Conservatives need Charles Darwin. They need him because Darwinian science supports
a conservative view of human nature. In my book Darwinian Conservatism,
shown how conservative social thought can be rooted in a Darwinian conception of the
imperfectability of human nature. In this paper, I will first briefly summarize the
arguments elaborated in that book. Then I will respond to some of the criticisms of
Darwinian conservatism coming from some recent books by five conservative writers—
Harvey Mansfield, Peter Lawler, Carson Holloway, John West, and Ann Coulter.
A Realist Vision
Believing in human perfectibility, leftists assume that social order arises best through
rational planning. Believing in human imperfectability, conservatives assume that social
order arises best by spontaneous evolution. The fundamental claim of Darwinian
conservatism is that Darwinian biology confirms conservatism’s realist vision of human
imperfectibility and denies the left’s utopian vision of human perfectibility.
Conservatives believe that there is a universal human nature. They believe that
this nature is imperfect because human beings are limited in their knowledge and their
virtue. They believe that these natural limitations on human nature can not be changed
by social engineering. And therefore they believe that any successful social order is
constrained by this imperfect human nature.
Russell Kirk spoke of conservatives as being “contemptuous of the notion of
He wrote: “Conservatives are chastened by their principle of
1
Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005). A blog for this book can
be found at darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com.
2
The next few sections—“A Realist Vision,” “Five Propositions,” and “Eight Objections”—are slightly
revised excerpts from Darwinian Conservatism, 3-7, 10-13; and from Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural
Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 8-
11.
3
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7
th
ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery
Publishing, 1985), 35.
2
Convention