by Paul Johnson
There was, it is true, a moment early in the twentieth century when it seemed possible that Darwinism might be toppled. As Mendel and his theory of genetics were rediscovered, spread rapidly, and were accepted and enlarged upon, some thought genetics was incompatible with Darwin. But after the First World War, Ronald Fisher showed that it was possible to reconcile Darwin and Mendel. Indeed, said Fisher, “Mendelism supplied the missing parts of the structure erected by Darwin.” Darwin showed the what of evolution and the why, natural selection. Now Mendel had produced the how, genetics. This was reinforced when Hermann Joseph Muller showed that genes are artificially mutable. Thanks to Fisher and Muller and others, such as J. B. S. Haldane, by the 1930s, Darwin-Mendelism was triumphant. The way was then open for James Watson and Francis Crick to discover the double helix structure of DNA. So on to the genome and the present infinite possibilities of the science.
But if Darwin’s natural selection survived to become an essential part of modern genetics, it also acquired an intellectual life of its own. First was its new universality. It was seen that natural selection applied not merely to organic nature—the entire range of species from vegetation to man—but to the inanimate world as well. Natural selection had to be seen as a destructive force as well as a productive one. The survivals are what remain after nature has swept away the rest as rubbish. This applies equally to everything in the universe, from galaxies down to suns and planets, then with planets to tectonic plates and continents. A typical case is a mountain. It exists because nothing, as yet, has come along to destroy it. One of weaker composition and construction would have been reduced to sand and rubble and absorbed in the soil.
Although the process whereby durable mountains are sorted out from broken ones may be physically different from the sorting out of vegetable and organic matter, both are part of selection by nature. Once this is grasped, it is hard to see any moral purpose in nature or indeed any purpose at all. We come under exactly the same fundamental rules as a piece of rock. Nature grinds on but without object or purpose or rationale, long- or short-term. There is no point whatsoever in existence. Nonexistence is just as significant. Or rather, nothing whatsoever signifies. The result is nihilism.
It is hard to believe that Darwin himself would have accepted this huge, bottomless emptiness of life. Or rather, perhaps because he felt it yawning, he averted his eyes from the big issues and focused them on the small: climbing plants, orchids, insectivorous plants, worms. The truth is, long before he died, he had lost control over his own theory. It was taking him where he did not wish to go. The point at which he lost control can be precisely identified. It was when he decided that natural selection, to be internally coherent, has to be comprehensive and universal. But if this is so, there is no essential difference between man and any other animal. The differences, however obvious and seemingly enormous, are of degree, not of kind. Darwin was sure this was and is so, and therefore, having written Origin, he wrote Descent and Expressions, whose prime object is to prove it. And then, having proved it, he averted his eyes from the consequence—the colossal vacuum that swallows the universe in pointlessness.
However, Darwin, by not thinking the thing through, missed a very important paradox. It can more easily be grasped if we see natural selection as destructive as well as constructive—and not only destructive but self-destructive. Once natural selection had created man, it was in its own danger zone. Human beings think. Well, so evidently do many other creatures, even worms, as Darwin showed. Human beings are conscious, and self-conscious. Well, so perhaps are some other beings, though we cannot be sure. What we can be reasonably sure about is that no other animal except man is self-conscious to the point of examining the nature of existence, the point of it or its pointlessness, and then seeking ways of doing something about it.
It is at this stage in evolution that natural selection falters and ceases to work with all its previous triumphalism and certitude. We speak of “man taming nature”—Darwin used the phrase himself. What he did not foresee was man taming natural selection. Yet it was already happening in his lifetime. He could see dim implications. He opposed birth control because it threatened the “geometrical progression” by which (he thought) human beings reproduced themselves. He opposed vaccination because it hindered nature’s ability to destroy the weak and select the strong. What he did not live to see was an age in which mankind would use its ever growing intellectual, physical, and indeed spiritual resources to frustrate natural selection at almost every point of its operations. So anxious was Darwin to prove that natural selection had produced humanity that he was blind to the fact that it was also producing humanitarianism, a moral force that made the operation of natural selection ultimately far more difficult, if not impossible.
Looking to the future, there seemed no end to the way in which the development of humanity, originally by natural selection at its most spectacular, should work to frustrate its destructive and unpitying logic. In the fifteenth century, European populations, having recovered from the Black Death, were expanding rapidly and suffering from land hunger. By their ingenuity in constructing oceangoing vessels and maps and navigational instruments, they were enabled to move overseas and begin the process of conquering and occupying the territories of weaker peoples, exterminating or enslaving them. With nature operating throughout the universe in its process of destroying the weaker and selecting the stronger, the earth itself is ultimately threatened with annihilation, and all its inhabitants. Long before that time, however, the likelihood is that humanity will have mastered long-distance travel in the universe, seeking out and occupying inhabitable areas as our fifteenth-century predecessors did in the Americas.
None of this, of course, invalidates the principle of selecting the fittest, which Darwin identified as the way nature operates. Indeed the fact that the superintelligent animal, Homo sapiens, which nature created by selection, has progressed to frustrating, at many points, the process that made us so formidable, is itself a further demonstration of its truth. So Darwin’s theory remains one of the great scientific explanations of all time, and its confirmation and blending with Mendelism, which supplied its missing dimension, has produced the science of genetics, moving at accelerating speed to illuminate the mysteries of life. Darwin is here to stay among the select band of leaders who dispersed the darkness of ignorance.
However, none of this justifies the enthusiasm of the Darwinian fundamentalists, who over the last few decades have sought to give Darwin a quasi-divine status and to abuse those who subject him and his work to the continuing critical scrutiny that is the essence of true science. Darwin was the first to admit his limitations, and as this little book has shown, they were numerous and sometimes important. Darwin clung to, for instance, the teaching of Lamarck, that acquired characteristics could be inherited, and this led him into absurdities. Post-Mendelian genetics has shown that Lamarck and Darwin were wrong on this point.
What is particularly unfortunate is that the biologists responsible for Darwinian fundamentalism have themselves been deified by an ingenious but perverse band of philosophers, who have acted rather like the slave-ants that Darwin studied, in subjecting their own professional interests to the demands of their biological masters. This alliance of overexuberant science with bad philosophy is a formidable obstacle to truth and the expansion of knowledge.
That knowledge will expand we can be certain, and at an accelerating pace and in directions we cannot possibly predict. This book is written from the viewpoint of a historian, and while all theories of history are vainglorious absurdities, doomed to eventual oblivion, history does teach certain lessons, one of which is that science, like everything else, becomes out of date. And another is that nature is full of surprises. After a lifetime of scientific research, J. B. S. Haldane ruefully concluded, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” It is a sobering but also an intoxicating thought that we are
just at the beginning of the process of acquiring knowledge. How Darwin would have agreed!
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Further Reading
THERE ARE NOW countless books about Darwin, but it is essential to read what he actually wrote. Of his more important books, there is a good edition of The Voyage of the Beagle (as it is now called) in the Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, with an introduction by David Amigoni. Penguin Classics publishes The Origin of Species, with an introduction by John Wyon Burrow. Gibson Square Books publishes The Descent of Man, with an introduction by Richard Dawkins. The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals is published by Penguin with an introduction by Joe Cain. The Oxford University Press has published a useful edition titled Darwin’s Evolutionary Writings, including the autobiographical material in an introduction by James A. Secord. All these are in paperback. Charles Darwin’s Shorter Publications, edited by John Van Wyhe, is published by Cambridge University Press (2009). There is a complete edition, The Works of Charles Darwin, in 29 volumes, edited by Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman (London 1986). The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al., is published by Cambridge University Press, in 18 volumes and continuing (1985– ). Also useful is The Cambridge Companion to “The Origin of Species”, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards (2009).
The official biography of Darwin by his son Francis is still worth reading and is epitomized in the old Dictionary of National Biography. Among modern biographies, there are Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (London 1995–2002); and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London 1991). For his wife, see James D. Loy and Kent M. Loy, Emma Darwin: A Victorian Life (University Press of Florida 2010). For Darwin and slavery, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Penguin 2010). For the historical background, see chapter 13, “The Evolutionary Moment,” in K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, England 1846–1886 (Oxford University Press 1998). For post-Darwin developments, see Matt Ridley, Genome (London 1999).
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
Albert, Prince (husband of Queen Victoria), 75, 95
Allingham, William, 58
anthropology, 21, 29, 68, 99, 101
Aryan master race, 133
Atlantic Monthly, 91–92
Audubon, John James, 17, 24
Ayers, A.J., 80
Babbage, Charles, 40, 144
Bacon, Francis, 41–42
Bagehot, Walter, 126
barnacles, 69–70, 73, 116
beetles, 19, 20
Bell, Joseph, 6
Besant, Annie, 104
Bible
Darwin dismisses account of creation, 41–42, 43
and Darwin’s gradual loss of religious faith, 51–52, 53, 141
Genesis, 31, 41, 71, 75, 83
as guide to chronology of creation, 31
New Testament, 51–52, 53, 93
Old Testament, 31
birds
and Audubon, 17
Darwin’s Galápagos studies, 33
Darwin’s study of pigeons, 71
in Descent of Man, 101
game shooting, 18
birth control, 104, 128, 129, 149
Bismarck, Otto, Fürst von, 128
Bloomsbury Group, 146
Blyth, Edward, 77
Bonaparte, Napoléon, 17
Botanical Society, 11
Botanic Garden, The (Erasmus Darwin), 4
Boulton, Matthew, 4
Bradlaugh, Charles, 104
Brave New World (Huxley), 132
Bridges, Lucas, 29
Bridges, Thomas, 29
British Association, 94
British Museum, 39
Brown, John, 89
Brown, Robert, 144
Brünn, Czech Republic. See Natural Science Society of Brünn
Buckland, William, 144
Buckle, Henry, 98, 143
Buck v. Bell (U.S. Supreme Court case), 132
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 4, 41, 42
Bunbury, Charles, 39
Butler, Samuel, 19
Button, Jemmy, 28
Byron, Lord, 19, 142
Cambodia, 136
Cambridge University
Darwin at, 20, 22, 23, 24–26, 39, 52
Darwin awarded honorary doctor of laws, 139–40
Carlyle, Jane, 90
Carlyle, Thomas, 134, 144
Carnegie, Andrew, 131
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 133
Chambers, Robert, 71
Chesterton, G. K., 132
China, 136
Church of England, 8, 13, 31, 93
Cocos (Keeling) Islands, 31–32
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 131
Coldstream, John, 23
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142
Communism, 135–36
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 6
Conrad, Joseph, 142
coral reefs, 31–32, 43
Covington, Syms, 26, 39, 59
Cramb, J. A., 127
creation, biblical account, 31, 41–42, 43, 71, 75, 82, 83
Crick, Francis, 22, 146
Darwin, Annie (daughter), 61–62
Darwin, Bernard (son), 116
Darwin, Bessie (daughter), 116
Darwin, Charles. See also HMS Beagle voyage; Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
autobiographical writings, 140–41
awarded honorary doctor of laws by Cambridge University, 139–40
becomes evolutionist, 41–42
birth, 17
at Cambridge University, 20, 22, 23, 24–26, 52
characteristics, 18, 23, 28–29, 59–60
children, 11, 61–63, 116, 140
collapse of cultural interests in middle and old age, 141–43
as collector, 11–12, 19, 20, 27, 39, 67, 69, 100, 142
death and funeral, 140
development of theory of natural selection, 44, 48–49
education, 19–26
educational limitations, 20–22, 29–30, 46, 47–48, 68, 97, 101
fame and celebrity, 10, 19, 28, 39–40, 98, 125, 141
family background, 3–12
fear of meeting Priestley’s fate, 12–13, 22, 56, 68, 121
finances, 10, 35
as gentleman-scientist, 10, 35
good fortune in life, 17–18, 25, 50, 79, 91, 93, 140
health issues, 56–59
on HMS Beagle voyage, 25–35
home at Down House, 57–61, 97, 114, 115–16
impact of Malthus’s Essay on Population, 41, 43, 44,48, 49
marriage, 11, 49–56, 140
missed connection to Mendel and genetics, 117, 119–21, 125
network of family and friends, 11, 20, 23–24, 39, 90–91, 143–44
as notebook keeper, 24, 41, 61, 67, 68, 113
as polymath, 21, 99, 113
publications, 21, 27–28, 40–41, 80–110, 115, 116, 130
religious faith, gradual loss of, 51–52, 53, 141, 144
reluctance to go public with general theory of evolution and natural selection, 71–72, 76, 77–79
study of plant fertilization, 70, 113–17
Darwin, Emma Wedgwood (wife)
children, 11, 61–63, 116, 140
and death of daughter Annie, 62
> describes ceremony honoring Darwin at Cambridge, 139–40
intelligence of, 106
letter to Darwin, 53–56
marriage to Darwin, 11, 49–56, 140
as pianist, 116, 142
religious faith, 52–53
response to publication ofOrigin of Species, 95
Darwin, Erasmus (grandfather)
background, 3–5
description, 5
family, 5–6, 11
as member of Lunar Society, 8
as polymath, 5
writings, 4–5
Darwin, Francis (son), 69, 113, 114, 116, 140
Darwin, George (son), 140
Darwin, Horace (son), 140
Darwin, Leonard (son), 61
Darwin, Robert (father)
background, 6–7
as doctor, 6–7
marries Susannah Wedgwood, 8
role in Darwin’s education, 20
sets Darwin up as gentleman-scientist, 35
Darwin, Susannah Wedgwood (mother), 8
Darwin, William (son), 95, 139
Darwinism, 98, 131, 146
Darwinismus. See social Darwinism
Davenport, Charles, 131
Delane, John, 91
Descent of Man (Charles Darwin)
comparison with Origin of Species, 21, 99–100
contents, 100–101
