Indeed, the rise of naturalism has meant moral catastrophe for
modern society. The most damaging ideologies of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were all rooted in Darwinism. One of
Darwin's earliest champions, Thomas Huxley, gave a lecture in
1893 in which he argued that evolution and ethics are
incompatible. He wrote that "the practice of that which is
ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a
course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that
which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence."
[Evolution and Ethics, The Romanes Lecture, 1893.] Huxley
nonetheless went on to try to justify ethics as a positive
result of humanity's higher rational functions, and he called
upon his audience neither to imitate "the cosmic process" nor to
run away from it, but rather to combat it--ostensibly by
maintaining some semblance of morality and ethics. But what he
could not do--what he and other philosophers of his era did not
even bother attempting to do--was offer any justifi