Captain Philip Lombard arrives on the island with a revolver in his luggage. A man named Isaac Morris has paid him a hundred guineas to come, keep his eyes open and be armed, without telling him why. Lombard is a soldier of fortune who has knocked around Africa and other parts of the world, charming, cynical and used to danger. When the gramophone accuses him of the deaths of twenty-one men of an East African tribe, he does not protest. He tells the others, calmly, that it is true: he was lost in the bush with them, there was not enough food, and he took what there was and left. He says that self-preservation is a man’s first duty, and adds, with the casual racism of his class and time, that the men would not have minded dying as much as a European would. Of all the guests, he is the most capable of surviving the island: he keeps the revolver, he suspects everyone, he stays alert. In the end, on the beach, only he and Vera Claythorne are left. She has taken his revolver, and when he lunges at her, she shoots him.
// The theorySelfishness in the light of evolution
Evolutionary criminology applies the logic of natural selection to crime. Psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, in Homicide (1988), showed that patterns of killing—who kills whom, at what age, over what—fit predictions derived from evolutionary theory, such as the higher risk faced by stepchildren or the role of status competition among young men. Lee Ellis and Anthony Walsh reviewed gene-based evolutionary theories of crime, including “cheater” strategies: the idea that in some environments, exploiting others can be a viable way to obtain resources. The approach has an explicit rule that its serious practitioners repeat constantly: explaining why a behavior might have evolved does not make it good, inevitable or excusable. Confusing what is “natural” with what is right is a classic error, known in philosophy as the naturalistic fallacy.
Survival as an alibi
Lombard’s justification sounds like evolutionary realism: in a situation of scarcity, the individual who keeps the resources survives, and that is how nature works. Evolutionary criminology can indeed explain why selfishness under extreme scarcity is a recurring human behavior. But it also explains what Lombard leaves out. Human beings evolved as intensely social animals, and cooperation, reciprocity and the punishment of cheaters are as much part of our evolved nature as selfishness. Most people in situations of shared danger share. Lombard’s choice was not dictated by biology; it was made possible by a situation in which there would be no witnesses and no consequences, and by a belief that the lives of the men he abandoned counted for less than his own. The real “evolutionary” element in his story is not the survival instinct, but the ancient human capacity to draw a line around “us” and leave “them” outside.
// The subjectThe honest cynic
Lombard is the most attractive of the guests, and Christie knows it. He is brave, competent and refreshingly honest about his crime at a moment when the others lie or hide. He is also the clearest example of a moral position the novel puts on trial: the man who sees himself as a realist, for whom rules are for people who can afford them. He has no sense of guilt and makes no attempt at excuse beyond his maxim. That honesty is not virtue; it is indifference. The island turns his creed against him. In a place where everyone is a potential killer, the man who believes only in self-preservation becomes, in the end, simply the last threat to the last survivor.
Philip Lombard
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// The crackThe other explanation is colonial
An evolutionary reading of Lombard explains the universal temptation of selfishness under scarcity, but it hides the most specific element of his crime: the colonial context. Lombard could abandon twenty-one Africans without consequences because no court of his time would have treated their deaths as a crime committed by a white officer. His own words reveal the dehumanization that made it possible: the belief that these men did not feel about dying as Europeans did. That is not biology; it is the ideology of empire, which postcolonial criminology and Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement explain better.
Evolutionary criminology has also faced criticism for the way its ideas can be misused: popular versions of “survival of the fittest” have served, historically, to justify racism, eugenics and the abandonment of the weak. Serious researchers reject those uses, but Lombard’s maxim shows how easily the language of nature becomes an alibi. Lombard chose to take the food and leave men to die. What the theory adds, read correctly, is the warning that what may be natural is not thereby right.
The naturalistic fallacy in the courtroom and the street
Appeals to nature appear constantly in justifications of violence and exploitation: “it’s human nature”, “the strong survive”, “they would have done the same”. Research in evolutionary psychology itself shows that humans also evolved powerful dispositions for fairness, empathy and cooperation, and that which dispositions dominate depends heavily on the social environment. Lombard’s story is a reminder that the biology of survival explains temptations, not choices. The question that matters, in the jungle and on the island, is not what we are capable of under pressure, but whom we decide counts as one of us.
Three key ideas
- Evolutionary criminology (Daly and Wilson, 1988; Ellis and Walsh, 1997) looks for the roots of some violent and selfish behavior in strategies favored by natural selection, while insisting that explaining a behavior does not justify it.
- Philip Lombard admits he abandoned twenty-one men of an East African tribe, taking the food, and justifies it with “self-preservation’s a man’s first duty”. He keeps his revolver on the island and survives almost to the end; Vera Claythorne shoots him on the beach.
- The crack: his alibi is the naturalistic fallacy, and his crime is better explained by colonial dehumanization than by biology. Even so, Lombard chose to leave those men to die.
Sources · further reading
- Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. Aldine de Gruyter.
- Ellis, L. and Walsh, A. (1997). “Gene-Based Evolutionary Theories in Criminology”. Criminology, 35(2), 229-276.
- Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.
- Christie, A. (1939). And Then There Were None. Collins Crime Club.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Philip Lombard?
Philip Lombard (“Capitán Lombard”) is a villain from And Then There Were None, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He did not deny it.
Why does Philip Lombard (Captain Lombard) become a villain?
Philip Lombard and evolutionary criminology: in And Then There Were None, the soldier of fortune who abandoned twenty-one men of an African tribe in the bush, taking the food with him, justifies himself by the instinct of self-preservation. Evolutionary criminology looks for the roots of violence in natural selection. Lombard uses it as an alibi, and the alibi says more about him than about biology.
Which criminological theory explains Philip Lombard?
Philip Lombard's case is analysed through Evolutionary criminology. Evolutionary criminology (Daly and Wilson, Ellis, Walsh) looks in the logic of natural selection for the roots of certain violent and selfish behaviors: strategies that may have favored survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. Philip Lombard, the adventurer of And Then There Were None (1939), invokes a pub version of that idea to justify what he did in East Africa: he kept the food and let twenty-one men die. He is the only guest who admits his crime without evasion. His case shows the distance between explaining a behavior through evolution and justifying it with evolution.
