by A. N. Wilson
By now, however, Darwin personally was beyond criticism in two specific senses. He had, firstly, adopted so many of the criticisms into the six editions of The Origin of Species that the theory itself was in tatters, and he was regarded, as has been said, simply as the Father of Evolution, the Man Who Had Discovered It. The specifics had become immaterial. The great majority of intelligent people now believed in evolution, as they have continued to do to this day in ever-growing numbers. So momentous a change in human belief and consciousness needed a prophetic figurehead, and that person was Darwin.
Darwin was inviolable, however, in a second sense. This was that he did not realize that his theory per se – the theory of evolution by natural selection – had been fatally criticized, not only by his supposed enemies such as Mivart, but by his supporters too. Huxley, for example, never committed himself to believing that all the innovations in living forms come about through the accumulation of many small steps. A major modification of the micro-mutationist position of Darwin’s original idea has to be made. Suppose you accept the ‘Darwinian’ explanation for the slow ‘evolution’ of complex organisms such as the eye. Suppose you accept that each of the forty or so different forms of the eye, from the trilobite 450 million years ago which deployed an ‘optimal design’ for seeing under water, to the compound eyes of insects that comprise up to tens of thousands of lenses to give full 360-degree field vision to avoid being attacked by predators from behind25 – suppose you believe that each of these seemingly purpose-built and complex optical phenomena to have evolved in the manner demonstrated by the Scandinavian Darwinists with their computer in 1979 – a process which would have taken ‘only’ half a million years or so! Even if you can imagine how all these different creatures, with their different, highly complicated optical capacities, were for hundreds of millions of years able to survive without seeing their predators clearly, there are other phenomena in nature which make ‘Darwinian’ explanations simply preposterous.
A very clear example occurred in 1974 with the discovery of ‘Lucy’, a three-and-a-half-million-year-old hominid, by Tom Gray and Donald Johanson. Lucy belonged to the species called Australopithecus afarensis. Compare Lucy’s femur, or upper thighbone, with that of a chimpanzee. The sharp upward angle of her hip joint and her distinctively shaped pelvis relocate the centre of her body’s gravity over her feet. She could stand upright. A Darwinian imagines apes spending millions of years standing half upright, or gradually a bit more upright every ten million years or so. No palaeontological evidence survives for such halfway creatures since, had they existed, they would undoubtedly have been eaten by predators. Lucy is one of the many indicators in the natural world that leaps occur in the story of evolution, and that Darwin’s theory of gradualism was simply wrong and unscientific.
The other area in which Darwinism has been supplanted by scientific evidence is the rich and multifaceted science of genetics which has made such extraordinary strides since the identification of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1944, and the subsequent discovery of its structure. Many branches of genetics have opened up since then, but among them is the measurement of genetic variation by techniques such as gel electrophoresis of enzymes. This way of measuring has shown that genetic variation is sometimes uncorrelated with reproductive success and adaptive evolution, leading biologists such as Motoo Kimura, for example, to develop a theory of molecular evolution. This theory asserts that much of the evolutionary change observed at the molecular level occurs via random genetic drift and is unaffected by natural selection.26
Remarkable as the discovery of Watson and Crick was, it remained, until the 1970s, a largely theoretical affair. ‘DNA makes RNA (ribonucleic acid, a molecule with long chains of nucleotides – something vital for living beings) makes protein’ was the essence of it. The details of what was encoded within DNA remained impenetrable. Christopher Wills, Professor of Biology at the University of California, made a by now famous analogy. He held Webster’s Third New International Dictionary on his lap and calculated that it contained 27,000 letters per page; so, with 2,600 pages, this was more than seventy million letters. There are about three billion nucleotide molecules in the human genome. It would therefore take forty-three volumes the size of Webster’s to carry this amount of information. Yet in each minuscule nucleotide molecule, this is what is carried. By 1970, molecular biologists had worked out that this was the level of information being carried by genes, but they saw no way of, as it were, opening the dictionary, unlocking the code.
The first task was to isolate the individual straws of nucleotide sequences within the haystack of the genome in such a way that they could be scrutinized in detail. Viruses, as the smallest of all organisms, do not have the space within their own cells to make the protein necessary for their own survival and replication, so they infect organisms larger than themselves such as bacteria (or human beings) and then borrow their protein-making machinery. The bacteria resent this invasion, so they create their own enzymes which chop up the genes into their own useless little fragments. The first of these enzymes – ‘restriction enzymes’ – was discovered in 1968. Over the following decade over 150 further such enzymes were discovered. Scientists were now, as it were, tearing pages out of Webster’s Dictionary and reading their contents. The science which has come to be known as the New Genetics was born.
In 1970, two Americans, Howard Temin and David Baltimore, quite independently discovered another, very special enzyme, this time made by a certain type of virus. They found the insulin gene. Moreover, they discovered that the enzyme produced by a certain type of virus actually reverses the classic process of DNA makes RNA makes protein. So, if the RNA coding for the insulin protein could be isolated from the pancreas cell, the addition of ‘reverse transcriptase’, as they called it, would turn it back into the gene from which it originated. A strand of insulin gene had been picked out of the human haystack.
While Temin and Baltimore were making these momentous discoveries, two other scientists, Frederick Sanger in Cambridge (England) and Walter Gilbert of Harvard, were working out a way to calculate the precise sequence of nucleotides in any strand of DNA. In one decade, molecular biologists had moved from a situation where the details of DNA were completely unknown, locked away in the trillion-times-miniaturized forty-three volumes the size of Webster, to a position where they could actually study precise genes. It was now technically possible to pin down where, and whether, micromutations were taking place.
The New Genetics was not able to solve any of the metaphysical mysteries of who human beings are or where they come from. It was, however, able to demonstrate the inadequacy of Darwinism as an explanation for the evolutionary process; and this was because it demonstrated information and capacities not being ‘evolved’ at all, but being handed down, fixed, hard and as it were ready-made. The double helix gives rise to the infinite diversity of living beings, down to the last detail of every tree, fish, bird and human being. Yet it contains not the smallest trace of those details. What the New Genetics revealed to us is the paucity of genes. They ‘multi-task’. The Pax6 gene brings all eyes, with all their complexity, into being. Pax6 in a mouse produces a mouse-eye, which is, like our eye, a camera-type; whereas the same gene in a fly produces sheets of lenses at different angles. Or again, the same gene, known as distal-less, orchestrates the formation of the diverse limbs of mouse, worm, butterfly and sea urchin.
These are phenomena which, since the 1980s, the human race has for the first time been able to observe. When Darwin wrote, he was of necessity simply speculating about how life-forms evolved or came into being. The discovery of ‘master genes’ multi-tasking and thereby determining the shape of a mouse’s paws or the functioning eyes of the fruit fly is in complete contradiction to Darwin’s theory that these came about as a series of infinitely gradual and random mutations. Whereas, until the 1980s, it was just about possible to imagine that evidence might one day come to light which would substantiate at least some of Darwin�
�s theory of evolution, the science of New Genetics delivered its death blow. Adios, theory!
Different views can be taken on the question how far a thinker in one age can be held to account for the misapplication of those views in action. Rousseau and Voltaire would have been conceited enough to be pleased, in 1789, that some people attributed the outbreak of the Revolution to their influence. It would be a harsh critic who blamed Voltaire for the Terror, and the innumerable heads rolling into baskets from the guillotine in 1793. Likewise, much as Karl Marx, making his inebriated way home from the Reading Room of the British Museum to his house in Maitland Park, north London, dreamed of the uprising of the proletariat throughout all lands, it would be harsh to lay at his door the millions of murders perpetrated by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao.
It remains fair, however, to say that Darwin was a direct and disastrous influence, not only on Hitler, but on the whole mid-twentieth-century political mindset. ‘The overflow of our birthrate will give us our chance. Overpopulation compels a people to look out for itself . . . Necessity will force us to be always at the head of progress. All life is paid for with blood.’27 These ideas, in Hitler’s Table Talk, are Malthus filtered through Herbert Spencer, but they derive directly from Darwin. ‘One may be repelled by this law of nature which demands that all living things should mutually devour one another. The fly is snapped up by a dragon-fly, which is itself swallowed by a bird, which itself falls victim to a larger bird.’28
What Darwin, his cousin Francis Galton and Spencer made into a disastrous commonplace was the notion that aggressive competition is the guiding principle behind the universe. Simone Weil, working for the Free French in wartime London, drew a direct connection, in her seminal work The Need for Roots, between the destructive work of these Victorian scientific thinkers and the catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century. ‘The modern conception of science is responsible, as is that of history and that of art, for the monstrous conditions under which we live.’29 Darwin the omnivore-naturalist, the great collector, the beetle-maniac, the pigeon-fancier, the slow patient lover of the earthworm, was not responsible for any catastrophe, still less for the ‘modern’ ‘scientific’ outlook which underpinned National Socialism. And it was this benign father-figure whom visitors saw when they came to Down House. Darwin the theorist was a different figure. Since his belief in the struggle for existence was simply that – a theory – and since it had been inspired not by a scientist but by an economist, it would prove to be a much more difficult idea to counteract. Factual error can be conquered by the simple presentation of facts. Darwinism, as is shown by the current state of debate, is resistant to argument because it is resistant to fact. Yet, as Karl Popper rightly wrote in The Open Society and its Enemies, ‘if our civilization is to survive, we must break the habit of deference to great men’.30 The worship of Darwin as a man, the attribution to him of insights and discoveries which were either part of the common scientific store of knowledge or were the discoveries of others, this is all necessary to bolster the religion of Darwinism.
In his conclusion to Why Us? (2009), a robust demolition of the Darwinian position, James Le Fanu quoted Douglas Futuyma of the University of New York State: ‘Darwin made theological and spiritual explanations of life superfluous. Together with Marx’s theory of history and Freud’s attribution of human behaviour to influences over which we have little control, the theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of materialist science.’
Le Fanu was not setting out to dispute the indisputable fact of evolution; rather, to question Darwin’s childishly simplistic ‘reason for everything’. Le Fanu accepts the idea that Marx, Freud and Darwin were all seeking to construct a ‘platform of materialist science’. Freud and Marx have been toppled from their thrones in our own day. Le Fanu writes, ‘Now it is the turn of Darwin, whose reputation can scarcely survive the devastating verdict of the findings of the recent past.’31
Ras, Darwin’s brother, died in August 1881. They brought the body back to Downe to bury him in the churchyard. Darwin would not have George Ffinden, the local vicar, to conduct the service. Instead, he brought in John Wedgwood, the clergyman cousin who had married Charles and Emma at Maer all those years before.32
It was the last time in his life that Darwin attended church. Three months after Ras had died, Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. It was by far his most popular work, selling 3,500 copies within days of publication.33
With the book complete, Emma could persuade him to move out of his appallingly smelly study, with its makeshift privy behind the curtain. The room was gutted and overhauled, and a new study built. While his work was disrupted – and in reality it had come to an end – the old man read again the book which perhaps had a more profound influence upon him than any other – Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, volume three. He spent the winter reading it.34 Here were the South American travels of the great German polymath, with the excited marginalia of the twenty-five-year-old Darwin. Humboldt had been, of all European scientists, the man whom Darwin wished to emulate, the most famous man in the world next to Napoleon. When the youthful Humboldt met the aged Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia had quipped, ‘You are called Alexander, do you intend to conquer the world?’ ‘Yes, sir. With my brain,’ was the confident reply. Darwin, in his generation, had achieved a comparable cosmic feat. Goethe, who was more than a little in awe of Humboldt, is said to have used his character and career, in part, to feed into his conception of Faust.
Faust, at the beginning of the drama, is hamstrung by the metaphysical problem of how we can know anything. David Hume’s sceptical empiricism seemed to have made any knowledge impossible, until the radicalism of his thought awoke Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ and permitted the tiny sage of Königsberg to glimpse the ‘Thing in Itself’ – Ding an sich. What had come to birth, first in the brain of Kant, and then in the imagination of Goethe’s Faust, was the concept of modern science, the idea that, whereas most truths communicate themselves to us imaginatively, or metaphorically, or through mythology, scientific language could describe an actual world, in a language which was authentically verifiable. A different way of looking at the world was born, with, in consequence, the application of the ‘scientific’ approach to truth being applied, not only to science, but to all other branches of human inquiry. Darwin’s had been the first generation to be free to think in this way, and the consequence had been an unprecedented advance in science, and an unprecedented confusion in the areas of metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and religion. Old Goethe had foreseen it all when he made Faust summon up mayhem, which could be resolved only by humanity soaking itself once again in the healing balm of the Imagination. (This is the subject of Faust, Part Two.) Science seen as an independent discovery of the Ding an sich becomes a phantasmagoric illusion.
As an old man, Darwin lamented, ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’35 His old love of poetry, as we have seen, and music, had entirely deserted him. He had become an empty husk, a bore. Reading Humboldt, it must have been painfully apparent on every page that, whereas the German had been one of the great inspirations, not only to modern science, but to Romantic literature and liberal politics, Darwin had merely succeeded in making himself a Mr Gradgrind. The dead weight of materialist, upper-middle-class England, and Dr Robert Waring’s bank, and the plutocratic class system, had eaten his soul. Humboldt died a poor man. Darwin wrote sadly on his copy of the great man’s work, ‘April 3, 1882, finished’. Presumably, he referred to the task of reading the book. But sixteen days later, on 19 April, Charles Darwin was dead.
The immediate cause of death, on the death certificate signed by C. H. Allfrey, the doctor of the nearby village of St Mary Cray, was ‘Angina Pectoris Syncope’.36 Darwin had been slipping downhill all winter, with the regular attendance of four doctors. In the event, the death was quiet and undramatic, with
no famous last words.
Emma had expected, and wanted, Darwin to be buried in Downe churchyard, but their cousin Francis Galton had immediately alerted the President of the Royal Society, William Spottiswoode, and the unstoppable movement began to have Darwin interred in Westminster Abbey. Darwin’s neighbour, Sir John Lubbock, moved in the House of Commons that this should happen, and the next morning a petition was offered to the Dean of Westminster, Dr George Bradley. It was sometimes supposed, in late twentieth-century biographies of Darwin, that there would be some difficulty about burying in the National Valhalla the man who had, apparently, proved God to be an unnecessary hypothesis. This view is to get things slightly the wrong way round. For a start, the fame and distinction in the eyes of his contemporaries was not in question. Tributes poured in from all over the world. Burying Darwin in the Abbey, like offering him an honorary degree at Oxford, was a demonstration that, far from being cowed by Darwin’s agnosticism, the Establishment was determined to neuter its danger by bestowing upon it a laurel crown. In any case, Darwin’s lack of belief in a Creator had never been publicly acknowledged, and he was not an avowed atheist, merely agnostic, like many of the clergy themselves – perhaps like Dr Bradley.
Darwin’s coffin was therefore carried into the Abbey by pallbearers who reflected the Victorian reverence for him. Here was the man, after all, who had told them that their land-grabs in Africa, their hunger for stock-market wealth in the face of widespread urban poverty, their rigid class system and their everlasting wars were not things to be ashamed of, but actually part of the processes of nature. The very flax spores which went to the making of the dean’s surplice and bands as he processed up the great Gothic aisle, the very stamen and petals of the flowers on the coffin, were there, according to Darwin, because flax and lilies, like Victorian stockbrokers, came into being only through fighting and struggling with weaker versions of themselves. The coffin was borne by Lord Derby, the Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) and the Duke of Argyll, whose scientific objections to Darwin were, for the occasion, held politely in abeyance. The American Ambassador, James Russell Lowell, and the scientists Spottiswoode, Lubbock, Huxley and Hooker made up the rest of the team of pallbearers. From the monastic stalls of the choir, Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, looked on, and must have felt they were fit indeed for their task. The seventy-nine-year-old Hensleigh Wedgwood was of the party following the coffin, but his sister Emma, Darwin’s wife of so many years, remained behind at Down House.