In this essay I`m going to argue that theres a difference between Darwin and Nietzsche conceptions about the

persistent effect of the past in the present in terms of morality. While for Darwin the past tells us in certain way how the human morality is a result of the progress throw history -according to the natural selection and favorable variations-, for Nietzsche the persistent effect of the past -specially the persistence of philosophy until his time- is the sign of our moral decadence. Darwin reads the past in the present as a good sign of our evolution and enhancement; Nietzsche as a result of our decadent way of life. Darwin tell us in the conclusion of The Descent of man: A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals. The moral of the human being is a sign of hierarchy above the lower species, and the capacity of making moral judgment is a result of the evolution because morality can be understood as a favorable variation and a rejection of injurious variations- for a good adaptation to the environment in order to survive and interact in an appropriate way with our community. Therefore, morality is a progress thanks to the natural selection and the adaptive capacity to perpetuate and go further: The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual power. Although human being, for Darwin, is not the final state of evolution, moral behavior is necessary to progress and evolve. If the shape of our body results from our past and our ancestors, and is a testimony of our favorable variations, the moral behavior is the result of a process in which we find by instinct the best way to survive, and Darwin deduce that the human being who is less moral is more provably not to survive, to not adapt into the social requirements. Therefore, our moral state can tell us about our not moral state, a previous state that was actually erased because it didnt correspond to our necessities and the natural progress. Nietzsche, in the second essay of the Genealogy of morality, doesnt thinks that the moral behavior can be an instinct or a result of natural selection. Instead, morality is a way of selftorture, occulting our real instinct: reinterprets these very animal instinct as a form of guilt against God. The feeling of being guilt and receive a punishment by not doing what moral values define, hide our life, our intense desires, our true instincts. Therefore, the memory, or the past, remember us constantly that possible punishment and deny our real life, stop us, abolish us. The persistent effect of the past is a testimony of our decadence throw the path of suicide instincts. Therefore, morality cant be a result of some natural process for Nietzsche, but of a social construction of control in which the weakest try to deny the strongest. This social control, throw history, is an history if decadence, and one of the best way to take out our instincts, to be real human being, is by forgetting our past, that constant voice that tell us not to act, to feel shame and be guilty. The moral in modernity, therefore, is not a testimony of evolution, and Nietzsche become an antimodernist figure by denying all moral progress until the modernity, by pretending to forget the past and suggesting a new form of life not repressed by the morality since Plato and preserved by the Christians. While the moral values for Darwin are necessary for living, for Nietzsche they deny the life; while the past is a sequel of a lower species, for Nietzsche is a sequel that confirm us as lower specie.

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