In “Aporia”: When Confucius met Darwin
Chinese sociobiological thinkers from Pan Guangdan to reprotech
I have a new piece in Aporia on the influence of Darwinism in Chinese thought.
Ethnic Chinese thinkers like Pan Guangdan and Lee Kuan Yew have sought to assess the evolutionary impact of traditional Chinese culture, in particular the dominant political and ethical philosophy of Confucianism. Concretely, there is evidence that by making prestigious and influential offices in the civil service conditional on passing rigorous state exams, Confucianism enabled more intelligent and studious men to have more children.
Confucianism is not of purely historical interest. Neo-Confucian thinkers in China and elsewhere are trying to revive the tradition for modern times. For example, Ruiping Fan, a neo-Confucian philosopher at City University of Hong Kon, uses Confucian bioethical analysis to judge which uses of reprogenetic technologies (e.g., what forms of genetic enhancement) are legitimate, a very direct example of how culture can impact population genetics.
Whereas today Chinese often consider Westerners to be overly sentimental, I was struck reading Pan Guangdan making exactly this criticism… in 1925! Quote:
Perhaps very few of us realize, and fewer will admit, that sentimentalism, a peculiarly Western social method of dealing with things and one leading nowhere, is a result, almost a logical outcome, of the disruption of the family. Personal sentiment, which formerly and naturally had as its central point of attachment the hearth, becomes now, as it were, dislodged, scattered about, and finally comes to invade all other provinces of life, wherein it ill fits. The whole situation, in its extreme, is perhaps well epitomized by the following in a comic paper:
“I had to discharge my nurse for the most horrible cruelty.”
“What did she do?”
“She kicked my poor darling Fido for biting the baby.”