Assertion 6.12: Evolutionary theory is responsible for the horrors of Communism.
Analysis:
i) Marxism has nothing to do with evolution. Marxism posits forces which are supposed to guide society inevitably down a certain path. Any attempt to claim that this follows from evolution is an abuse of Darwin, who does not commit to the history of life, much less society, having any direction at all.
(ii) The Communism that has been so problematic in the twentieth century has little to do with Marxism. Whereas Marxism has the masses spontaneously effecting changes in the economic structure of society, the Communists forsook this vision for the totalitarian "guidance" of the process by a powerful elite (sometimes, as with Stalin, by a single man).
We see, then, that the supposed chain between Darwin and Stalin is broken at both links: Darwin was abused by Marx, and Marx was in turn abused by Stalin.
Philosopher and historian Michael Ruse points out that although Marx and Engels esteemed Darwin, and the Soviets presumably followed suit,
the English materialistic science of Darwin was not the major influence on Soviet science. This honor was held by the Germanic idealistic philosophy of Hegel. The Soviet bible on scientific methodology was Engels's posthumously published Dialectics of Nature, which owes a great debt to Naturphilosophie and nothing at all to Darwinism and natural selection. Darwinism, it appears, was more something used to give people's thinking a veneer of intellectual respectability than something that profoundly altered the way people thought. (Ruse 2000:80)
It is also worth pointing out that the communists of the Soviet Union went so far as to reject outright Darwinian evolutionary theory in favor of the Lamarckian hypotheses of Lysenko, with grave agricultural consequences. Therefore, if there is anything unfortunate about the relationship of Soviet communism to evolution, it is that the relationship was not stronger, since a better appreciation for evolutionary biology probably would have prevented many innocent people in the Soviet Union from starving.
References
Ruse M. 2000. The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.