Charles
Darwin understood
better than anyone how his theory on the origin of new species
threatened
prevailing religious beliefs. He
referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain” and complained that
publishing
the theory felt “like confessing a murder.”
He knew especially well how his ideas troubled his pious
wife. (BB, 388)
Darwin
himself
might well
have spent his life quoting Genesis rather than studying speciation had
it not
been for his friendship with a professor of botany at Cambridge, John
Stevens Henslow. Two years into his
training for the Holy
Orders, Darwin
fell under the wing of Professor Henslow.
The two men frequently strolled the campus together,
prompting
dons to
call Darwin “the man who walks with Henslow.”
Darwin
later recalled that his mentor’s “strongest taste was to draw
conclusions from
long-continued minute observations.” In
1831, when Henslow received a call from Admiralty asking whom he could
recommend as a naturalist on a voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle to
map the
South American coastline, he identified his favorite pupil. Darwin’s
father at first fought the idea, preferring that his playboy,
dog-loving,
“rat-catching” son stick on the road to the clergy.
Eventually, however, he relented—perhaps
persuaded by the argument of Charles’s uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, that
“the
pursuit of natural history, though certainly not professional, is very
suitable
to a clergyman.” (DB, 466-67)
Darwin’s theory did not, contrary to popular
opinion,
suddenly pop into his head as he observed differences in the beaks of
Galapagos
finches. Darwin’s
thoughts on the origins of species developed slowly, and only in
1842—six years
after returning to England
from his voyage—did the great naturalist put his ideas about evolution
onto paper. Remarkably, after completing a
230-page
“sketch” in 1844, Darwin
let his revolutionary work gather dust for fourteen years while he
raised a
family and tended to other scientific studies.
(BB, 383-85)
A letter
from a
young
naturalist in 1858 finally spurred Darwin
to publish his theory. The letter came
from a friend of his, Alfred Russell Wallace.
Wallace laid out a draft of his own ideas on the subject
of the
origin
of species. Darwin quickly saw that Wallace’s
ideas
bore a
striking resemblance to his own. “If
Wallace had my manuscript sketch,” Darwin
wrote, “he could not have made a better short abstract.”
(BB, 386)
Darwin found Wallace’s letter strangely bothersome. Ideas that he developed only through years of
careful and plodding work came to his young friend in a single
insightful
flash. It hardly seemed fair.
Nonetheless, Darwin
recognized Wallace’s
contribution.
On July 1,
1858, Darwin
buried
his
son. That same day, the theory of
evolution was announced to the world—or, more accurately, thirty or so
persons
at a meeting of the Linnaean Society.
The paper bore the names of both Darwin and Wallace. Wallace, for his part, generously referred to
the theory forever afterwards as “Darwinism.”
The
sketches and
essays of
Darwin and Wallace, which filled seventeen pages of the Linnaean
Society’s 1858
journal, in the words of Darwin, “excited very little attention.” (DB, 469) At the end of the year, Thomas
Bell, the president of the Society, noted, “The year which has not,
indeed,
been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once
revolutionize…the department of science on which they bear.” (DB, 464-65)
Darwin fretted whether his editor, John Murray,
might find
his ideas too unorthodox to be published.
He asked a scientist-friend whether he should point out
that he
did not
“bring in any discussion about Genesis…and only give facts” or whether
it would
be wiser to “say nothing to Murray” in the hopes that he will not fully
grasp
how revolutionary his work truly was. He
needn’t have worried; Murray
decided to publish after reading only the chapter titles.
(DB, 474-75)
Darwin’s work on evolution, called Origin of
Species,
was published in London
in November 1859. His editor, skeptical
of the level of interest in such a theory, encouraged him to write next
time
about another interest of Darwin’s:
pigeons. “Everyone is interested in
pigeons,” he assured him. Despite his
editor’s reservations, the first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on
the first
day, and the book has remained in print ever since.
(BB, 380-81)
Nowhere in
the
first
edition of Origin of Species does the word “evolution” appear. Instead, Darwin refers to his theory as
“descent with
modification.” Only in the sixth edition
did Darwin,
finally giving into widespread use of the term, substitute the term
“evolution”
for the phrase he favored. (BB, 384)
Critics
soon
began pointing
to alleged problems with Darwin’s
explanation for the emergence of new species.
First, they argued that the earth was far too young to
allow for
the
gradual evolution of species as Darwin
proposed. By this time, thanks to the
work of geologist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and others,
scientists
unanimously rejected Ussher’s estimate of a 6,000 year-old-earth. Nonetheless, they generally agreed that the
earth must be only tens of millions of years old, not billions. Lord Kelvin, a widely respected applied
mathematician of the day, had calculated that in about 24 million years
a body
the size of the sun would consume all its available fuel—and, it
scarcely
needed to be pointed out—the earth could not be older than the sun. A second difficulty with Darwin’s theory seemed to be the
scarce
fossil support. Scientists wondered why,
if Darwin
was
right, there were not hundreds of (“transitional”) fossils representing
“missing links” between species. (BB,
389-90)
Eventually,
most
scientists—if not laypersons—would see flaws in Kelvin’s calculations
and
transitional fossils would begin to appear.
(Conveniently, one such fossil was discovered in 1861,
just two
years
after publication of Origin of Species.
It was an archaeopteryx, a creature that sharing features
of
both
dinosaurs (teeth) and birds (feathers).) (BB, 389)
Moreover, there gradually arose an
appreciation of how difficult in was to become a fossil.
Over 99.9% of all living things end up as
decayed matter, and even the .1% that don’t are unlikely to be
fossilized and
then discovered.
Another
criticism
of his
theory, however, gave Darwin
more difficulty. Critics saw little
chance that complicated organs such as the eye could have emerged
gradually. They must, it was believed,
be the work of an intelligent designer.
Even Darwin
admitted doubts. He wrote, “It seems, I
freely confess, absurd to the highest possible degree” that natural
selection
could produce such organs gradually.
(BB, 390) (Decades later,
evolutionary biologists would take up the challenge, and would attempt
to trace
the evolution of the eye. They would
point out, for example, that the human eye shares many “quirky vestiges
of
extinct ancestors, such as a retina that appears to have been installed
backwards.”) (SP,51)
The first
skirmish in the
war by religious leaders on the theory of evolution occurred at a
meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford on June
30, 1860. Darwin
did not
attend, but naturalist Thomas H. Huxley, an outspoken champion of Darwin’s ideas
(and the
inventor of the word “agnostic”), did.
The program got off to a contentious start when Bishop
Samuel
Wilberforce turned to Huxley and insisted that he state whether his
relationship to apes came by way of his mother’s or his father’s side
of the
family. Huxley rose in anger to proclaim
he would rather claim the ancestry of an ape than that of someone who
used his
position to push religious nonsense in what should be a serious
scientific
forum. While emotions roiled, Robert
FitzRoy, Darwin’s
former ship captain on the Beagle, roamed the halls, holding up a Bible
and
shouting to all within range, “The Book! The Book!”
Each side left the meeting claiming victory,
much as sides would in Dayton sixty-five years later (BB, 393-94; DB,
476)
Over time,
the
theory
propounded by Darwin and Wallace became
increasingly viewed as Darwin’s
alone. Wallace’s interests veered off
towards socialism, women’s rights, extra-terrestrials, and
communication with
the dead. (BB, 387-88) Most
significantly, Wallace began to back off from the implications of his
own
theory. He concluded that the mind
could not be a product of evolution, and could only be the design of a
superior
intelligence. He rejected the idea that
man was subject to “the blind control of a deterministic world.” (SP, 28)
Darwin
expressed some misgivings about Wallace’s new spiritualism. In a letter to his old friend he wrote, “I
hope you have not murdered too completely your and my own child.” (DB, 472)
In Origin
of
Species,
Darwin
kept his
focus on explaining how new species emerged over time.
He carefully avoided any discussion of the
origin of humans. In 1871, however, Darwin made the
connections between apes and humans explicit when, in 1871, he
published his
second great work on evolution, The Descent of Man. Darwin
argued that his theory could account for the emergence of a species
capable of
self-conscious thought. To his critics, Darwin robbed
man of his
special place in the universe—and they saw the implications as
profoundly
troubling. Man was the product of too
much randomness—our chances of being on this planet remote in the
extreme. If the universe were replayed a
billion
times, in none of those replays would humans likely have emerged. A single break anywhere on the long chain
that led to us—and there have been several periods of mass
extinctions—and
there would have been no human history.
Darwin never doubted that the human brain evolved
from the
brains of extinct species. If Darwin is right
then, by
implication, evolution might also explain morality.
He saw in animals the types of empathy that
underlie moral systems. (R&L, 41) He
saw the mind as the accidental outcome of random variations over time. Man’s “wonderful advancement,” according to
Darwin, “largely depended” on the evolution of “articulate language,”
not on
any special programming added by a watchful creator.
(R&L, 42)
Darwin’s view left no place for God--or so it
seemed to
those who would take up the fight against evolution.
Morality, his religious critics would
maintain, had to have a transcendent source or all was lost. (SP, 52)
Not only would Darwin’s
naturalizing of the mind attract the fire of Fundamentalists, but also
many
other religious leaders who accepted other aspects of his theory. For example, the Pope in 1996 acknowledged
that evolution was “more than just an hypothesis,” but he insisted that
evolution
could not account for “the spiritual soul.”
The spirit, he stated, could not develop “from forces of
living
matter.” Any theory that contends
otherwise is not compatible “with the dignity of the person.” (SP, 186-87)
Shortly
before Darwin died in 1882 and was
buried in
Westminister Abbey
(next to Isaac Newton), he was visited by a young American studying in England,
Henry
Fairfield Osborn. Osborn would become,
by the time of the Scopes trial, the nation’s leading paleontologist
and expert
on evolutionary biology. John Scopes
traveled to see Osborn at the American
Museum of History in New York when
he visited the city to meet
with ACLU officials coordinating his trial work. Osborn
told Scopes of his earlier meeting
with Darwin
and
said, “I was greatly inspired. Now you
young men can see me, and I hope you’ll be equally inspired!” (GMT, 94)
Osborn told Scopes that his wife’s illness would prevent
him
from
traveling to Dayton
for the trial, but he promised to secure a letter of support from
Leonard
Darwin, the great naturalist’s son and president of the Eugenics
Education
Society.
Osborn was
true
to his
word, and Leonard Darwin sent his note of encouragement to John Scopes. Darwin
congratulated Scopes on his “courageous effort to maintain the right to
teach
well established scientific theories.” Darwin told
Scopes, “To
state that which is true can not be irreligious.” He
ended the letter with the words, “May the
son of Charles Darwin send you in his own name one word of warm
encouragement.” (GMT, 94-95)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When all
the
battles were
concluded in the Rhea Country Courthouse, as the Scopes trial ends on
July 21,
1925, Judge John Raulston makes his concluding remarks.
Raulston tells those in his hot, crowded
courtroom that “there are two things in this world that are
indestructible.”
“One is truth,” he intones, and the other is “the Word of God.” Left unsaid is his implication that there can
be no conflict between these two indestructible things.
The last exchange comes between Arthur
Garfield Hays and the judge. When the applause ends for Raulston’s
final
speech, defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays speaks up:
“May I, as one of the counsel for the
defense, ask your honor to allow me to send you the Origin of
Species
and the Descent of Man by Charles Darwin?”
Raulston, in a charitable mood, replies,
“Yes, yes.” There is laughter and
applause. A train whistle blows outside
the courthouse, Brother Jones gives a benediction, and the judge raps
his gavel
and announces, “The court will adjourn sine die.” (T,
38-319)
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