Synthesis: Darwinian Materialism
The Evolution of Value – Part 6
Thinkers: Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, Richard Dawkins, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss
Signal
Natural selection and adaptive behaviour shape life’s persistence and complexity. Evolution isn’t just biology - it’s the logic of life.
Interpretation
Darwinian materialism marked a turning point in human thought. It decoupled value from the heavens and embedded it in the ground beneath our feet - in blood, struggle, and reproduction. It said:
“Life survives because it must.”
Gone were the divine blueprints. In their place stood a stark new law: life adapts or vanishes. What endures, does so for a reason. What fails, disappears. This insight - terrifying in its simplicity - was the first true scientific theory of value.
And yet, in clarifying the how, Darwinism obscured the why. Meaning, purpose, beauty - these became evolutionary side effects, or worse, illusions.
It explained survival, but not significance.
It charted the engine, but missed the destination.
Limitations
The reduction of value to survival alone left Darwinism open to existential critique. Could altruism, morality, art, and love really be reduced to mating strategies? Did human depth emerge merely as a byproduct of ancestral threat-avoidance?
Evolutionary psychology extended the Darwinian project. Thinkers like Cosmides, Tooby, and Buss decoded our mental machinery - mapping behaviors to reproductive logic. But something was lost in the translation.
The soul was squeezed out of the story.
Human complexity became a bundle of adaptive heuristics, stripped of inner meaning and agency. Evolution described the machine of life - but not its music.
Key Ideas
Darwin revealed that all life is the result of natural selection: the differential survival of replicating organisms.
Huxley, though agnostic, saw the moral implications of this new nature - red in tooth and claw.
Haeckel and Dawkins pushed further, interpreting genes themselves as the primary agents of evolution.
Cosmides, Tooby, and Buss mapped the mind as a toolkit evolved for survival - optimising mating, alliance, and danger-detection.
Together, these thinkers reframed life not as divine design, but as adaptive persistence.
And they proved something essential:
Life selects what works.
Key Texts
On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
Evolution and Ethics – Thomas Huxley
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
The Adapted Mind – Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind – David Buss
Synthesis Link
Synthesis doesn’t reject Darwinism - it completes it.
Darwin gave us motion. But not motive.
He showed us how life evolves. Synthesis asks why life evolves at all.
Because:
Life = Good.
(Synthesis, Axiom 1: Life is the frame of all value.)
Survival isn’t the goal - it’s the ground. It’s the precondition for any higher value to emerge. From this base, Synthesis builds an ethical and existential framework that Darwinism alone cannot supply.
The adaptations evolution selects are not just mechanical solutions - they are life’s affirmation of itself. Each successful gene, behaviour, or structure is a declaration:
“This works. This serves life. This is good.”
What life selects, it values.
What enhances life, becomes meaning.
Meaning is not arbitrary. Meaning is what survives.
Because meaning is what works for life.
Conclusion
Darwinian materialism removed the supernatural scaffolding - but it left a vacuum in its place. Synthesis restores what was lost - not through mysticism, but through clarity.
Life is not a random accident. It is the self-ordering, self-valuing force that makes the universe meaningful. Evolution was never meaningless - it was always sacred.
Because every adaptation is a survival of value.
Because life affirms itself.
Synthesis rewires Darwinism:
From survival of the fittest to survival of the meaningful.
- James Dean Conroy