Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  If it is doubtful whether Spencer knew Greek, it is almost certain he knew no Hebrew, and it would be interesting to find any Hebrew-reader who considered, let us say, the Book of Job, with all its parallelism, its ambiguities and its poetic sweep, to be less linguistically sophisticated than Spencer’s First Principles.

  So influential was Spencer, however, and the habits of mind to which he was prone in the 1860s, that he managed to persuade even those who were experts in their academic fields. Professor Max Müller is a case in point; an accomplished linguist who was also much loved by Queen Victoria for his supposed resemblance to the Prince Consort. Darwin quotes with approval in The Descent of Man some words of Max Müller, printed in the periodical Nature in January 1870. ‘A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and owe their success to their inherent virtue.’51 Sad words to read for the more mellifluously long-winded of Max Müller’s contemporaries such as George Meredith or the young Henry James – if they ever did read them. Quite how a short word could be viewed as more ‘virtuous’ than a long word is difficult to define, though Spencer, who seems to have invented this particular and distinctive approach to human vocabulary, castigates the languages of North America for their polysyllabic primitiveness. The Ricaree and Pawnee languages were, for example, obviously ‘uncivilized’, because they persisted in saying ashakish, three wasteful syllables, when they could be saving useful time by using the manly English word ‘dog’.52 Darwin, who was a poor linguist – never getting very far with those early German lessons and relying on a children’s governess to write his letters to German correspondents – swallowed all this stuff quite seriously and absorbed it into The Descent of Man.

  The Descent of Man is a longer book than The Origin of Species. This is chiefly because, even more than in the previous book, Darwin makes little or no attempt to follow a tightly argued structure, preferring to flood his chapters with information about matters which have, at most, an indirect bearing on his supposed subject.

  Most of the second part of the book is not concerned with the human race at all. Chapter Ten, for example, concerns the ‘Secondary Sexual Characters of Insects’; Chapter Eleven continues the story, narrowing his theme to Lepidoptera, but without the suggestion that human beings derive from butterflies; Chapter Twelve concerns ‘Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles’, and the next four chapters are devoted to birds. Much of it is fascinating, but it scarcely throws any light on the supposed subject of the book, namely the descent of man. About this question, Darwin was disappointingly reticent, concluding one of the lamer chapters, on the manner in which human beings might have developed, with the sentence, ‘we do not know whether man is descended from some comparatively small species, like the chimpanzee, or from one as powerful as the gorilla’.53

  In 1858, the discovery of flint artefacts and animal bones in Brixham Cave – in Devonshire – by the Scottish palaeontologist Hugh Falconer and the English geologist and schoolmaster William Pengelly, established what Roderick Murchison, of the Royal Geographical Society, called ‘a great and sudden revolution in modern opinion’54 about the antiquity of the human race. The artefacts were deemed to be coeval with the bones of the extinct animals. By 1872, Gabriel de Mortillet had organized the surviving artefacts, some found in the Awirs Cave, near Engis in Belgium (1829), some in the Neander Valley in Germany (1856), into a plausible sequence. Almost complete Neanderthal skeletons would be found in Belgium in 1886. A little later, in Java (now Indonesia), the young Dutch doctor Eugène Dubois found a primitive skull cap, and the world was introduced to Pithecanthropus erectus. The debate could now be conducted, among informed scientific opinion, about what connection, if any, these discoveries had with later humanity. It used to be supposed, for example, that our ancestors eliminated the Neanderthals, but it is now thought by some scholars that the earliest humans coexisted with the Neanderthals for thousands of years.

  To none of these scientific questions was Darwin, who wrote before the major palaeontological discoveries, able to give his mind. Nor is there much evidence that his work prepared any useful groundwork for the actual, scientific investigation into ‘the descent of man’. What his book of that title does offer, on the other hand, is a series of highly contentious generalizations and assertions about the metaphysical nature of humanity.

  An example which leaps immediately to mind, in his chapter ‘On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties’, is his explanation of the success of the British Empire, and how ‘a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations’.55

  Why, for example, have the British in the nineteenth century been so much more successful, in the previous couple of centuries, than the Spanish – when once the Spaniards were such successful colonists? The answer is that the British were Protestants. Just as the Spanish Empire was getting under way, ‘all those given to meditation or culture of the mind’ were lured into the celibate priesthood. Meanwhile, the ‘freest and boldest men’ were all burnt at the stake ‘at the rate of a thousand a year’.56 Small wonder, then, that the British ended up with a more prosperous and extensive empire than the Spaniards.

  Darwin perhaps cannot be blamed for believing that the Spanish Inquisition killed a thousand people a year, since this story was aired in various learned journals, reflecting the visceral anti-Catholic prejudice of the Victorian Establishment.57 Modern historians think that the Inquisition between 1480 and 1520 in fact killed some forty people a year, not a thousand. It is hard to see how this level of judicial murder, however immoral, could be held responsible for reducing the number of adequate Spanish colonists. Many of those killed by the Inquisition were executed not for heresy but for a practice of which Darwin himself hotly disapproved, both on evolutionary and bourgeois principles, namely sodomy. (Darwin was probably too innocent to realize that many of the most successful soldiers, colonial administrators and merchants in the British Empire were in fact homosexual. He lived too late to know the life story either of Roger Casement or Cecil Rhodes, or to read the dream diaries of Robert Baden-Powell.)

  The Descent of Man is, moreover, riven with self-contradiction. On the one hand, Darwin clung to the Malthusian view that the secret of life is a struggle for existence. The being which can push, elbow or kill its way to the most nutritious fodder will come out on top. On the other hand, Darwin was a kindly, high-minded liberal, whose father-in-law had been elected to Parliament as one of the first wave of Liberal MPs after the passing of the Reform Bill. His Wedgwood grandfather had campaigned against slavery, and, whatever Darwin’s view of ‘savages’, he never stooped to regarding them as a saleable commodity. So it was that Darwin wanted to conclude his Descent of Man on a tone of moral uplift. Here is a paragraph towards the close of his treatise:

  The moral nature of man has reached the highest standard as yet attained, partly through the advancement of reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially through the sympathies being rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction and reflection. It is not improbable that virtuous tendencies may through long practice be inherited.58

  A very typical late-Darwin sentence, that. He puts ‘It is not improbable’ at the front of it, and expects the group of words to sound plausible, even scientific. If ‘virtuous tendencies’ are hereditary, presumably he is speaking in a Lamarckian sense – that we learn certain patterns of behaviour, which could then be passed on, not through instruction to children already born, but actually through inheritance. We’ll return in a moment to this, for it turns out to be one of Darwin’s most lasting and influential ideas. For the moment, though, let us stay with the moral sense.

  With the more civilised races, the conviction of the existence of an all-s
eeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advancement of morality. Ultimately man no longer accepts the praise or blame of his fellows as his chief guide, though few escape this influence, but his habitual convictions controlled by reason afford him the safest rule. His conscience then becomes his supreme judge and monitor: nevertheless, the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt [here we go again, with ‘no doubt’!] were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection.59

  In spite of Darwin putting ‘no doubt’ into that sentence, the difficulty of accepting it as reliable will be immediately apparent. Our minds inevitably go back to the celebrated third chapter of The Origin of Species. ‘We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds and are thus constantly destroying life or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey . . .’60

  The principle of natural selection, as defined by Darwin – inspired by Malthus – is a struggle for existence. ‘It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.’61 It is not logically possible to believe in this ‘Malthusian’ principle and at the same time to maintain that natural selection leads to the growth of ‘virtuous tendencies’, ‘social instincts including sympathy’. The process which has now taken Darwin’s own surname as an epithet – Darwinian – is a ruthless process. ‘In the state of nature’, Huxley maintained in Evolution and Ethics, ‘[human] life was a continual free fight.’62

  David Stove, in a posthumously published essay called ‘Darwinism’s Dilemma’, places the problem very amusingly and forcefully. It is obvious that human life could not be sustained if Darwin’s view of it were actually true. Human life simply isn’t a free fight and a constant struggle. The existence of hospitals, nurseries, poorhouses in the old days, unemployment relief in our own day, shows that struggle and fight are not everlasting, and that societies do not survive by allowing the weak to go to the wall. Apart from anything else – and this is not an argument Stove advances, it is my own addition – the weakness of human babies and children positively demands levels of unselfishness on the part of their parents which are at variance with the Darwinian ‘struggle’.

  Stove argued that there were three ways out of Darwinism’s dilemma. One route was what he called the Cave Man theory. Maybe we are kindly and civilized now, because we are nineteenth-century liberals; but in ‘the state of nature’ human beings really were like that. ‘Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.’63 Stove asks what this selfish cave man was doing with a family at all. ‘Any man who had on his mind, not only his own survival, but that of a wife and child, would be no match for a man not so encumbered.’64

  If you abandon the Cave Man arguments, you are left with two choices, in Stove’s judgement. One is to be a Darwinian Hard Man. No one could ever be a completely consistent Hard Man. Indeed, if you were a serious Hard Man you would probably have to say that not only should there be no hospitals, orphanages, care homes for the old, and so on, but that there are none – there could not be any, if ‘the struggle for existence’ was still in full storm. Herbert Spencer came close, in his philosophy, to being this Hard Man, developing as he did, in The Man against the State, the view that the existence of hospitals and the rest weakens the natural process. In a healthy society, Spencer came to believe, communities, and certainly states, would simply let the weak go to the wall.

  The third option, of being a Darwinian Soft Man, is the option favoured by most of those who say they believe in Darwin. Darwin himself, for most of the time, was such a Soft Man. The Soft Man ‘believes all the right things’65 – in welfare programmes, kindliness and so forth – but realizes that in today’s world it would seem bizarre to admit to not believing in The Origin of Species. Soft Man simply fails to think the thing through.

  Many of Darwin’s contemporaries were not content with this double-think. And before we pour too much scorn on those older critics of Darwin, such as Sedgwick, who failed to grasp the fundamental fact of evolution, we should perhaps allow them the credit for failing for an honourable reason. The picture of humanity presented by Darwin was an ugly and an unrealistic one.

  The problem, in part, went right back to the difficulty of defining a ‘species’. Bertrand Russell was perhaps never more Victorian, indeed almost toppling over into the world of Lewis Carroll, when he wrote, ‘If men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal?’ All readers who open The Descent of Man for the first time would consider this to be one of the central questions which the book would answer; in fact it is silent. Russell went on,

  Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton’s? Would the Piltdown Man have written Shakespeare’s poetry if there had been anyone to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will find himself forced to regard apes as the equal of human beings. And why stop with the apes? I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favour of Votes for Oysters.66

  The passage loses none of its force, even if it was written before the exposure of the Piltdown Man – the supposed ‘Missing Link’ – as a forgery in 1953. The problem was put even more succinctly by Sedgwick, who wrote in the margin of Vestiges of Natural Creation, ‘But why do not monkeys talk?’67

  For the first generation of British scientists who tried without success to come to terms with the fact of evolution, human kinship with the apes was the sticking point – it was for Sedgwick, for Wilberforce, for Henslow, for many of them. In some ways, however, it is for the subsequent generations, down to our own, who can see that there is, and must be, some sort of kinship with the higher primates, and who can fully see that evolution is a fact, for whom the questions raised about the distinctiveness of human nature seem all the sharper, and Darwin’s answers seem even less adequate than they did for believers in the historicity of Adam and Eve. All the Adam and Eve-believers were saying, in effect, was something which seems on the face of it inescapable, that human beings are different from their ape cousins. Even from their Neanderthal cousins (or mates) in the mists of time, for though the Neanderthals are now thought to have produced artefacts and tools, Russell’s reductionist joke applies. We cannot envisage a Neanderthal Newton or Shakespeare.

  One of the first publicly to dissociate himself from Darwin’s view of humanity was Wallace. Although he considered The Descent to be ‘on the whole wonderful’, and ‘a marvellous contribution to the history of the development of the forms of life’,68 he could not agree about Darwin’s account of human evolution. Wallace was a diffident man, vegetarian, socialist and given to many of the gentler fads of the age. What he was really saying was that the book was admirable when it spoke of fish, butterflies and birds, but unconvincing when it came to trying to write about the subject of the book’s title. He expressed his reservations with such courtesy, however, that Darwin was largely appeased. Wallace, though unwavering in his belief in natural selection, was a religious believer. He believed that man, with all his faculties of language, conscience and spiritual sensibility, had not merely evolved but was, in effect, a new creation by the Almighty.

  Mivart thought the same. He recollected the moment he had come clean about the matter to Huxley.

  After many painful days . . . I felt it my duty first of all to go straight to Professor Huxley and tell him all my thoughts, feelings and intentions in the matter without the slightest reserve . . . Ne
ver before or since have I had a more painful experience than fell to my lot in his room at the School of Mines on that 15th of June, 1869. As soon as I had made my meaning clear, his countenance became transformed as I had never seen it. Yet he looked more sad or surprised than anything else. He was kind and gentle as he said regretfully that nothing so united or severed men as questions such as those I had spoken of. 69

  By the time he had published his own book, The Genesis of Species, in 1871, Mivart was generous in acknowledgement that ‘we are mainly indebted to the invaluable labours and active brains of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace’ for addressing the problems of how natural laws produce new species and new characters. ‘Nevertheless, important as have been the impulse and direction given by those writers to both our observations and speculations, the solution will not . . . ultimately present that aspect and character with which it has issued from the hands of those writers.’70