Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  Charles did not enter the debate because he had no standing as a mammalian taxonomist and, as he put it later to Hooker, “knew nothing about the brain.” Their friend Huxley, though, could argue confidently about the anatomical issues. In 1858, a few months before the announcement of the theory of evolution at the meeting of the Linnean Society, Huxley suggested in a lecture at the Royal Institution that if we compared man, gorilla and baboon, we should find little greater interval “as animals” between man and gorilla than between gorilla and baboon. Echoing Dr. Holland’s point in his Chapters on Mental Physiology about the continuity between man and animals, he went on: “I believe that the mental and moral faculties are essentially and fundamentally the same in kind in animals and ourselves. I can see no line of demarcation between an instinctive and a reasonable action.” Speech had led to our “unlimited intellectual progress” but “to the very root and foundation of his nature, man is at one with the rest of the organic world.”

  No one in England had yet seen a gorilla in the flesh, but in September 1858 a corpse of a young adult male, which had been killed in Gabon, was brought to the British Museum in a cask of spirits. When the cask was opened, the gorilla was found to be partly decomposed and smelt dreadfully. Professor Owen examined it and gave a detailed description of its anatomy to the Zoological Society, but could say little about its behaviour because he had only travellers’ reports from “Gorilla-land” to go on. Mindful perhaps of the specimen’s wretched semi-human look when the spirits were poured away, he noted two “redeeming qualities . . . the male’s care for his family and the female’s devotion to her young.”

  Professor Owen entrusted the specimen to Abraham Bartlett, a leading taxidermist who knew Charles and was working at the time on the animal displays at the Crystal Palace. Bartlett prepared the body and was allowed to display it for a few months at the Crystal Palace, where the gorilla was portrayed in The Illustrated London News as a terrifying monster. “The strength of the adult male being prodigious, and the teeth heavy and powerful, it is said to watch, concealed in the thick branches of the forest trees, the approach of any of the human species, and as they pass under the tree, let down its terrible hind foot, furnished with an enormous thumb, grasp its victim round the throat, lift him from the earth, and, finally, drop him on the ground dead. Sheer malignity prompts the animal to this course, for it does not eat the dead man’s flesh, but finds a fiendish gratification in the mere act of killing.” The force of the emphasis on the gorilla’s wilful and “fiendish” evil is remarkable. It helps explain why, when Charles later suggested that the apes were our cousins, people were reluctant to accept the link.

  The young gorilla

  Charles did not deal with human origins in the main argument of The Origin of Species, but declared his belief twice in the conclusion, writing later that he had done so “in order that no honourable man should accuse me of concealing my views.” He said about one familiar example of our bodily similarities with other mammals, that “The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse . . . at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight and successive modifications.” And when he came to sketch the “considerable revolution in natural history” which he believed would follow if his ideas were accepted, he suggested that “psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” Charles thus placed the final emphasis, not only on bodily structure in which most of the obvious likenesses lay, but on psychology which was the science of the human soul or mind. Here the links were far less clear, and most people denied that there were any, but Charles was confident that they would prove to be the key to the understanding of human nature.

  A few days after The Origin was published, Charles revealed privately to Lyell that he was confident that the theory of natural selection would explain fully how man had evolved as a thinking being. True to Lyell’s uniformitarian principles, he saw a gradation of mental powers between an orang-utan and a savage, and wrote: “To show how minds graduate,just reflect how impossible everyone has yet found it to define [the] difference in mind of man and the lower animals; the latter seem to have [the] very same attributes in [a] much lower stage of perfection than the lowest savage.” He rejected the idea that God had miraculously inserted the human soul in an animal body, and set a challenge for his argument. “I would give absolutely nothing for [the] theory of natural selection if it required miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”

  The Origin of Species opened the way to an evolutionary view of human origins, both body and mind. Charles Kingsley, a country rector, Christian Socialist and chaplain to Queen Victoria, suggested to Charles that he had set a “villainous shifty fox of an argument” running, and people should follow it into “whatsoever unexpected bogs and brakes” it might lead them. That “shifty fox” quickly became the hunters’ quarry in the controversy about the theory. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce wrote in his anonymous review of The Origin in the Quarterly Review that Mr. Darwin clearly declared “that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well as to the animals round him.” He insisted that “the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God” must be rejected because it was utterly irreconcilable with mankind’s supremacy over all other creatures. During the notorious debate on evolution at Oxford in 1860, Wilberforce jokingly asked Huxley whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that he was descended from an ape. Huxley replied that he would prefer to be descended from an ape than from a person who treated serious issues with the bishop’s frivolity. It is not clear exactly what was said and heard on the day, but the exchange in Huxley’s telling was quickly identified by Charles’s friends and supporters as the defining moment of the whole controversy about evolution, because it harped on man and animal, bishop and baboon.

  The general distaste at the idea that humans were cousins to gorillas was heightened in 1861 when Paul Du Chaillu, a young American explorer, published his Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He had hunted the “monstrous and ferocious ape” in the mountain forests of Congo, and gave a vivid and almost evil account of the living creature. Just as the writers on chimpanzees and orangs in the 1830s had done, he played heavily on the animal’s links with man. “Suddenly I was startled by a strange, discordant, half-human, devilish cry, and beheld four young gorillas, running toward the deep forests . . . their whole appearance like men running for their lives. Take with this their awful cry, which, fierce and animal as it is, has yet something human in its discordance, and you will cease to wonder that the natives have the wildest superstitions about these ‘wild men of the woods.’ ” A gorilla, when shot, “dies as easily as a man.” His hideous death cry “tingles” the hunter’s ears “with a dreadful note of human agony.” “It is this lurking reminiscence of humanity, indeed, which makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter’s excitement in his attack.”

  Struck by the likenesses with humans, people nevertheless insisted that the beast must be alien. In 1863, the Literary Institute in Bromley, the Darwins’ nearest town in Kent, heard a talk by a visiting lecturer on the gorilla as compared and contrasted with man, and the Bromley Record made a dark hint to Charles, referring to his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion. “One thing we may as well state, not that some we could name, who ought to have been present, deserve to know it . . . the lecturer clearly proved that the gorilla is not ‘a Man and a Brother.’ ”

  The public were fascinated by the issue of human origins, and Huxley and Owen entertained them with a fierce and highly personal public argument about the hippocampus minor, which Huxley managed to show apes had as well as Homo sapiens. Charles, meanwhile, experimented on plants and insects, feeling that the best contribution he could now make to
the case for evolution was to develop his ideas about inheritance and cross-fertilisation, both relatively uncontroversial topics. In 1862, he commented to Kingsley that the genealogy of man was “a grand and almost awful question.” He had “long attended” to the subject and had “materials for a curious essay on human expression, and a little on the relation in mind of man to the lower animals.” But he would keep them to himself for the time being. “How I should be abused if I were to publish such an essay!”

  In 1863, Huxley published his lectures on the anatomical relation of man to the lower animals as a short book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. (Charles wrote to him: “Hurrah, the monkey book has come!”) He showed clearly the close similarities in anatomical structure between the human brain and those of the man-like apes, and repeated the case for a close natural link. On our mental powers, he emphasised the differences between human and animal minds, and how far humans had progressed from their animal origins. He insisted that humans had their origins in the natural world, but then said: “no one is more strongly convinced than I of the vastness of the gulf between civilised man and the brutes.” “Intelligible and rational speech” was mankind’s unique possession. The capacity had a natural origin, but with it, man was “transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.” Those were not words that Charles would have used. Whether they were Huxley’s true ideas, or whether he was paying lip service to the pious presumptions of the age, is difficult to say.

  Everyone was waiting for Lyell to declare his view, but although he had encouraged Charles to publish, he was troubled by the implications of the theory and unwilling to commit himself. He was a respected champion of the method of science, believing that “truth is the highest aim”; he was committed to the principle of continuity in nature, and to uniformitarian explanations. At the same time he was a devout and scrupulous Unitarian, and thought long and hard about the difficulties he faced in reconciling Charles’s idea of evolution with his Christian faith. He had no fear that the idea would diminish our awe of the Creator, because nothing could detract from God’s grandeur. The dignity of man was Lyell’s worry. In the fortnight after the appearance of The Origin of Species, he had noted in his private journal how the laws of nature and continuity pointed clearly to human development by descent from an animal ancestor, but he had an “apprehension lurking in the depth of the soul,” “fear lest the dignity of Man . . . should be lowered by establishing a nearer link of union between him and the inferior animals,” a threat to “his conscious feeling of superiority.” Lyell did not avoid the problem, but wrote bravely: “Let us look it steadily in the face. Now before it is proved. When it is only possible, perhaps probable, that it will be established.”

  By 1863, Lyell had concluded privately that he must “go the whole orang” with Charles and the others; he told Charles, but he could not bring himself to say so in public. He produced a book, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, which marshalled the evidence that humans had lived with ancient mammals that are now extinct. The book gave mankind a history reaching far back into the geological past, with ample time for humans to have evolved with the apes from a common ancestor. Lyell admitted the possibility that we were descended from animals, but firmly rejected Charles’s idea that human nature had developed from an animal condition by “gradation,” small steps in a natural process with no sudden leaps to break the continuity with our ancestors. He chose to suggest instead that mankind might have at some point in the remote past “cleared at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason manifested by man.”

  Charles was bitterly disappointed by Lyell’s comment, and it was a cruel irony for him that the eminent geologist from whom he had learnt the uniformitarian approach to the explanation of natural processes had to introduce a discontinuity or leap in his conjecture about human origins. Charles cared deeply about his species theory and all that it suggested about the secrets of human nature, and was upset by the unwillingness of others to explore its implications as freely and boldly as he wanted to. During the days after first reading Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, he suffered “much sickness and weakness” and had to put off a visit by him. The day after the Lyells’ next stay, Emma noted in her diary that Charles had “bad hysteria and sickness.” Some time later, Charles told his doctor that one of his recurring symptoms was “vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half faint.” With his comment to his doctor, there can be no doubt about the intensity of the distress that Emma witnessed.

  Queen Victoria had by now been mourning Prince Albert’s death for two years, but she was interested in the debate about human origins, and summoned Lyell for an audience at her summer residence on the Isle of Wight. He wrote to his wife: “She asked me a good deal about the Darwinian theory as well as Antiquity of Man. She has a clear understanding, and thinks quite fearlessly for herself.”

  One of the most positive if peculiar responses to The Origin of Species was Charles Kingsley’s story for children, The Water Babies, which also appeared in 1863. The Spectator wrote: “The purpose of this tale—and it was a fine one—seems to have been to adapt Mr. Darwin’s theory of the natural selection of species to the understanding of children, by giving it an individual, moral and religious as well as a mere specific and scientific application.” Kingsley, an eclectic and mercurial thinker, saw the presence of God in all natural life, but a God at once loving and ruthless whose character was “consistent with all the facts of nature, not only those that are pleasant and beautiful.” Among “all the facts” in Kingsley’s natural theology were some absurdities. No human could have invented “anything so curious and so ridiculous” as the lobster. The Water Babies is a surreal fantasy in which two children who die meet strange characters in a parallel water world and act out a satirical allegory of selfishness and moral transformation. Kingsley pictured God the Creator as Mother Carey, a white marble lady sitting on a marble throne at the world’s end. She created all living things, but not each separately. Instead, she explained, “I sit here and make them make themselves.” Kingsley welcomed Charles’s idea of evolution and felt it should be offered to children in this way because it pointed to our links with other living creatures; it explained human degeneration as well as progress, and he believed that “your soul makes your body, just as a snail makes his shell.”

  When, towards the end of the book, Tom, the drowned chimney sweep, reached the Other-End-of-Nowhere, he found an island where everyone was “running for their lives day and night . . . and entreating not to be told they didn’t know what.” They were being chased by “a poor, lean, seedy, hard-worked old giant” who “had a heart, though it was considerably overgrown with brains.” He was a naturalist “made up principally of fish bones and parchment, put together with wire and Canada balsam.” He smelt strongly of spirits for preserving specimens; he had “a butterfly-net in one hand, and a geological hammer in the other; and was hung all over with pockets, full of collecting boxes, bottles, microscopes, telescopes, barometers, ordnance maps, scalpels, forceps, photographic apparatus, and all other tackle for finding out everything about everything, and a little more too.”

  Tom told the giant that he had seen Mother Carey, and the giant was delighted to find someone who might be able to “tell him what he did not know before.” He said “quite simply—for he was the simplest, pleasantest, honestest, kindliest old . . . Sampson of a giant that ever turned the world upside down without intending it . . . ‘If I had only been where you have been, to see what you have seen!’ ” Tom asked the giant why he ran after the people, and he replied that it was they who had been running after him. All he wanted was “ ‘to be friends with them, and to tell them something to their advantage . . . only somehow they are so strangely afraid of hearing it. But, I suppose I am not a man of the world, and have no tac
t.’ ‘But why don’t you stop, and let them come up to you?’ ‘Why, my dear, only think. If I did, all the butterflies and . . . birds would fly past me, and then I should catch no more new species, and should grow rusty and mouldy, and die. And I don’t intend to do that, my dear; for I have a destiny before me, they say.’ ”

  Earlier in the book, Kingsley had ridiculed Professor Owen’s egotistical clash with Professor Huxley over the hippocampus minor. When he wanted to show science in a different way, as an approach to knowledge and understanding which could reveal the secrets of natural life for the good of mankind, he portrayed it as a tall, kind, unworldly figure whose heart was “considerably overgrown with brains.” All who knew Charles would have recognised him in the picture.

  At last in 1864, Alfred Russel Wallace took up the argument about mankind and carried it a step forward. He read a paper to the Anthropological Society on “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of ‘Natural Selection.’ ” He suggested that man was “social and sympathetic” by nature, and that early in the development of human societies the capacity for cooperation and “sympathy which leads all in turn to assist each other” benefited each community and was favoured by natural selection. “From the time, therefore, when the social and sympathetic feelings come into active operation, and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and structure . . . Every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard against adverse circumstances, and combine for mutual comfort and protection, would be preserved and accumulated.” That was “the true grandeur and dignity of man.” Wallace asserted that if his conclusions were just, it must inevitably follow that “higher” communities, “the more intellectual and moral,” must displace the lower and more degraded ones.