Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  For Huxley, however, and for his generation of English scientists, it made sense to claim that evolution had been the discovery of an Englishman. Darwin was their magic genie, whom they had conjured, not out of dead bones in a glass case, but out of their dissecting rooms and laboratories. Darwin’s theories had been concocted, by his own confession, from reading the standard textbook of selfish capitalist economics, Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, but he had tested his idea by observing living beings – pigeons, worms, dogs, apes incarcerated in the zoological gardens. Logically speaking, the French novelist should have been right: if you believe in ‘evolution’, you must believe that all species, including our own, are heading for a transformative process which amounts to extinction – unless you concede, which Darwin doggedly never would, that there is something ‘special’ about human beings which makes them different from other species. Strangely enough, however, Huxley and the other Victorian Darwinians, unlike Balzac and the followers of Cuvier, did not see their genus and class as heading for extinction. Rather, they saw science as confirming their position as lords of the universe. For Huxley, by contrast with Cuvier and Owen, it was the laboratory, and not the museum, where science had made its strides.

  It is not only in the churches at the time of the Reformation, nor yet alone in the former Soviet Union, that statues find themselves on the move, often with deep symbolic effect. In the Natural History Museum, for example, Darwin’s statue on the staircase was moved less than a decade after it had been placed there. Owen died in 1892, ten years after Darwin, and his statue replaced that of the celebrated naturalist of Down House. There seemed justice and logic in the decision at the time; after all, the museum was largely Owen’s creation. Moreover, by then, Darwin’s reputation was on the wane, so much so that by the early twentieth century it had almost the nature of a family cult, kept going by Darwins and Huxleys and their Cambridge friends. Darwin in his lifetime had changed his mind so often about the details of his theories that the scientific world had moved on. Evolution was accepted as a given by most scientists. How it operated, however, remained mysterious until the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetics in the early part of the twentieth century.5

  Then came neo-Darwinism, which is still the orthodoxy in most academic scientific faculties in the world. This is the melding of Darwinism with Mendelian genetics. The weirdly Victorian battle between creationists and neo-Darwinians needed a patron, and the neo-Darwinians could scarcely, without absurdity, have enlisted for this purpose the genial Bohemian friar who had pioneered the science of genetics. Since Darwin and his champion Huxley were among the relatively few scientists in history who entered the sphere of religious controversy, Darwin was the obvious such figurehead. The bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, 2009, seemed a timely moment to heave the 2.2 ton statue back to its original place on the landing overlooking the gigantic skeleton of a diplodocus. It was rather as if the statues of Lenin had been re-erected in the central squares of the now democratic capitals of the former Warsaw Pact countries. Darwin’s hero Charles Lyell liked to quote Constant Prévost, ‘Comme nous allons rire de nos vieilles idées! Comme nous allons nous moquer de nous mêmes.’

  Classification was Owen’s métier. For Huxley, by contrast, it was not the museum but the laboratory which was the place where good science could progress. Owen, in Huxley’s view, had committed the ultimate sin for a man of science: he had compromised the truth, in order to appease his conservative-minded patrons. He had, in Darwin’s and Huxley’s view, shilly-shallied over the truth of evolution, appearing, when he spoke to conservatives, to disbelieve that species could mutate, while hinting, when he spoke to Darwin, that they could. Darwin punished Owen, in The Origin of Species, by numbering him among those diehards who believed species were fixed.

  As this shows, Darwin was no saint, for he knew perfectly well what Owen thought about evolution, and knew he was not a simple-minded anti-evolutionist. Huxley, however, egged Darwin on in his quarrel with Owen. And long before Darwin was an icon sculpted by Boehm, and gazing benignly at visitors to the Natural History Museum, Huxley had made his friend into a Type of the Perfect Man of Science, the secular-materialist equivalent of a saint.

  Whereas Owen was a man of the world, who had to convince politicians and churchmen that his museums would not upset the apple-cart, Darwin was single-hearted and single-minded in his pursuit of the only thing which counted: the Truth. Moreover, Darwin, toiling for years in spite of bad health, to establish the truth, was rooted neither in the cigar-scented committee rooms of clubs, nor in the corridors of Whitehall, nor in the common rooms of academe. Rather, he did his work in that sacred Victorian place, the home, where his faithful wife, mother to nine children, dabbed her eyes with grief as her husband dismantled the grounds for religious belief. Here, again, was a story which bore some relationship to reality, but which Huxley had moulded creatively.

  Huxley coined the word ‘agnostic’ for his own religious position. By the time he unveiled the Darwin statue, it was pleasing to consider oneself daring or anti-establishment by not being Christian, but in fact, in the sort of circles in which Huxley moved – metropolitan and intellectual – agnosticism was commonplace. Though there were intellectuals in public life – the poet Browning, the politicians Gladstone or Salisbury – who were articulate Christian believers, the Sea of Faith, as it ebbed in Matthew Arnold’s great poem ‘Dover Beach’, had made its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. G. K. Chesterton was probably right to say that by the end of the nineteenth century atheism was the religion of the suburbs. Materialism, as expressed by Herbert Spencer, the most famous and popular philosopher of the Victorian Age, defined that age. Thomas Hardy, wistful and lyric, had described God’s Funeral in a poem. And Darwin, who with his copious white beard resembled one of the biblical prophets, was the prophet of the irreligious position. This was partly of his own doing, but it very much suited Huxley’s vision of things to have the figure of Darwin to display to the public. Behold the Man! Here was the man who, in the words of one of his most fervent disciples in our own times, had legitimized unbelief. ‘Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’ So wrote Richard Dawkins, in his classic distillation of Darwinism The Blind Watchmaker.6

  Darwin, therefore, from the publication of his most famous book, was always something more than a scientist. Huxley concluded his speech in the Natural History Museum with a plea that Darwin should be seen not merely as a man. ‘We beg you to cherish this Memorial as a symbol by which, as generation after generation of students of Nature enter yonder door, they shall be reminded of the ideal according to which they must shape their lives . . .’7

  In a survey conducted by the New Statesman magazine in 2011, various public or intellectual figures were asked their religious views. Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, delivered one of the more succinct answers.

  To suppose that there is a God explains why there is a physical universe at all; why there are the scientific laws there are; why animals and then humans have evolved; why human beings have the opportunity to mould their character and those of their fellow humans for good or ill and to change the environment in which we live; why we have the well-authenticated account of Christ’s life, death and resurrection; why throughout the centuries millions of people (other than ourselves) have had the apparent experience of being in touch with and guided by God; and so much else. In fact, the hypothesis of the existence of God makes sense of the whole of our experience and it does so better than any other explanation that can be put forward, and that is the grounds for believing it to be true.8

  I choose to quote this statement by a twenty-first-century Oxford professor, at the beginning of a book about a nineteenth-century scientist, for two reasons. One is that it is the best and simplest account of the Christian, theistic position which I know. The second is that you would be hard pressed to
find any philosopher, any highly intelligent person, in the entire intellectual history of Europe, from the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD to the time of the French Revolution, who would not have agreed with Professor Swinburne’s words. The atheist or non-believing or materialist tradition existed, of course it did, and can be found among the Epicureans of Dante’s time, the followers of Spinoza in the seventeenth century and the atheist forerunners of modern thought in eighteenth-century France. And there was David Hume. It remains true that the broad mainstream of intellectual opinion would have supported the Swinburne line, not for fear of popes or patriarchs, not for dread of the Inquisition, but because it would appear to be a sensible and reasonable statement. One aspect of his credo, however, would have puzzled some – though not all – of the thinkers and philosophers for that long period of one and a half millennia. And that is his belief that God explains ‘why animals and then humans have evolved’.

  Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, all believed in evolution in some form or another. It was not a view entirely peculiar to the nineteenth century. But in the decades before Darwin, and during his lifetime, evolution of the species had been questioned – more, really, on theological than on scientific grounds. Various philosophical and scientific mistakes account for this phenomenon. So it was that by Darwin’s day there were those who supposed that you had to choose between believing in the fixity of species and losing your religious faith. Darwin’s faith evaporated slowly, and for a number of reasons which a biography such as this might be able to unpick. The battle over his Origin of Species theory, a battle which Huxley so relished and encouraged, was a useful weapon against religion only if you supposed – as many people appeared at that date to suppose – that God could have created the universe only by placing unaltered and unalterable species in situ, rather like those gardeners in large municipal parks who prick out the flower beds with plants ready-grown in potting sheds, rather than allowing the exuberant chaos of the herbaceous border to form a life of its own. There are still those who hold that to believe in evolution is incompatible with religious faith. They include those on both sides of the divide – both materialist atheists and the creationists, so called. That their strange battles still occupy so much of the antagonists’ energy in the twenty-first century is testimony to Huxley’s instincts: this is certainly a show that will run and run. For such as these, Charles Darwin is either the hero who ‘made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’ or he is the demon who made so many people lose faith in the Bible. Both the creationists and the Darwinists here seem to be saying the same thing. In any event, it gives Darwin a strange position in the history of science. True, Galileo got into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church for asserting what Copernicus had worked out mathematically seventy years earlier, that we live in a heliocentric, not an earth-centred, universe. But the Church recovered its equilibrium, and nowadays the Copernican–Galilean–Newtonian universe is a fact which it would be insane to deny. No other major scientific discovery or breakthrough has ‘made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’ – only Darwin’s. This will prompt some people to wonder whether Darwin’s distinctive twin doctrines – that evolution occurs gradually by means of natural selection, and that this process necessitates an everlasting struggle for existence – are not in fact scientific statements at all, but expressions of opinion. Metaphysical opinion at that. To conceal this fact, Darwin’s ardent disciples in our own day are quite happy for it to be supposed – as it is by very many of the people who look at his image on a British ten-pound note – that Darwin was the person who discovered the phenomenon of evolution. We shall come to see that the story is not so simple. The story of evolution, and how some scientists resisted it and others came to accept it, is, obviously enough, intimately connected with the story of Darwin. Long before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, however, scientists were aware that there was a process at work within species which enabled them to adapt themselves to their environment. French biologists had been divided between two opposing camps usually known as functionalists and structuralists. Cuvier was the great champion of the functionalists. He believed that flora and fauna had developed their characteristics as a way of surviving. That is why – let us say – a bat has wings, in order that it can live in trees and high places to escape predators. Cuvier’s great opponent was Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. He believed that the best way of studying species was to examine their basic structures rather than their functions.

  Taxonomy, the subdivision of living plants, animals, insects and so on, was basically a study of structure. Cuvier noted, for example, the furcula, a bone which enabled birds to fly. Saint-Hilaire found a corresponding bone in fish. This showed, for the structuralists, that different species often had cognate characteristics which lay dormant or unused, but which revealed relationships between the species.

  Neither Cuvier nor Saint-Hilaire propounded a theory of how the species evolved. Both accepted that the essential building-blocks of species were a sort of given. Owen believed he had found the way to reconcile functionalist and structuralist biology. In his groundbreaking discourse On the Nature of Limbs, given as a paper at an evening meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 9 February 1849, Owen accepted that taxonomy’s task was to classify the building-blocks, what he called homologues. A mammal, for instance, possesses certain characteristics – it is amniote, it has hair, it has tetrapod limbs, at the end of which we find a pentadactyl pattern. These are the given homologues of the taxa. Owen noted however that every species of mammal has a different ‘adaptive mask’, as he called it. Depending on its needs, the basic building-blocks for each species of mammal, will adapt, and this is most obvious in the limbs, where in a bat you see wings, in a man useful fingers and thumbs, and legs which enable him to stand upright, in the horse a series of adaptations which allows the pentadactyl ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ to morph into hoofs. Owen did not offer an explanation for how the species assumed their various ‘adaptive masks’. Nor did he offer an explanation of how the building-blocks of nature arose in the first instance. He did conclude his discourse with words which make it quite plain that science had, by 1849, come to accept changes within the taxa.

  To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession and progression of such organic phaenomena may have been committed we as yet are ignorant. But if, without derogation of the Divine power, we may conceive the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term ‘Nature’, we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light, amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the human form.9

  The scientific study of how species adapt themselves ‘with slow and stately steps’ would have advanced – as this glorious paragraph shows – had Charles Darwin never been born. The distinctive and Darwinian idea, of course, was that one species changed into another, that the building-blocks themselves – the carpels of angiosperms, for example, enabling thousands of different plant forms to burst into flower, or the feathers of birds – had somehow themselves evolved by a mysterious, impersonal process. Adaptation of the kind demonstrated by Cuvier and Owen in their museums is a phenomenon which we can watch at work, through the discoveries of palaeontology. These would eventually demonstrate, for instance, almost every adaptive stage by which a small foxlike animal that walked on four toes, and whose fifth dactyl was redundant thirty to fifty million years ago in the Eocene Epoch, adapted itself in a progressive line producing Orohippus, Epihippus, Mesohippus and so on, until it came to stand on one toe enclosed in a protective hoof. The redundant fifth dactyl was evolved out of existence, and eventually Equus caballus, our horse, stands before us.

  Darwin’s theory was that the basic building-blocks – the amniotic sack, the feather, the carpel – had themselves evolved in the way that a horse’s limb
s had adapted. For this, palaeontology has never provided any evidence whatsoever. Stephen Jay Gould described the total absence of any transitional forms as ‘the trade secret of palaeontology’.10

  There is surely a reason for this, and when we identify the reason, we see why Charles Darwin occupies so unusual a role in the history of science.

  The story of his life is not quite what you might expect. The first principle of hydrostatics was plausibly attributed to a particular brainwave, occurring to a particular man, Archimedes, when he stepped into the bath and realized that the mass of the overflowing water was equivalent to his own. Darwin’s relation to the science of evolution was not of this order. But, once he had been made into a symbol by Huxley (and he was very happy to be a symbol), Darwin could take the credit for an idea which had, appropriately, evolved in many minds over many decades. Moreover, although, to read the writings of modern-day Darwinians, you might suppose that Darwin’s version of evolution has been irrefutably proved, or that it is now contested only by religious bigots, this is decidedly untrue. Boyle’s Law, on the inverse proportionality of volume and pressure in gases, remains in place until another chemist comes along and refutes it by persuasive experiment. The same is true of all real scientific discoveries. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and his claim that the process works as a result of an everlasting warfare in nature, are not laws like Boyle’s Law or Newton’s Law of Gravity. Although their extreme unlikelihood (especially of the ‘struggle for existence’ idea) can be demonstrated, they are not strictly speaking verifiable, or falsifiable, and in this sense they are not scientific statements at all. It is for this reason that there has never been a time, since The Origin of Species was first published in 1859, when Darwin’s theory was universally accepted by the scientific academy. And even among Darwinians, down to our own day, there remain deep fissures between the varying sects – for example, those who hold to the true faith of each evolutionary change having come about by an infinitesimally slow gradualism or micromutation, and those Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge whose punctuated equilibria provided a kind of Fast Forward button on the evolutionary Remote which allowed a species to cut out some of the boring waiting-time and jolt forward to the next stage. So it is in many senses surprising that Darwin is seen as a symbol, or as the Man Who Discovered Evolution. How this came to pass will be explored in the story that follows. It certainly did not happen by accident. It happened by determined and ruthless self-promotion on Darwin’s part, by cultivation of his own image, and by enormous good fortune in his choice of enemies. In his own lifetime, Darwin attracted little support among his scientific colleagues for his own distinctive take on evolution. His loyal ‘Bulldog’,11 Huxley, however, was usually able to minimize the intellectual and scientific objections to Darwinism by one simple device. He made it seem as if Darwin’s enemies objected to his theory only for reasons of religious bigotry. If the Darwinists had not managed to represent themselves as single-minded warriors for truth against obscurantists from the Dark Ages, the unsatisfactoriness of their science might have been made clearer. It is this book’s contention that Darwinism succeeded for precisely the reason that so many critics of religions think that religions succeed. Darwin offered to the emergent Victorian middle classes a consolation myth. He told them that all their getting and spending, all their neglect of their own poor huddled masses, all their greed and selfishness was in fact natural. It was the way things were. The whole of nature, arising from the primeval slime and evolving through its various animal forms from amoebas to the higher primates, was on a journey of improvement, moving onwards and upwards, from barnacles to shrimps, from fish to fowl, from orang-outangs to silk-hatted Members of Parliament and leaders of British industry. It was all happening without the interference or tiresome conscience-pricking of the Almighty. He, in fact, had been conveniently removed from the picture, as had the names of the many other thinkers and scientists, including Darwin’s own grandfather, who had posited theories of evolution a good deal more plausible than his own. Copernicus had removed the earth – and by implication the human race – from the centre of the universe. Darwin in effect put them back. For all the brave, Darwinian talk of natural selection being non-purposive and impersonal, it breathes through the pores of everything which Darwin and Darwinists write that natural selection in fact favours white middle-class people, Western people, educated people, over ‘savages’. The survival of the fittest was really the survival of the Darwin family and of their type – a relatively new class, which emerged in the years after the Napoleonic Wars in Britain and held sway until relatively recently. It remains to be seen, as this class dies out, to be replaced by quite different social groupings, whether the Darwinian idea will survive, or whether, like other cranky Victorian fads – the belief in mesmerism or in phrenology, for example – it will be visited only by those interested in the quainter byways of intellectual history.