WE GOT DARWIN ALL WRONG

And boy (literally) are we paying for it

Thanks for reading and subscribing to “Made With Care,” a deep dive into the cultural roots of the care crisis. I really care about care and so glad you do too. For more on the subject, check out my new book “When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.”

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BEFORE WE DIG INTO DARWIN, SOME NEWS:

• I am thrilled to be the 2025 book club pick for

  Amber Adrian
  ’s One Tired Mother Substack community. If you want to wrestle with what it would mean to create a culture that actually values care, join us!

• You know how Hollywood is really supportive of middle-aged female filmmakers who make nuanced work about menopause and motherhood that avoids overly simplistic formulas in favor of the sometimes tender, sometimes painful chaos that is existence? Exactly. Please check out, and pre-order, my friend

  Brooke Berman
  ’s film “Ramona at Midlife,” which is coming out on Apple on February 11. (The pre-orders make a huge difference in letting the algorithm overlords know that films about middle-age women have an audience.)

• This March, I will be co-leading a three-day, in-person seminar on care with the brilliant

  Elliot Haspel
  (check out his Substack here) for Capita. We will be digging deep into the care crisis and dreaming of a more care-aware, and care-supportive, future. Learn more here.

• It’s the final days of the annual Barnes & Noble nonfiction sale. “When You Care” is half-off! So if you’ve been thinking about getting a copy, wouldn’t mind a good price, but want to avoid Bezos, check it out.

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The world increasingly feels as though it is in the hands of exactly the kind of guys, and a few select “cool girls,” I tried to avoid in high school.

Watching the news these past few weeks has become some kind of perverse Proustian madeleine, an unconscious summoning of those all-too-certain cadences, smirks, brows, and cackles I witnessed in my teenage years, the kind that insist you are deeply unfunny, uncool, and just like clearly bonkers wrong, if you disagree. These are the kind of gestures you remember in your body, in the back of your mind, even if your conscious self has blissfully managed to mostly avoid thinking about them for decades.

These guys and “cool girls” represent a complete inversion of the kind of relational care ethic I want to see more of in the world, one in which the goal is to listen to the other, to consider them sensitively, slowly, doing your best to hold their subjective reality alongside your own, and then respond. This isn’t about adhering to one set of policies or politics, or agreeing about things, but about steering clear of that particular jerky affect that made me feel deeply alienated in my youth, and has me feeling deeply frustrated and depressed right now.

I see this high school asshole energy everywhere these days, including among those on the family values right with whom I agree with about many things, but why, why, must there be so much combative, know-it-all cockiness when we are talking about fertility rates and the well-being of parents and children?

And then there is Mark Zuckerberg with his plea for more masculine, aggressive energy. Is there a time and place for such things? Yes! But to make such a call during the same news cycle as the accusations against Pete Hegseth and to not take a beat to discern the aggression you are trying to reclaim from the aggression Hegseth has been accused of again and again, is to miss a big opportunity -- and show your true colors. Zuck, even if you believe that Hegseth never did any of those vile things to women, you could have still made it clear that you aren’t advocating for that and the many other varieties of unhealthy aggression on display today.

Back in the 1980s, and, increasingly, today, people have attributed this overall aggro-vibe to Charles Darwin and the phrase most associated with him, “Survival of the fittest.” The big idea is that humans are competitive and power-hungry at their core; we are here to dominate, bitches, and far be it from any of us to deny this “Darwinian” truth.

So with that in mind, I wanted to share a passage from my book in which I explain how our culture got Darwin all wrong and neither his theories nor his life story would endorse the assholery we are seeing today. Darwin, a Victorian man, was hardly a perfect feminist. But nevertheless, we have a lot to learn from him today. He didn’t endorse what today is referred to as “Darwinian” in popular culture, and believed care and sympathy were just as important as competition for the survival of our species.

Darwinian does not mean what you think it means.

I truly believe we won’t fix the care crisis, which seems to be growing deeper and wider by the day, until we pull our understanding of human nature up by the roots and see what lies underneath. So much of our culture rests on a denial of, and misunderstanding of, care.

Reclaiming “Darwinian” is a great place to start.

AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER FIVE OF “WHEN YOU CARE”

The path to valuing caregiving will require more than changing our social, political, and economic systems. We must go deeper, to the roots, and consider the way our collective story about humanity’s fundamental nature ignores and misrepresents care. My understanding of this nature, and perhaps yours too, can be boiled to down to a single pithy phrase used by everyone from science teachers, to political theorists, to Wall Street bankers, to obnoxious youth soccer coaches, to describe the one-and-true secret to any person’s or species’ success: survival of the fittest. Most of us associate this phrase with Charles Darwin and his theories about evolution.

In popular culture, Darwin is synonymous with competition, our alleged perpetual, instinctual, thirsty race to the top. Darwinism, as we understand it, both explains and fuels our every-man-for-himself culture of independence, a culture that seeps into all aspects of our lives, coloring our relationships with people we know and don’t. But few of us know that Darwin didn’t come up with this phrase that is endlessly credited to him, nor does it accurately capture what he had to say. Even fewer know that he, and many of the neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists who followed him, didn’t exactly see things this way. My animal brain was no anomaly. Humans, Darwin argued, are as cooperative and caring as they are competitive. He even had a moving care experience of his own that inspired his thinking on this very subject.

Charles Darwin was a good guy. This is not in relative terms, a comparison to the many other great men in history who were, by most interpersonal measures, terrible. Leo Tolstoy was a cruel and selfish husband and father; Charles Dickens, the same; Pablo Picasso, an incessant and often indifferent womanizer; Einstein, not as bad but a serial cheater nevertheless; and Gandhi, who had asked his young grandniece and regular companion Manu to sleep in his bed with him to, in her words, “test, or further test, his conquest of sexual desire.” No, Darwin was a good guy even by normal guy measures. He was a family man, kind, thoughtful, and attentive to his wife and children. He doubted much of Christianity, and yet was always careful not to offend his wife for her more traditional Christian beliefs in a divine maker. In fact, some historians believe he put off publishing his big ideas about evolution for decades in part because he didn’t want to undermine his wife’s faith and all the comfort it brought her. Even if it’s not true, the fact that it could be true says a lot about the kind of guy he was.

He showed equal sensitivity to his children, who delighted him and inspired his work. Darwin had, in his own words, “a fine degree of paternal fervour,” and was the kind of dad who insisted his children sleep on the couch in his study when they were sick. His daughter Etty remembered her father as “the most delightful play-fellow,” the source of a number of her and her siblings’ favorite childhood games. One was called Taglioni, in which he would dance with children while standing on his knees. In another, Darwin turned into a growling bear.

He was also humble. And not humble as in a synonym for “weak” or “uncertain.” Darwin possessed a steely confidence, with just enough nerve to question millennia of answers to one of the most profound and difficult questions to ever possess human beings: Where did human life come from? It was more of a Mr. Rogers variety of humility: an ability to listen, to ask questions, to speak slowly and thoughtfully on what he did know, and to step back when the conversation turned toward the unfamiliar. One of the reasons Darwin got his spot on the HMS Beagle at age twenty-two, for the trip around South America that seeded his ideas about evolution, was his reputation of being well-mannered.

Time and fame did not change him. Novelist Henry James visited Darwin when the latter was sixty and reported: “Darwin is the sweetest, simplest, gentlest old Englishman you ever saw. . . . He said nothing wonderful and was wonderful in no way but in not being so.” Goodness and connection weren’t just traits Darwin valued in his personal life; they were also intellectual preoccupations. He was a careful observer of “the dependence of one being on another,” as he wrote in On the Origin of Species, and was wary of any interpretation of his work that privileged our capacity for competition over our capacity for cooperation. We aren’t bloodthirsty, single-minded strivers, he wanted everyone to understand, but a species whose survival depends on both protecting ourselves and others.

Darwin’s sympathy was, as he himself argued, likely woven into him through the slow march of time. But his fixation on it, intellectually and personally, was in part a response to a devastating family tragedy. In 1849, Darwin’s eight-year-old daughter, Anne, fell ill. She was coughing and achy with a fever, and though her symptoms improved briefly, she soon took a turn for the worse. This was the age when doctors knew sadly little about the human body, and even less how to heal it. Charles, having exhausted limited options, decided to travel with his sick daughter three hours by train to a spa, located at the foot of the widely admired Malvern Hills. There Anne would receive the “water cure,” a new treatment created by a doctor named James Manby Gully.

This was a form of hydrotherapy that involved being “packed” in damp towels and sheets to help stimulate circulation, taking hand and foot baths, and sitting under hot lamps. None of it worked. In April 1851, Anne died of what is now thought to be tuberculosis at the age of ten.

Losing a child was a common occurrence back then, but statistics don’t go very far in dulling pain. Anne was Darwin’s favorite child. In his memorial of Anne, penned shortly after her death, Darwin wrote intimately about who she was and the relationship he and Anne shared. She loved to play with her father’s hair, “making it beautiful,” as she described it. She was tender with young children, he recalled, and kind to all members of the household, servants included. “I quite thank you” were the last words Darwin remembered her saying to him, after he gave her a cup of water. It was this, all of this, Anne’s finely tuned social instinct, the joy she took in caring for and connecting with others, that drew Darwin to Anne and made her absence that much harder. With time, Darwin found ways to conceal the wound, but it never healed.

In Darwin, His Daughter & Human Evolution, Randal Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, writes about the impact fatherhood, including the loss of Anne, had on his great-great-grandfather’s work. Darwin had spent the early part of his career focused on understanding the physical evolution of animals and plants. But his relationship with his children, and the loss of his favorite, heightened his curiosity in the development of humans. In particular, he wanted to better understand where goodness came from. Why, exactly, was Anne so caring?

Over time, Darwin arrived at the conclusion that we are born with a moral sense. He was convinced by his observations of animals, who showed concern for one another. He was also influenced by the writings of philosopher David Hume, who believed that “natural virtues” were innate, rather than something arrived at by way of abstract reasoning. Then there was everything Darwin learned at home. He carefully observed his children, beginning at a young age, and had a journal filled with notes on the development of their facial expressions, emotions, ideas, and, eventually, sense of right and wrong—unbidden.

“About this time was fond of pretending to be angry & giving me a slap. with a scold, & then insisting upon giving me a kiss as reconciliation,” he wrote of his son William at age one. Over 150 years later, psychologists performed rigorous studies on the presence of moral principles in young children and came to similar conclusions. We come into this world primed to cooperate and connect.

Darwin was making progress, but there was still one thing he couldn’t understand in terms of evolution. Why did he still feel so much love for Anne, and why were memories of her still so vibrant, nearly two decades after her death? Why did it still hurt so, so much? How did this pain, this longing to care for his long-deceased daughter, help the species survive? He thought, and thought, and thought, until, eventually, he came up with a possible answer: “Parental and filial affections . . . lie at the base of the social instincts,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, published in 1871. Our inclination to be good is, evolutionarily speaking, a product of our inclination to love and care for our children.

Darwin believed sympathy, or what today we might think of as empathy, altruism, or compassion, is the “all-important emotion,” part of the pulsing origin of the social instinct. We can’t take good care of our children without sympathy, and without it our children wouldn’t survive. Therefore, “communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

“Survival of the fittest,” or what Darwin himself originally called “natural selection” in reference to the fact that living beings who are better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive, is a fair, one liner summary of his work. But only when coupled with “survival of the most sympathetic.” Unfortunately, only the former concept, with its focus on competition and selfishness, rose to prominence in popular culture. “Survival of the fittest” had the advantage of appealing to those with power, giving those who say it with a straight face a chance to defend their greed and dominance as a product of a higher order: It’s not their fault; it’s nature’s fault! Nature wants the strong to thrive and the weak to just go away because that is how species improve and survive. Far be it from them to mess with nature. “Survival of the most sympathetic,”meanwhile, never gained as much traction. “While cooperation wasn’t completely ignored, it was not taken up by main authoritative scientific figures,” historian Ian Hesketh told me. “Sympathy,” and its squishy associations with sentimentality, femininity, and care, held little currency in Darwin’s age, and even less in much of the century that followed.

What popular culture, and, often, scientific culture, wanted from Darwin was an excuse to defend social and racial hierarchies, alpha behavior, and independence. The struggle for survival became less about genes and more about one human versus another—mano a mano, you against me, every man for himself. In this equation, independence is more valuable than dependence, because only the independent, and not those caring for dependents or who themselves were dependent, had the capacity to defend themselves.

Such ideas were ubiquitous during my 1980s childhood, in which representations of man as an essentially solitary, selfish, and competitive being seemed to be everywhere. “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works,” fictional businessman Gordon Gekko explains in one of the better-known speeches in film history, from the 1987 movie Wall Street. Fans of the movie knew that, yes, this Gekko guy is off, the world he inhabits is off, and yes, these are the rules of the game.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please share, subscribe, and comment. Let’s reclaim “Darwinian” together.

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Thanks for reading and subscribing to “Made With Care,” a deep dive into the cultural roots of the care crisis. I really care about care and so glad you do too. For more on the subject, check out my new book “When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.”