Degraded Conceptions

Does Darwinian Evolution Select for Toxic Men?

The vice president of a California school board recently proposed a resolution titled “Recognition of the Essential Role and Needs of Young Men in Society,” which criticized use of the term “toxic masculinity.” Parents were outraged. At a school board meeting, nearly a hundred parents denounced the resolution as “offensive,” “embarrassing,” “insensitive,” and “tone deaf.”

Where did the idea come from that masculinity is toxic? Why does the secular world get its idea of masculinity so wrong? Surprisingly, a major source was Darwin’s theory of evolution.

We think of evolution as a theory in biology, but in fact it had an enormous impact on secular views of masculinity. Already in Darwin’s own day, sociologist Herbert Spencer applied the idea of natural selection to human behavior in a theory known as social Darwinism. Spencer argued that survival of the fittest weeds out all but the most aggressive men:

In the course of the struggles for existence among wild tribes, those tribes survived in which the men were not only powerful and courageous, but aggressive, unscrupulous, intensely egoistic. Necessarily, then, the men of the conquering races which gave origin to the civilized races were men in whom the brutal characteristics were dominant.

According to Spencer’s logic, these “brutal characteristics” were not moral flaws but represented normative traits for manhood. The authentic male nature was said to be ruthless, savage, barbarian, and predatory.

How did women survive in relationships with such ruthless men? Spencer’s answer was that women needed to develop the “ability to please.” It would help if they also acquired the “powers of disguising their feelings” in order to hide the sense of “antagonism produced in them by ill-treatment.”

The lesson of evolution, apparently, was that men are brutal beasts—and that women must appease and placate them, while learning to hide their resentment of “ill-treatment.”

In an earlier age, Christians had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature—“the beast within.” Books appeared arguing that civilization is a thin façade over men’s primitive instincts. Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” The Caveman Within Us (1922) claimed that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.”

Are Men “Pigs”?

Today social Darwinism has reappeared under a new label—it’s called evolutionary psychology. But it sends the same message about men. A bestselling book by Robert Wright called The Moral Animal says:

Human males are by nature oppressive, possessive, flesh-obsessed pigs. Giving them advice on successful marriage is like offering Vikings a free booklet titled “How Not to Pillage.”

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it transforms sin into inexorable biological impulses.

An older book with a similar theme was recently reissued titled Men and Marriage. The author, George Gilder, claims that “Men are, by nature, violent, sexually predatory, and irresponsible.” Their “most profound yearning” is not for a wife and family, but for “the motorbike and the open road, the male group escape to a primal mode of predatory and immediate gratification.”

Are you seeing the origin of the Andrew Tate phenomenon? Intellectuals have been creating the secular script for masculinity for a long time. Tate brags about making money as a “pimp” producing “pornography.” He sneers at anyone not rich or successful, calling them “losers” whose ancestors would have been “taken care of by natural selection and evolution.”

If you tell men often enough that they are naturally irresponsible brutes, captive to ancient caveman urges, they will start acting like it.

This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the core of masculinity.

Putting Women Lower on the Evolutionary Ladder

Any list of toxic male behavior includes disrespect for women, and Darwin bears some responsibility for that as well. He was convinced that males are superior to females—that man attains “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” He concluded that “the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.”

Darwin explained men’s alleged superiority by proposing that among social animals, young males have to pass through many contests to win a female—and many additional battles to retain their females. Over time, he said, natural selection will favor the more dominant, combative males. Although modern men do not literally fight for a mate, he wrote,

yet they generally have to undergo, during manhood, a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes.

By contrast, Darwin argued, because women stay home to care for the young, they are out of reach of natural selection. Thus, they have evolved more slowly and their mental powers are lower. (In his day, it was assumed that males pass on more of their traits to their sons, and females, to their daughters.)

Darwin did acknowledge that women have “greater tenderness and less selfishness” than men, and even greater “powers of intuition, and rapid perception.” But he dismissed these traits as “characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.” Even women’s positive traits were devalued as evidence of inferiority.

Darwin’s theory thus gave supposedly scientific support to the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men—that women have no ideas or insights that warrant male respect. Women were relegated to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder.

Many leading scientists of the day agreed with Darwin that women are less evolved than men. Anthropologist James McGrigor Allan held that “physically, mentally and morally, woman is a kind of adult child.” Thomas H. Huxley, dubbed Darwin’s Bulldog, said even education could not lift women to intellectual equality with men. Since women’s inferior abilities are a product of natural selection, he argued, they are not “likely to be removed by even the most skillfully conducted educational selection.”

There was no hope, apparently, for women to escape their inferior position.

In reality, of course, the survival of the human species depends just as much on characteristically female activities like giving birth and nurturing the young. Nevertheless, evolutionary thinkers preferred to exalt the more typically male activities like hunting and fighting as most important for the progress of the species.

Attack on Transcendent Values

The impact of Darwinism went even deeper, however. His theory was thoroughly naturalistic. It proposed that natural forces acting alone had the power to create everything that exists—that God was not necessary in any way to explain the world. And if God was not needed to do any creating, then he was out of a job. The idea of God might still be helpful for some people, but only for those who need that kind of emotional crutch. Christianity was reduced to the status of subjective feelings.

Historian Glenna Matthews describes how Darwinian naturalism continues to have an impact even in our own day:

Men and women living in a modern secular society are under a handicap in dealing with transcendent values. Darwinism helped create a secular and materialist outlook. As a consequence, reflective people now lack a vocabulary for talking about love, nurture, or the social importance of home without sounding sentimental and faintly ridiculous.

In short, Darwinism led to the rejection of any transcendent values that would call men to a higher ideal of what it means to be a man.

Universal Darwinism

In our day, Darwinism has been extended into an entire worldview—what some are calling Universal Darwinism. In books like The Evolution of Ethics and The Origins of Virtue, ethics are said to be a product of natural selection. In books like How Religions Work and Religion Explained, religion is reduced to an illusion. Evolution is being applied to politics in Darwinian Politics and to economics in Economics as an Evolutionary Science. It has been applied to medicine in Evolving Health and Evolutionary Medicine. Even art and literature have been reinterpreted within a Darwinian framework in Literary Darwinism and Evolution and Literary Theory.

So it should not be surprising that evolutionary thinking has also shaped the secular script for masculinity. One reason it is important to highlight the failure of evolution as a biological theory is that it has been extended far beyond science to construct a complete worldview.

Let me end with a story: I recently received an email from a former graduate student who now teaches at a high school. “All my male students are fans of Andrew Tate,” she wrote. “They are even using quotes from Andrew Tate in the yearbook.”

“Where do you teach?” I asked.

“At a classical Christian school.”

The sobering lesson is that even Christian boys and young men are being drawn in by online influencers like Andrew Tate. We need to provide them with a critical grid to recognize the Darwinian roots of the secular script for masculinity—and fortify them with a healthy, aspirational, biblical view of what it means to be a man.

—This article is based on Pearcey’s most recent book, The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes.