Everybody knows that Charles Darwin was the first to explain the central principles of evolution. But not one person in a hundred knows that isn’t really true. It was really Alfred Russell Wallace, working independently of Darwin, who first wrote down the principles of evolution in an essay which he then sent to Darwin. But there was a good reason why everyone today knows Darwin's name but few remember Wallace. Fot while Wallace himself was a preeminent English scientist, he had some other ideas which made him dangerous to the establishment. He was opposed to England’s “social compact,” considering it unjust. He supported women’s suffrage and was against militarism. But far worse than these “utopian” ideas, he had one truly radical notion that seemed a real threat to the aristocracy of his day. He believed that he could PROVE SCIENTIFICALLY that the inheritance of wealth was “against nature.”
Why would the inheritance of wealth be “against nature?” To understand Russell’s argument we must first understand a very different theory of evolution that was older than either that of Wallace or Darwin, the theory called Lamarckism. According to Wikipedia
Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring.
Lamarck made brilliant arguments for his thesis but it turned out to be almost entirely wrong. The advent of the evolutionary ideas of Russell and Darwin, and then subsequently the emergence of Mendelian genetics, increasingly showed that Lamarck was mistaken.
Now Wallace knew all about Lamarckism and its frailties, and he saw in the human inheritance of wealth a kind of throw back to Lamarckism. When you leave your child a million dollars, you are leaving property that you acquired in your lifetime (unless you too inherited it). This means that you are giving your child an “edge” in life that the average child doesn’t have. Your child will have a better chance of surviving and reproducing than the average child because of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” But what harm does it do? A lot.
The problem with the inheritance of wealth, thought Russell, was that it undermined the TRUE principles of evolution, which favored individuals who were best equipped by natural selection (or non-Lamarckian evolution) for survival and reproduction. The danger of this is seen most dramatically when an imbecile inherits a great kingdom from his father and runs it into the ground. Thus the inheritance of wealth throws a monkey wrench into human evolution, and increasingly favors individuals through no innate superiority of their own leading not only to an unjust society but an UNFIT society.
Do you buy it?