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The Theory of Evolution
By John Scotney Bravo Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Bravo Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85733-645-0
CHAPTER 1
Young Darwin and God's Unchanging Creation
The Devil's chaplain
The same issue worried Charles Darwin: how could a kindly Creator be responsible for so much cruelty? 'What a book the devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!' he commented to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856, well before he published The Origin of Species; and in a letter to the Harvard Professor Asa Gray in 1860, the year after he had published it:
'There seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitical wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.'
The Great Chain of Being
Darwin must have been familiar with the philosophical justification for the existence of cruelty and suffering that dates back to Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Everything, it was said, is an essential part of the divine scheme of things, hence nothing is bad, only imperfect, less good. This explanation of the complexity and interdependence of every aspect of life, of what was called 'Creation', came to be known as 'The Great Chain of Being'. According to St Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) everything fitted together like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and had done so since the six days when God made it all. Fitting everything together had required a Supreme Intelligence, and that was what God was.
Aquinas postulated a ladder descending from God, through archangels, then angels, mankind, the animal kingdom, plants and minerals, down to mud and finally sheer nothingness. Other great philosophers, notably Descartes (1595–1650) and Spinoza (1632–77), adapted and developed the idea. As Descartes saw it, all 'Creation' is inextricably, mutually interdependent and is, and must be, 'perfect' (that is to say, complete). Hence it must contain every possible kind of creature, even the imperfect and downright nasty ones. God had to make Ichneumonidae, or he would have left out a piece of the jigsaw. It is not so remote from modern concepts of 'biomass' and 'biosphere'.
More alien to modern thinking is the suggestion that because Creation was hierarchic, with angels at the top and mud at the bottom, everything and everyone had a proper place. Or, as 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' puts it in a verse that today is usually left out:
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate.
In an age of rapid change we can easily forget that our ancestors saw the world as essentially static and stable; attempts to change the fixed order were dangerous. The Universe remained in harmony so long as everything and everyone stayed where they were put and didn't rock the boat. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare makes Ulysses tell how the stars and planets 'observe degree, priority and place':
'Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy ...'
An interesting word that: 'oppugnancy'. Shakespeare says that the alternative is everything fighting everything else, or perhaps 'struggling against everything else'. In the late eighteenth century the English economist Thomas Malthus suggested that this was precisely how population was regulated. Everybody is in competition for food and living space, and because we breed too many children for the Earth's limited resources the weakest fail to survive. Malthus died in 1834, when Charles Darwin was twenty-five years old and half a world away; but his ideas were to prove something of a revelation to the young scientist.
A disgrace to the family
Charles Darwin was the grandson of the famous physician, philosopher, poet and eccentric, Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus had been a well-known doctor, but not an especially rich one. In 1786, he brought his twenty-year-old son Robert, newly qualified as a doctor, from Derby to Shrewsbury, and left him with £20 in his pocket to set up a medical practice. Robert became one of the richest and most influential men in the county of Shropshire. He was a good doctor, and also a shrewd businessman and property speculator, and in 1796 married Susannah Wedgwood, the daughter of one of Erasmus's closest friends, Josiah Wedgwood, the great pottery manufacturer. Charles was the fifth of Robert and Susannah's six children, and Susannah died in 1818 when he was nine years old. Robert had no great hopes for his son:
'To my deep mortification my father once said to me, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."'
Shrewsbury and Edinburgh
Charles was sent to Shrewsbury School as a boarder, even though it was scarcely a mile from the family home. His father had studied medicine at Edinburgh University, for which he had great respect, and Charles was expected to follow the family tradition and become a doctor:
'As I was doing no good at school, my father wisely took me away at a rather earlier age than usual, and sent me (October 1825) to Edinburgh University, where I stayed for two years ... But soon after this period I became convinced that my father would leave me property enough to subsist on with some comfort, though I never imagined that I should be so rich a man as I am; but my belief was sufficient to check any strenuous efforts to learn medicine.'
There was more to it than that. He had to watch two operations in those brutal days before anaesthetics: one was on a child, and the softhearted Charles fled in horror. He was clearly not cut out to be a doctor. However he met some interesting people in Edinburgh, among them Dr Robert Grant, who introduced him to Lamarck's theory of evolution, and a 'very pleasant and intelligent' Guyanese exslave, John Edmonstone, who taught him taxidermy – the art of stuffing animals.
Cambridge
Neither Erasmus nor Robert Darwin was an orthodox believer, but every rich man knew that the thing to do with a dim younger son was to get him into the Church and fix him up with a cosy living as a country parson. So Charles was sent to Cambridge to study theology. He missed the first term because he had forgotten all his Classics from school and had to take a crash refresher course in Greek and Latin.
'During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school.'
So Charles himself admits in his brief autobiography – though it hasn't stopped his old college putting up a statue to him. He also admits to preferring shooting to study: he was a first-rate shot, and spent far too much time out with his guns at Maer in Staffordshire, the estate of his 'Uncle Jos' (Wedgwood). But, he adds, significantly, 'no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles.' Years later he could remember the exact circumstances in which he had found many of his specimens, and recalled his delight at seeing his name in Stephens' Illustrations of British Insects. Imagine, then, the thrill he felt when only a few years later in Brazil he was to discover sixty-eight new species of beetle in a single day.
Henslow
For all his apparent idleness there must have been something special about the young Darwin, for both at Edinburgh and at Cambridge some of the most perceptive scientific minds welcomed his company and treated the undergraduate almost as an equal. At Cambridge he attended the public scientific lectures of John Stephens Henslow, who combined being a very orthodox Anglican clergyman with the professorship of botany. Henslow kept open house once a week. Darwin became a regular attender, and they got on so well that during his last year he and Henslow often went on long walks together in the countryside. But Darwin still had to get his theology degree, and as his finals approached he worked feverishly to catch up on the studying he had missed while out shooting, collecting beetles, or walking with Henslow. One of his set books was Dean Paley's Evidences of Christianity. Darwin was struck by Paley's logical, clear, intelligent analysis, and went on to read his Natural Theology. The two books made a great impression on him.
The Watch on the Heath
William Paley was the leading Christian thinker of his age. His approach was in a sense scientific, since he did not argue from authority, as in, 'It must be true because the Bible says so'. He based his case instead on observation and logic. He is most famous for his concept of the 'Watch on the Heath'. The key passage states:
'In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive – what we could not discover in the stone – that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine ...'
It is a sophisticated development of the 'Great Chain of Being'. Paley suggests that the Universe resembles a watch: it is complex, it fits together with great ingenuity, it clearly has a purpose, as does the watch, and is so brilliantly organised that if you change one bit it will stop working. Surely the odds against this amazing machine having come about by chance are impossibly colossal? It must have been designed. Nowadays this theory is called 'intelligent design', but philosophers have always referred to it as the 'teleological argument', from the Greek word telos, meaning 'purpose'. As Aquinas expressed it: how could the blind forces of nature all work together to sustain life and enable progress unless there were some intelligent mind directing them? Paley similarly asked how birds knew where to migrate to, or how they would instinctively build nests when they had never done so before, and were no more capable of thought than a watch was, unless some Supreme Mind had designed them to do just that. How could the complex structure of the eye come about by chance?
This particular problem was to concern Darwin for years, and he reports that, as a student, he considered Paley's arguments 'conclusive'. In a more subtle form they remain the convinced believers' best intellectual case against what they see as the 'blind chance' of Darwinism.
Grandfather Erasmus
But even in Paley's day there were alternative theories. Indeed, he wrote his books to refute them. The chief proponents of the alternative view were Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who will be considered in more detail in a later chapter, and, more especially, Charles's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.
Erasmus was one of those larger-than-life eighteenth-century figures like Dr Johnson. In fact he came from the same Midlands town – Lichfield – as Johnson, and resembled him physically. But Erasmus was as radical in his views as Johnson was conservative.
Erasmus founded the Lunar Society of Birmingham – a group of brilliant men who met every month at the full moon, not for its mystic resonance, but simply because the bright moonlight made it easier to ride home. The other main members were James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood (Charles Darwin's other grandfather): the four greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution.
Erasmus Darwin was a fascinating man, and more about him can be found in any of a number of books by Desmond King-Hele. He, like his son Robert, was a Unitarian – he didn't believe in the Holy Trinity, seeing Jesus as simply a remarkable human being, and was probably secretly an atheist. This makes Charles's decision to become a Church of England vicar all the more curious.
'First forms minute'
Erasmus attracted Paley's hostility by his two vast works Zoonomia (1794) and the posthumously published The Temple of Nature (1803). They both anticipated Lamarck's ideas. Here is Charles Darwin writing to Thomas Huxley:
'[It is] curious to observe how exactly & accurately my Grandfather (in Zoonomia Vol. I. p. 504 1794) gives Lamarck's theory. I will quote one sentence. Speaking of Birds Beaks, he says "All of which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavour of the creatures to supply the want of food, & to have been delivered to their posterity with constant improvement of them for the purposes required."
Charles then points out that Lamarck did not publish until 1809, fifteen years later. He doesn't mention that Grandfather Erasmus had also anticipated Charles's own ideas based on his study of finches' beaks!
The Temple of Nature is written in verse. Here are a couple of extracts from a famous passage in which Erasmus accurately postulated the evolution of plant and animal life from sub-microscopic spores in the sea to mankind itself:
ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing ...
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod, And styles himself the image of his God; Arose from rudiments of form and sense, An embryon point or microscopic ens!
(Embryon is the correct Greek form for what we now call an embryo, and ens is Latin for what we now call an entity.)
No wonder Paley felt the need to take up his pen!
The speculator and the scientist
Darwin admitted that his grandfather's ideas had probably influenced his own, since as a young man he had greatly admired Zoonomia. However, when he came to re-read it, 'I was much disappointed; the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.' Paley's ideas, by contrast, seemed more logically organised and factually based.
Erasmus had a brilliant speculative mind, capable of making giant leaps of imagination. Charles had the ability to collect a vast array of facts, sort them, categorise them, throw out ideas that didn't fit the facts, and ask himself what conclusion the facts led to. As he put it: 'I am a sort of machine for observing facts & grinding out conclusions'. Erasmus thought like an eighteenth-century savant; Charles had the mind of a scientist, which was why it was Charles, and not his grandfather, who revolutionised scientists' understanding of the living world.
Time to kill
In 1831 Charles got his theology degree: he wasn't considered bright or hardworking enough to go for Honours, but among those lesser students who sat for pass degrees he proved to be one of the better ones, chiefly thanks to his knowledge of, and sympathy with, the ideas of Dean Paley. Because he had come up to Cambridge three months late, he had to stay on two extra terms, and Henslow arranged for him to go on a geological investigation in North Wales with Professor Sedgwick, the famous geologist after whom the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge was named. Though Charles left as soon as the shooting season started, the expedition taught him a vital lesson:
'Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them'
For five years of his young life he would assiduously collect facts without really knowing where they would take him or what conclusions he would draw.
CHAPTER 2
The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles now had his degree in theology, or divinity, as it is called in Cambridge. His piety was genuine, and he could quote scripture by the ream. All he had to do now was to wait for a suitable parish to turn up. His increasing interest in insects, plants, animals in general, fossils and geology were perfectly normal for an English vicar at the time; Henslow himself was a clergyman. A parish would cost money to secure, but his father was rich and his uncle Josiah Wedgwood would probably also help, being after all one of England's leading industrialists. As it happened, 'Uncle Jos' helped in a quite different way. Charles wanted to travel a little before he settled down – the 'gap year' is by no means a modern invention. Unhappily the friend he planned to travel with died suddenly.
Gentleman's dining companion
Then, wholly unexpectedly, a letter arrived from Henslow. A Captain Robert Fitzroy was to command a Royal Navy brig called the Beagle sailing to survey the southern part of South America, and at the same time testing the new naval chronometers as a way of assessing longitude. The survey was planned to last two years. We tend to forget it, but this was an important voyage irrespective of Darwin's involvement, and Fitzroy himself was a significant scientific innovator. He was twenty-six at the time, the grandson of the Duke of Grafton, and a comfortably rich young man. So much so that he was having the Beagle refitted at his own cost. But it was still only a brig, and therefore not large: brigs were the smallest class of fighting vessel in the navy, and this one was 90 feet (30 metres) by 24 feet (8 metres), though it did carry ten guns. Darwin later claimed that he was taken on as unpaid 'ship's naturalist'. This was not wholly true: the Beagle already had a naturalist in the person of its surgeon, Robert McCormick. The post offered was that of 'gentleman's dining companion' – someone for Fitzroy to talk to, someone who was a gentleman, and who had wide scientific interests.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Theory of Evolution by John Scotney. Copyright © 2010 Bravo Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Bravo Ltd.
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