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'What a book a Devils Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature' (Charles Darwin in 1856, about to start 'The Origin of Species').
Darwin was the Devils Chaplain, and his studies showed that the forces driving evolution were those of nature alone. Natural selection is clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, and cruel, and many evolutionary changes are due to nothing other than random chance. Nature simply does not reveal meaningful patterns of change towards a predestined goal. Darwin felt like confessing a murder. Nothing captures better the idea of evolution as a social crime in early Victorian Britain. In religion Darwin moved from a conventional orthodoxy in youth to a sceptical agnosticism which he never lost. Nature was to blame. He had no intention to commit a crime, to deliberately come up with something so staggering as evolution. Darwin did not pretend to know whether the wold was made of matter, spririt, or whatever. Darwinism was alltogether secular. He was like a machine observing facts and grinding out conclusions, he was a freethinker in the pursuit of truth.
On a 5-year-long circumnavigation the young Darwin worked to the utmost from the mere pleasure of investigation and from his strong desire to take a place amongst scientific men. Classification and the definition of species was a field that he wished to revolutionize with his theory of evolution. The idea of evolution itself came to Darwin when he read Charles Lyells 'Principles of Geology'. Historical geology with its emphasis on slow and continued processes recognized none of the miraculous events of the creation story, and once the materials had been made available, the evolution of the earth could be assumed to have looked after itself. Natural phenomena were no longer miraculous in themselves, the relationships between things could be explained in terms of the laws of science.
Thomas Malthus called attention to the war between creatures that follow from the universal tendency to multiply in number and thus to exhaust the resources of the environment. His 'Essay on Population' supplied Darwin with the idea of the struggle for existence which forms one of the cornerstones of his theory of evolution.
In his 'Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature' William Paley claimed that life was abounding with goodness and joy. All creatures were happy as they were adapted to their surroundings, and animals and humans were so perfectly fitted to their places in the world, so obviously designed that there had to be a devine designer. The violence and cruelty in the jungle, the many plants and animals struggling for life, the killing fields, how different from Paleys well ordered English garden.
Fuegian savages were naked, painted, wild and lived like animals. They had no government, no proper clothes, no fitlanguage, no decent houses, they delighted to torture their enimies, practiced cannibalism, knew no decency. Thus, having seen the animal in himself, Darwin was ready as few Victorians were to see orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees as cousins. His first sight of an ape, a 3-year-old female orangutan in the zoo, was much more comforting. She was so much like human children and came off very well in her civilized environment compared to Fuegians and Maoris. Lyell worried about a chimpanzee ancestry crushing mans belief in the high genealogy of his species, he feared that it would brutalize mankind. But what about savages hardly better than brutes. Where were the dignity for humans who slept uncovered on the wet ground, coiled up like animals? Lyell would have no smooth mental scale from apes through savages to civilized Anglo-Saxons, but Lyell had not seen savages. Darwin had come face to face with the most degraded natives and had been forced to recognize a world of difference between the faculties of Fuegian savages and educated civilized man. Human differences were more profound than Lyell knew. The real threat seemed man already brutalized and degraded. Yet, to Darwin, it was no threat. The gentlemen were at the top in their rightful place, they were the evolutionary succes. Instead of considering ourselves special because of some traditional myth we could still consider ourselves special because of our highly specialized brains, and our place in the world would nevertheless remain important to us. Human chauvinism outraged Darwin, mans arrogance and admiration of himself. He wanted to knock mankind off its pedestal. People often talked about the wonderful event of intellectual man appearing, yet the appearance of species with other senses may be even more wonderful. It seemed absurd to consider one animal being higher than another. Man consider those with the intellectual faculties most developed as highest. A bee doubtless wound use instincts as a criterion.
During many years Darwin had collected notes on the emotive issue of the origin of man, rather with the determination not to publish as he thought that he should thus only ad to the prejudices against his views. It was Thomas Henry Huxley who publicly associated humans with apes. He presented a detailed comparison of human and ape anatomy which led him to propose that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Anglicans denounced the theory of evolution as anti-Christian. And Anglicans dominated science and society. Science should provide moral uplift in a turbulent age and the scientific elite had to provide spiritual leadership. Richard Owen had dissected more apes than any man and used his results against the theories of human origin. Like Lyell he opposed strongly against anything that tended to break down the barrier between mankind and the animal kingdom. As an authority on apes he wanted to find an argument that would allow him to place man in a category apart from and superior to the rest of the animal world. He claimed that certain structures in the human brain differed from the brains of apes, but Huxley argued that the structures in question were similar in human and ape brains. Huxley also explained how the embryos of man, dog, seal and reptile were almost identical at the early stages, the only plausible explanation being that man is descended from some less highly organized form. What was at stake was no less than a worldwiev. One could not simultaneourly accept the literal words of Genesis and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. No scientific discovery had been as staggering as this one. Also, evolution had dangerous social and political implications. If you cut the link to God then how do you control rebellious lower classes ?
To argue that humans are no different from other animals is just as foolish as to argue that they are completely different. Humans are unique, they have language. But elephants are also unique - they have trunks. There is nothing unique about being unique. Mans capacity for language has justly been considered one of the chief distinctions between man and other animals, but he uses inarticulate cries in common with other animals to express his meaning, aided by gestures and the movements of the muscles of the face.
Biologists universally acknowledge and respect Darwin as the architect of modern biology. Yet even today in many American High School biology courses, evolution is still frequently ignored or forbidden. Many thousands of young people are still being denied a sound education in biology as a result of creationist political pressures.
Generations of dedicated scientists have labored to refine Darwins groundbreaking idea, have discovered new evidence, developed new fields of study. We have innumerable contributions from biology, chemistry, biochemistry, physics, paleontology, geology, genetics, developmental biology, ecology, anthropology, geochemistry, geophysics, astronomy, and other disciplines, and primatologists are generating voluminous new information about the intelligence of the great apes and their culture which is causing us to rethink our attitudes and obligations to our close biological cousins. Darwin would have been delighted if he had known about Mendels laws. Or about the modern biochemistry and molecular biology which has proved strong evidence of the close relationship between humans and apes. Gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share 98% of their genes with humans. This association was hotly debated among scientists in Darwins day, but today there is no doubt about the close evolutionary relationships among all primates including humans.
Evolution has become not only the science of sciences, it has become the philosophy of philosophies. Hardly any kind of thought, scientific, philosophical, religious, social,literary, or historical, remained long unchanged by the radical implications of 'The Origin of Species'. Society will never be the same, the Devils Chaplin has done his work.
The old myths of tribal and racial superiority have now been thoroughly discredited by the biological understanding that we are one people, one species, in one world. We now know the true story of our physical and emotional history, which reaches back through the millions of years of human and protohuman development, back to our animal ancestry .
Man is undoubtedly the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on earth. All animals except man adapt to their environment in order to survive. Man is trying to bend the universe to suit his purposes. Sooner or later he is bound to fail.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appleman, Phillip. Darwin - a Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. (1st ed. 1970).US, UK: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Desmond, Adrian and Moore, James. Darwin. 2nd ed. (1st ed. 1991).UK, US, Australia, Canada: Penguin Books, 1992.
Hansen, Bent Sigurd and Olsen, Knud Ryg. Darwinisme. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980.
Howard, Jonathan. Darwin - A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. (1st ed. 1982).UK, US: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Patterson, Colin. Evolution. London: British Museum, 1978. Copenhagen, Skarv 1979.
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