and then, walking upright, almost human.

And then, the fossil collections grew. Hip bones were fitted together with leg bones…and whole new baubles – including hitherto unknown species of “humans” – were hanging from the family tree. The resemblances were unmistakable. There was Uncle Harvey’s jaw – on the face of a baboon! There was Aunt Lucy’s nasty growl…coming from a hyena.

“The Evolution of Everything”

And it was all laid out for us, 2000 years ago, after the Greek gods had been dismissed…and before Christ climbed Calvary, by Lucretius:

For certainly the elements of things do not collect
And order their formations by their cunning intellect
Nor are their motions something they agree upon or propose
But being myriad and man-mingled, plagued by blows
And buffeted through the universe for all time past
By trying every motion and combination they at last 
Fell into the present form in which the universe appears

People do things. They build their own houses. They choose their own music. They invent. They innovate. They find their own mates, often with no conscious awareness of what they are doing…or why they are doing it. And by combination and recombination things come together, not by any design…but by happenstance. Some things survive. Some don’t.

In either case, they don’t need no stinkin’ Fed to guide them.

Even Darwin himself was reluctant to take the idea much further than biology.  And yet, doesn’t it apply to just about everything? Lord Ridley wrote a book about it, “The Evolution of Everything.”

The principle…that things evolve, by human action but not human design…seems to describe government, money, technology, culture, genes, even morality. They are all “man mingled;” but no human mind controls them or comprehends them.

You’ve seen us make the point many times before, mischievously….that if slavery were still profitable, it would still be with us. It was the Industrial Revolution that undid it…not Lincoln…not Harriet Beecher Stowe…and not William T. Sherman burning down Atlanta.  

Gradually…then Suddenly

Imagine that you want to take a trip across the USA. And imagine that slavery were still in style. You could harness a team of slaves to a wagon. Actually, you would need several wagons….many of them just to provide food, water, clothing for the slaves.

With such an arrangement, aided by a strong lash, you could lumber across mountain, plain and valley…the slaves carrying you in your sedan chair, hoisted on their shoulders. Then, after setting out from New York…and many months of travel, great sacrifice, much suffering and adventure… perhaps you would reach California. Or maybe not.

Or, taking advantage of the industrial revolution, you could get in your F150 and be there in a couple days of comfortable travel.   

Who do you have to thank for this marvelous improvement? Who designed the Industrial Revolution? Henry Ford? Andrew Carnegie? Eugenio Barsanti? Or the Baptist lay-preacher, Thomas Newcomen?

Newcomen is credited with being the first to convert heat to useful kinetic energy. He was tinkering…devising a way to power a pump to keep the water out of mines. He heated water. The steam pushed up a piston, and then, switching a valve, the piston reversed, forcing the cooled steam out. Then, the valve switched again and the process repeated itself. Up, down…up, down…add more fuel to the fire and the ‘machine’ will keep pumping.  

But who invented the iron he used? The wheel? Who discovered fire?

Evolution gives us our world. But it is not a world that anyone designed or created.  Instead, we all add to it (or subtract from it)…little by little, and then by sudden, occasional bursts – such as Darwin’s “Origin of the Species.”

Entrepreneurs find a profitable model…or go broke looking for it.

Investors carefully place their money, hoping to earn a decent return, and keep investing their money…until it is all gone.

Politicians stumble through lies and errors…forcing or enticing people to do things they oughtn’t do…distorting the present…delaying progress…

…and the Fed (tomorrow!) will use its ‘cunning intellect’ to pretend to know what it can never know and do what it can never do; it will tell us exactly what interest rate the world needs right now. It will not let the credit market ‘fall’ into its natural form; it will give it a shove…

Stay tuned.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

Joel’s Note: “If I have seen further than others,” observed Sir Isaac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

It was an insight the Founding Fathers of the United States well appreciated. When it came to the establishment of the American republic, those who oversaw its “origins documents” were acutely aware of the lessons of history. Indeed, the ancient world continued to guide and temper their impulses long after those documents were inked and filed.

Wrote Jefferson himself, in a letter to Henry Lee, a half century after the founding…

“Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the US. have existed thro’ all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the ἄριςτοι [ancient greek for “aristocracy” or “nobility”] should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions; as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot…”

From the ancient aristocracy to today’s “rich men north of Richmond,” man’s basic nature remains largely unchanged. As such, history provides a useful roadmap not only for whence we’ve come… but where we’re headed, too.

We alluded to BPR’s shameless affinity for the classics in yesterday’s missive. Indeed, it was a decade or so ago, over an unhurried lunch at our favorite parrilla in Buenos Aires, that Bill conceived the idea of an online community that would rescue the classical texts from dusty libraries and bring them into the refulgent light of the digital age. The resulting project – Classical Wisdom – is still going strong today. Dear readers are kindly invited to check it out, right here on Substack.

As for the evolution of ideas, Dan reminded us this morning that progress is not always linear… and that often, bad ideas trump good ones. Once again, we’re hearing about Peak Oil… only this time, it’s not on the supply side. Demand for fossil fuels is likely to peak this decade, say the “experts,” as the world transitions to something cleaner, cheaper, and abundant. Just what that magical replacement might be, exactly, is not at all clear…

But it’s likely to be one giant step backwards for a species highly dependent on reliable, high-density energy.

“It's a big con,” writes Dan. “Reverse engineering the industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels means a lower quality of life for everyone on the planet.”

Ah… just when we think we’ve seen over the distant horizon, we discover our would-be leaders, standing squarely on the shoulders of dwarves. More on the “great energy devolution” to come…