The year following that first public outing of the idea, Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species which amply bears out just how fully developed his ideas were. It is one of the greatest science books of all time – beautifully written and easy to understand, yet completely solid and immensely detailed in its science. And what is remarkable is just how complete the ideas have proved to be in the century and a half since it was written.
Despite the legendary furore provoked by Darwin’s books, the rows over evolution actually died down quite quickly at the time and the concept was soon widely accepted, not just among the scientific community but by all but the most dyed-in-the-wool among the clergy, too. In fact, it was scientific criticism of Darwin’s mechanism for evolution – natural selection – that threatened to undermine his work most severely. The physicist Lord Kelvin’s worryingly short estimate of the age of the Earth – far too short for Darwin’s evolutionary process to have taken place – proved, in the end, to be mistaken. But for a long time there seemed to be a hole in the heart of Darwin’s work – just how were traits passed distinctly on and on through the generations rather than simply fading away?
This problem bedevilled Darwin for the rest of his life. Yet, unbeknown to Darwin – and unbeknown to most of the scientists working on evolutionary ideas – the problem had been solved by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel even as Darwin published the Origin. Mendel’s work with plants showed how traits can be preserved from generation to generation through the combination of factors, later known as genes, inherited from both parents.
By the time Mendel’s work was rediscovered in the early twentieth century, Darwin’s reputation was fading. Even Mendel’s genes didn’t entirely revive it, because genes didn’t seem to work in the gradual way needed for Darwinian evolution, but were simply ‘on’ or ‘off’ – genes, in Richard Dawkins’ neat metaphor, seemed to be digital while evolution looked ‘analogue’. Then in the 1920s, a mathematical approach by geneticists such as Ronald Aylmer Fisher showed how the ‘digital’ nature of gene variations (mutations) was smoothed out over large populations. With this reconciliation, biologists could at last dovetail genetics and evolution by natural selection into what came to be called by some the ‘modern synthesis’ and by others, the ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’. Since then, Darwin’s ideas have gone from strength to strength.
Interestingly, in the 1960s, Darwin’s ideas were given a new twist, when Richard Dawkins suggested in his famous book, The Selfish Gene, that the real battle for survival that drives evolution is not between individual organisms, but between their genes – the organism is simply a vehicle for the genes. This startling idea gave Darwin’s theories a real shot in the arm. They were already so widely accepted by then that they seemed almost dull. But Dawkins’ suggestion gave them a whole exciting new dimension and opened up many rich avenues of research.
They also seemed to wake up the religious opposition, maybe because they seemed so chillingly mechanistic and because they placed ‘selfishness’ at the heart of life. Right from the day the Origin was published, Darwin’s ideas, of course, upset many people of particular religious views, because they entirely banish God from any role in the creation of species – and in particular go against the Biblical story of the Creation. But criticism from religious groups, rather than diminishing as the scientific evidence mounts, has begun to heat up.
Recent surveys, for instance, suggest that more than half of all Americans entirely reject the idea that life evolves – despite the overwhelming scientific consensus on the evidence. And when it comes to the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in which evolution progresses in an entirely automatic (entirely God-free) way, the numbers shrink further – with only 14 per cent of Americans agreeing with it. One challenge to evolutionary theory has come from a notion labelled ‘Intelligent Design’. It sounds scientific and is often presented in a pseudo-scientific way, but its argument is that the astonishing complexity and aptness for their circumstances of most life forms on Earth must indicate that they were designed intelligently, that is by God. This idea is an old one, convincingly demolished by the philosopher David Hume two centuries ago, and more recently by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker.[1]
Despite these challenges, the scientific consensus is overwhelming. The evidence that species do evolve by natural selection has mounted up so powerfully that very few scientists doubt that it provides a remarkable and astonishingly complete explanation of the nature of life. It seems to work right from the microscopic, where it shows very clearly how things like antibiotic resistance develop, to the macroscopic, where it shows how whales and hippos are actually very close relatives. It shows how dinosaurs morphed gradually into birds. It shows how butterflies acquired particular wing patterns. It explains why cheetahs are so fast. It gives us a way of exploring why humans are naked and other apes are hairy. Indeed, it touches every aspect of life. Life is the most amazing, varied, rich and interesting phenomenon in the universe – and yet Darwin’s idea shows us to a very large degree how it has come to be as it is … and how it may change in the future.
[1] The title of the book comes from the early nineteenth-century theologian William Paley’s assertion that if you found an object as complex as a watch, then you would rightly assume it to be the creation of a watchmaker – and so you must assume that a beautiful and complex organism must be the creation of a divine watchmaker.
#6 Abolition of Slavery
There is no more hideous stain on the history of the Western world than the transatlantic slave trade. It is deeply to our shame that our ancestors treated anyone, let alone so many, with such brutality. There is no escaping such shame. Twelve million people were shipped from Africa to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and the lives of these people and their offspring born into slavery were utterly blighted. The sufferings of most of the slaves were largely silent, but whenever you read a solitary witness voice from that time it brings home the true misery with enough force to make you weep or rage that this vile trade ever happened.
Indeed, it is so natural at this distance in time to dismiss the slave trade as an aberration of the past that it is easy to forget just how important an idea it was to abolish it. If you can’t imagine something happening now (wrongly as it happens, as I’ll return to later), it doesn’t seem such a great idea to abolish it. Yet the fact is that enough people believed slavery was acceptable to sustain it for nearly three centuries. Perhaps most Europeans and Americans, benefiting from the fruits of slave labours, simply turned a blind eye rather than actively condoning it. It ended only when the voices raised in protest became loud and effective enough (helped no doubt by changing economic circumstances).
It matters to remember that abolition was a great idea because there are abuses in the world today that in the future may seem just as unimaginable as the slave trade does to us now. We live with the fact that a third of the world’s people are living in abject poverty, for instance, because we feel powerless to change it. Maybe it was not so different for ordinary people thinking about slavery a few hundred years ago. Ultimately, the slave trade didn’t disappear because most people didn’t approve of it but because it was actively abolished. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil,’ the eighteenth-century Irish statesman Edmund Burke is believed to have said, ‘is for good men to do nothing.’
Of course, it is the transatlantic slave trade that looms largest whenever the issue of slavery is mentioned, but slaves have existed throughout history – and so have moves to free them. Ancient Rome, for instance, had a slave trade every bit as extensive as the transatlantic trade, with entire nations brought into slavery. Indeed, it is thought that a quarter of Ancient Rome’s population were slaves. Interestingly, there were those who protested against their slavery then, such as the famous gladiator slave Spartacus, who led a slaves’ revolt, and those among the slave-owning class who acknowledged that slavery was wrong. Stoics protested a
gainst the ill-treatment of slaves and some early Christians such as John Chrysostom condemned the very idea of slavery. Indeed, the idea of manumission – freeing one’s slaves – became so popular that the Emperor Augustus was forced to make laws limiting the practice.
Slavery didn’t end with the collapse of the Roman Empire, though. It is not just that slaves became serfs, peasants bound for life to a particular feudal lord; more than 1 in 10 people were fully enslaved in Medieval Europe, including many Slavic people who gave their very name to the practice. A thousand years ago, the port of Bristol was thriving on the slave trade just as it did in the eighteenth century, only at this time the traders were Vikings and the slaves were English. Christians, although urged to treat slaves well, felt that justice need only be done in the next world, not this. But many English Christians felt uncomfortable about their own people being enslaved overseas, especially by heathen races like the Vikings.
Just a few years before the Norman conquest, the Saxon bishop Wulfstan, an early abolitionist, put a stop to Bristol’s slave trade, writing: ‘They used to buy men from all over England and carry them to Ireland in the hope of gain; nay they even set forth for sale women whom they had themselves gotten with child. You might well groan to see the long rows of young men and maidens whose beauty and youth might move the pity of a savage, bound together with cords, and brought to market to be sold.’
Not long after, William the Conqueror, long thought of as the oppressor of the English, issued what may be the first national ban on trading slaves, in 1102, stopping ‘that shameful trading whereby heretofore men used in England to be sold like brute beasts’.
Gradually, over the next half-millennium, slavery dwindled in Europe, until only Russia had slaves, and in 1723 Peter the Great turned Russian slaves into serfs. But slavery had not disappeared; it was simply focused elsewhere – in the Arab nations where slaves brought from Europe as well as elsewhere were often kept, and of course in the Americas where slaves were brought by European traders from Africa.
The history of the transatlantic slave trade began when the first African slaves arrived on the Spanish-colonised island of Hispaniola (modern Dominica and Haiti) in 1501. By the end of the century, the infamous ‘slave triangle’ was well under way, with European ships carrying cargoes of textiles, rum and manufactured goods to Africa, taking on a new consignment of slaves and sailing to the Americas before taking sugar, tobacco and cotton back to Europe. British ships alone carried over 3 million African slaves to the Americas.
The Enlightenment brought a change in attitudes, and an anti-slavery movement led by Quakers began to grow among the British public. Although the Evangelist politician William Wilberforce is the best-known figure, it was a surprisingly widespread movement, with dissenting religious groups finding rich support among the factory workers of the Midlands and North, and even among women and children who ran their own anti-slavery campaigns. Another side that has come to light in recent years is the significant role played by black people, such as the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography was widely read, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.
Through the 1780s the movement gained such momentum that in 1787 the Parliamentary Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was set up under the leadership of Wilberforce to enquire into the possibility of abolishing the slave trade. The extensive and committed research compiled by committee members such as Thomas Clarkson, which threw the suffering of slaves into the spotlight, built up an eventually unanswerable case. On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire.
Getting the slave trade banned was just the first battle, however, and in the 1820s the abolitionists were active again, campaigning to set existing slaves free – finally succeeding with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, under which all slaves in the British Empire were liberated after 1 August 1834. It took a long, long time, though, to finally remove the chains from the black slaves of the Americas. In the United States, the African-Americans were not really freed until the end of the segregation laws in 1965.
It is unimaginable that there should still be slaves in the Americas now, but the emancipation of slaves didn’t happen by chance. It was achieved through the idea of abolition and the courageous, dedicated efforts of campaigners from Moses Brown to Rosa Parks over nearly two centuries. There is no other idea among our list of great ideas that is quite so necessary, quite so vital in correcting a great wrong as abolition, and no idea, perhaps, that has done quite so much to directly alleviate human suffering. Abolition is the one absolutely essential idea, the one we cannot do without if we are to live with any degree of comfort in the world.
And the battle is not yet over. Appallingly, abolition is not a great idea of the past that no longer matters. The enslavement of Africans in the Americas may be history, but there are now more slaves around the world than ever before. The slavery is not legal as it was for the African-Americans but it is just as real, and the sufferings of those enslaved just as terrible. According to Anti-Slavery International there are now 27 million people in slavery around the world – men, women and children forced to work through violence or the threat of it, under the complete control of their ‘employers’, and sometimes even bought and sold. This slavery takes many forms, from domestic slavery in northern Sudan to child camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates.
Perhaps the largest group of modern slaves, though, are the victims of ‘human trafficking’, the trading of young women and children who are then sexually exploited, as well as coerced into other kinds of forced labour. Sickeningly, this is apparently the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, and only a little way behind the drugs trade as a target for the world’s nastiest crime syndicates. According to the Council of Europe: ‘People trafficking has reached epidemic proportions over the past decade, with a global annual market of about $42.5 billion’, while the United Nations estimates that nearly 2.5 million people from 127 different countries are being trafficked around the world each year. These bald statistics hide ghastly individual tales of exploitation, as young girls are abducted into prostitution abroad. Although the trade is so far underground that it is hard to be sure of numbers, child protection agencies believe there are thousands of child sex slaves, many from Eastern Europe, in the UK alone.
The numbers involved in slave trading around the world today are, shockingly, greater than the transatlantic slave trade at its worst, yet because so many of the victims are traded singly and clandestinely the trade slips under the radar. Abolition, of course, was targeted against the legal institution of slavery, not against this modern criminal enslavement. But the need to end it is just as imperative. The victims are isolated and traumatised minors, with no courageous spokesmen, no Toussaint l’Ouverture[1] to lead the fight against the slave-bosses. That’s why the drive behind abolition is needed more than ever. Abolition is not an idea of the past; it is the idea that all slavery must end and is the most urgent, most crucial idea of all.
[1] The rebel slave leader who won Haiti independence from Napoleon’s France.
#5 Use of Fire
In itself, of course, fire is not an idea but a natural phenomenon. The big idea with fire is using fire, of deliberately starting a fire – not simply to revel in its destructive power but to use it in a controlled way.
It’s hard to be certain just when humans first thought of doing so. Ancient signs of burning, such as charred wood, may well be the marks of natural wildfires, not campfires. Fire-hardened shards of clay at East African sites such as Chesowanja and Koobi Fora may be telltale signs of campfires dating back 1.4 million years, while bear bones in a cave at Swartkrans in South Africa may have been charred by equally ancient cooking fires. But they could be just the scorch marks of a blaze ignited by the heat of the sun or a flash of lightning. Some palaeontologists suggest the world’s oldest manmade fire is actually a 790,000-year-old site at Bnot Ya’akov Bridge in Israel, where a fire
seems to have been lit repeatedly on the same site over a period of up to 100,000 years.
What seems likely, though there is no conclusive proof, is that the first bright sparks to think of lighting fires were human ancestors such as Homo erectus who lived in Africa a million or more years ago. The flame was then carried around the world by their descendants as they walked out of Africa.
Anyone who has tried lighting a fire in the open without the aid of matches or firelighters of any kind will know just how tricky it is. Even in bone-dry conditions with perfect kindling it can take a lot of effort – with energetically rubbed sticks or struck stones needed to get a proper fire going. So those first fire-starters must have been not only ingenious enough to get their flames lit; they must have been thoroughly convinced that the effort was worth it. Indeed, if one takes the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’ line of argument, then fire must surely win the battle of the greatest ideas hands-down. Think of all the countless trillions of fires that have been ignited all around the world since that first flicker in Africa. What other idea has consumed so much sustained and repeated effort over such a long time? And considering the risks of injury or worse when lighting fires, it’s clear that the benefits of lighting fires must be substantial.
So just what is it that’s so great about lighting fires? It’s pretty likely that for the earliest of our ancestors protection came close to the top of the list. Fire not only provides a light to see predators and enemies through the dangerous hours of darkness; it also provides a powerful and handy weapon to drive them away. Think of Indiana Jones with his flaming torch in the snake pit, or any other resourceful adventure film hero trapped in a perilous place, and you get the picture. Fire uniquely provides powerful protection against almost any kind of attacker, even for those with neither skill nor powerful physique.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 26
