by A. N. Wilson
A survey of the reviews of the first edition of The Origin of Species could not make happy reading for its author.32 Two rejected the idea of evolution outright (Sedgwick and Agassiz). Three (Hooker, Hutton and Wright) accepted Darwin’s thesis but with deep reservations. The remaining eleven – all of them, however, respectful – suggest that micro-mutation is an implausible explanation for the origin of species, and propose some form of macro-mutation. Some of the reviewers also point out similarities between Darwin and Lamarck and between Darwin and Vestiges which he was unwilling to acknowledge himself. The book had confirmed in the reading public the hunch which it had had since reading Lyell and Chambers years before: namely that evolution is true. As a specific explanation for the origin of species, it had failed, and Darwin was gored, wounded, by the result. The side of him which was the faithful naturalist would acknowledge this, and was preparing to withdraw from the fray. The other side of him – the side which had believed in 1844 that he was guilty of murder, for having murdered his wife’s God – was preparing the development of his biological theory into a metaphysical treatise. The Origin of Species had not said a word about the origin of the human race, although it was patently obvious that this was what made the central argument a matter of controversy. Why else would Bishop Wilberforce have been so foolish as to ask Huxley on which side of his family he was related to a monkey? Having remained taciturn, except in his letters, and in implicit revisions to The Origin, about this vital matter, Darwin was now at work on the book which really spelled out, not only the logical conclusion to natural selection, but also the first principles that had enabled him to form the theory in the first place. Darwin, after all these years of caution, was about to come clean about the central question of all: about who he thought we human beings are.
The Origin of Species had not ventured an opinion about the origin of the human species. Not everyone, perhaps, had paid sufficient attention to Chapter Three of that book, ‘Struggle for Existence’, in which the Malthusian doctrine was applied ‘with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’.33 Malthus’s central idea – that populations increase proportionately to the amount of food available to them, and after that perish – was, of course, an idea which he applied exclusively to the human race. It was Darwin (and Wallace) who applied it to plants and fish and birds. When he came to apply it back again to humans, Darwin blurred the distinction between two sorts of ‘struggle’ for existence: namely, the ‘struggle’ of seeds, or incipient life, to come into being at all, and the struggle, when alive, to be able to eat. So he spoke of American forests being scenes of perpetual warfare, with different tree-types vying with one another for space, different insects battling it out.
The implication, though he did not state this openly in 1859, was that the human race was exactly comparable to Californian redwoods, beetles, cockroaches and the rest – all fighting with one another, as were Father’s spermatozoa and Mother’s eggs, to be conceived in the first instance, and then, when born, scrambling violently for the porridge bowl, the rice or the mock-turtle soup. A moment’s reflection would show us just how untrue this is, as a picture of actual human behaviour at any stage of history: ‘each species [he did not except humanity], even where it most abounds, is constantly suffering enormous destruction at some period of life, from enemies or from competitors for the same place or food’.34 Even the slow breeders, like elephants or human beings, would, by the Malthusian principle, eventually breed so excessively that there would not be enough food for them to eat.
Darwin here was not talking about the ‘struggle’ for eggs to be fertilized by spermatozoa. He was talking about the life of living beings – human included – after they have been born. Many more individuals are born, he maintained, than can possibly survive. This is plainly not true. Even in the darkest days of mid-nineteenth-century England, where child mortality was painfully high, it was still the case that the huge majority of human beings survived childhood. The most extreme and apparently ‘Malthusian’ phenomena in Darwin’s lifetime – the Irish potato famines – were not caused by there being too many Irish people. They were caused by the failure of the potato crops, the forcible restraint of the population who were trying to get their hands on the abundant wheat harvests, which were exported by landlords for profit under the very eyes of the starving, and the Malthusian beliefs of the Liberal government who thought in the first instance that the famine was ‘inevitable’.
Darwin’s proposition that infant mortality is ‘very high’, and that only the ‘fittest’ could survive such a struggle, simply bore no relation to the facts of the case. By speaking of child mortality existing on the same scale as, say, the death of seedlings in a pine forest, he was positing – though not quite openly stating – a child mortality rate which was comparable, say 70 or 80 per cent. So far as I know, none of his first readers pointed this out, and it was only the philosopher David Stove35 who makes clear the full absurdity of the Darwinian analogy.
You might suppose that when he came to write about the descent of man directly Darwin would have come to revise this view, but this was not the case. The Malthusian doctrine is retained in all its nonsensical plentitude in Chapter Four of The Descent, where he says that overpopulation in Britain was prevented only by ‘the greater death-rate of infants in the poorer classes’. As for the ‘savages’, although it would seem that they are ‘less prolific than civilised people’, they too would easily breed more children than they could feed were it not for the fact that their numbers are ‘by some means rigidly kept down’.36 A sinister phrase here, which is not fully explained.
Long ago, in 1820, William Godwin had objected to Malthus that, if his theory had been true, the English would have become ‘a people of nobles’, the ‘fit’ surviving and the feckless unwashed poor dying of starvation. This did not happen. Contemporaries of Darwin as various as Wallace himself, as W. R. Greg – in Enigmas of Life – and as Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton all addressed themselves to the puzzling fact that the exact opposite of the Darwinian–Malthusian process seemed to be at work. As Greg, for example, a retired mill-owner, put it, ‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him.’37
David Stove was particularly clever at capturing Darwin’s very distinctive way of dealing with an argument. Greg, Dalton and Wallace were all lined up in opposition to Darwin’s views. If Darwin was correct, and natural selection was busy at work discarding feckless, lazy or unintelligent people, or people of feeble physique, while preserving the muscular and the upright, then surely the ‘people of nobles’ would already have been in existence. Here is David Stove:
He discusses at length the relevant writings of Greg, Wallace and Galton . . . Yet he somehow manages to do so without ever once betraying the faintest awareness that what he is dealing with is an objection to his theory. Well, that was Darwin’s way. He was temperamentally allergic to controversy, and would always, if he could, either ignore or else candidly expound a criticism of his theory, as a substitute for answering it. The result might be, and often was, that his own position became hopelessly unclear, or else clear but inconsistent. But then, he did not mind that at all!38
Readers of The Descent of Man might very well find it a disappointment. It sold well. Murray sent Darwin a cheque for £1,470. ‘You have produced a book wch. will cause men to prick up what little is left them of ears – & to elevate their eyebrows . . . it cannot fail, I think to be much read.’39 There are, indeed, parts of The Descent of Man which still make the eyebrows soar. The book does not, however, quite give its money’s worth. Any reader might hope that it would contain an account of how the human race is descended from some semi-hominid ape and, if so, which primates are our closest cousins. About these matters Darwin is both brie
f and vague. He gives a far less lucid account of the human descent from apes than is to be found among his twentieth-century exponents, such as John Maynard Smith in The Theory of Evolution (1958, revised 1975 and 1993) and Julian Huxley in Evolution in Action (1953). Indeed, I suspect that if we had not read some such book first, The Descent of Man would be only semi-intelligible as a fulfilment of our expectations. It is a wide-ranging ramble over the field of evolution in non-human species; and these ramblings are interspersed with reflections upon his fellow human beings which make Darwin, when placed beside even the most reactionary or fascistically inclined readers of the twenty-first century, seem simply monstrous. For here in all its fullness is an exposition of his belief in the survival of the fittest, by which he meant the white races of the globe in preference to the brown-skinned races; and, among the white-skinned races, the supremacy of the British; among the British, the class to which Darwin happened himself to belong; and among that class, the Darwin family, and himself, in particular. The grand end of the struggle for life was to allow the rentier class to live in comfort while lower ranks toiled. ‘I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin,’ Darwin added in a note to his Autobiography, ‘but have often and often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures.’40
In The Origin of Species, he had softened the cruelty of his view of life – of the endless struggle and fight which it involved – by adding, as we observed in an earlier chapter, ‘we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply’.41 Anyone who has seen a zebra chased and mauled by a lion or a bird quivering in the mouth of a cat will question the idea that there is no fear in nature. But Darwin’s best-sellers were based, perhaps like many best-sellers, on mythic contradiction. The vigorous happy and healthy who bought books, and rode in carriages, and sent their sons to Rugby and Haileybury and Eton were consoled to realize that, although it required much destruction and death to allow them to exist, the inferior and discarded breeds felt no pain as they died out. Darwin had, for the moment at least, left biology behind and ventured into the popular realms of mythology. He had given the Victorians a myth which reflected their own self-made achievements as the summit, not merely of recent history, but of the whole impersonal order of nature. It was a consoling myth, not least because, unlike the myth of Genesis, the Man and the Woman who walked together in the Garden would never be called to account. Adam and Eve walked naked until they heard the voice of Jehovah and hurried to cover themselves with leaves. Mr and Mrs Victorian Bourgeois, already swathed in bonnets, crinoline, frock coats and stove-pipe hats, felt no comparable reproach when they contemplated the inexorable and impersonal force of Nature. God was moral. Natural selection appeared to endorse all their baser selfishness.
It is open to question how many Europeans ever took the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden literally. It was first written down as a myth, and it remained – remains – a myth: that is, a story by which human beings understood their origins, and their place in the world. At some point, perhaps in the seventeenth century, the myth came to be understood as what we should call history, perhaps because this was a period when modern historiography itself knew its beginnings. Clearly, this literalism would need to be corrected, and the story of evolution, as it had come to be explored from the closing decades of the eighteenth century onwards, provided this corrective.
It is probably fair to say that nowadays in the West – with the exception of some biblical literalists – the evolutionary picture, of humanity having emerged from a long ancestry of lower primates, is now the dominant myth. It has replaced Adam and Eve in the Garden. ‘Every human being, the first man marching ahead of the endless ape armies of prehistoric times, you and I, no less than our descendants, are the heirs of all the ages, poised on the perilous brink of time,’ as an English poet (born 1892) once phrased it.42
The most extended metaphysical exploration of the myth is perhaps to be found in the writings of the French Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who in The Phenomenon of Man (English edition 1959)43 saw the entire natural order beginning with the stuff of the universe itself and unfolding on earth over millions of years, from the first manifestations of life, through protozoa, coelenterates and chordates leading to fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds, mammals and eventually primates, to the dawning of human consciousness: to what he called the hominization of the species. Thomas Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley commended the work to English-speaking readers after Teilhard had died. (In his lifetime, his religious superiors forbade him to publish his work.) Above all, as a humanist, Julian Huxley commended the Christian priest’s sense that biology commanded us to be aware of our common humanity and our kinship with the natural order.
If Teilhard’s name is not so prominent in the public mind as it once was, he and Julian Huxley’s generation surely were influential on later generations. The Green Movement and our sense of the interrelatedness of all species on the planet, and of our ecological co-dependency, all surely stem from a profound reading of evolutionary ideas. So too, in the time that the evolution myth has had to penetrate our collective consciousness, has evolution worked to break down racial barriers. Our knowledge that the human race almost certainly derives from hominids who left Africa 1.7 to 1.8 million years ago would, you might suppose, make racism intellectually and emotionally impossible. Human beings, however, are not purely logical, and even scientists are capable of using what they suppose to be scientific facts to bolster what are in fact simple prejudices. Darwin was no exception, and his book The Descent of Man, published by John Murray in February 1871 – is a work bristling with the late Victorian high-bourgeois mindset. It represents humanity’s climb from hirsute higher primate to frock-coated member of the Athenaeum Club as a mirror of the social climbing which had enabled such ascents as his own grandfather’s family from the dreaded depths of trade into the work-free existence of the educated rentiers: ‘Man may be excused for feeling some pride, at having risen, through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having risen, instead of being aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.’44 In something of the same way, a Victorian bourgeois gentleman, who owed his leisure to ancestors in trade, might hope to marry a daughter into the ranks of the aristocracy. Moreover, Darwin showed the classic British – perhaps it would be more accurate to say English – love of animals, a love which is stronger than his disdain for brown-skinned and ‘savage’ people. ‘For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.’45 There are moments, however, when he admits to finding it difficult to accept that he is, indeed, part of the same species as the savage, ‘even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no words to express any number higher than four, and who uses no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections, with that of the most highly organised ape’.46
The ‘savages’ whom he had encountered as a young man in Tierra del Fuego flicker across the sixty-year-old Darwin’s brain like figures in a nightmare, and he compares their reactions to life, and their levels of intelligence, with his own domestic pets. Once, when a gust of wind moved an open parasol on the lawn at Down House, Darwin’s dog, ‘a full-grown and very sensible animal’, growled and barked, believing the movement to have been caused (Darwin supposed) by ‘some strange living agent’. He compares the dog barking with the hostile reaction of the Fuegians when the surgeon on the Beagle went duck-shooting. The ‘savages’ believed it would bring bad luck: ‘much rain, much snow, blow much’.47 In h
is Voyage of the Beagle, he had already noticed that the language of the Fuegians ‘scarcely deserves to be called articulate’.48 Only a few decades after the Beagle had made her short visit to Tierra del Fuego, the parents of Lucas Bridges went to live there as missionaries. His father compiled a dictionary of the Yaghan language, far from complete, which revealed that they had a vocabulary of over 32,000 words. In The Descent of Man Darwin was still repeating the claim that the Yaghans ate human flesh and maltreated their children. Bridges, who lived among them for years, encountered no instance of cannibalism, and found them to be intensely devoted to their children. Darwin told readers of The Descent of Man that ‘we could never discover that the Fuegians believed in what we should call a God’.49 (Interesting use of the word ‘we’ incidentally.) Bridges found the Yaghans to be intensely religious – as, pace Darwin, every anthropologist has found every ‘primitive’ people on the face of the planet to be.
The notion that ‘savages’ do not really have ‘languages’ in ‘our’ sense of the word bore no relation to any study of the language of ‘savages’, nor to any knowledge, so far as we know, of even the simplest facts about what in modern parlance would be called linguistics. His book reflects what Herbert Spencer and other intellectuals of the time supposed about this interesting and complicated branch of study. Because Spencer believed that everything was on an upward spiral of progress, he imagined that language, like plant forms, or the necks of giraffes, was perpetually improving itself. With (so far as one can work out from his Autobiography) either no Greek or only the most basic knowledge of Greek, he decided that Homer wrote in a ‘primitive’ language which was obviously less sophisticated than that of poets in Spencer’s own day like Tennyson or William McGonagall. (If this analogy strikes you as unfair, Spencer actually believed that The Iliad is more ‘primitive’ than Victorian three-decker novels, such as the masterpieces of Mrs Henry Wood.) Hebrew, in Spencer’s view, is further back in the evolutionary scale than English. ‘If we compare, for instance, the Hebrew Scriptures with writings of modern times, a marked difference of aggregation among the groups of words is visible.’50
