by A. N. Wilson
The ever-generous Wallace wrote, in 1898,
We may best attain to some estimate of the greatness and completeness of Darwin’s work by considering the vast change in educated public opinion which it rapidly and permanently effected. What that opinion was before it appeared is shown by the fact that neither Lamarck, nor Herbert Spencer, nor the author of the Vestiges, had been able to make any impression on it. The very idea of progressive development of the species from other species, was held to be a ‘heresy’ by such great and liberal-minded men as Sir John Herschel and Sir Charles Lyell; the latter writer declaring, in the earlier editions of his great work, that the facts of geology were ‘fatal to the theory of progressive development’. The whole literary and scientific worlds were violently opposed to all such theories, and altogether disbelieved in the possibility of establishing them. It had been so long the custom to treat species as special creations, and the mode of their creation as ‘the mystery of mysteries’, that it had come to be considered not only presumptuous, but almost impious, for any individual to profess to lift the veil from what was held to be the greatest and most mysterious of Nature’s secrets.10
This is undoubtedly the key to why Darwin achieved his mythic status in the history of science. More than any other exposition of the evolutionary idea, it was The Origin of Species, in 1859, which changed the minds of the educated world, and changed them, as Wallace said, for ever. As someone who was so extremely generous to Darwin, and so modest, Wallace would probably have wanted to say that he alone would not have been able to persuade the educated public, any more than would Blyth. It is questionable whether he is entirely right in his dismissal of Vestiges. This surely was the book which at the very least laid the groundwork for the acceptance of progressivist or evolutionary theory. One has only to consider Tennyson’s anguish in his best-selling poem In Memoriam, the work which more than any other was a mirror of the mid-Victorian soul, to see that the fossil evidence, casting whole species ‘as rubbish to the void’, had established in people’s minds the fact that species become extinct. Lamarck’s theories of how new forms arise in nature had equally been popularized by Chambers, and they would – as we have seen in this book – eventually be largely accepted by Darwin, somewhat to Wallace’s surprise. So Darwin, in the late 1850s, was pushing at an open door. Nevertheless, it was his hand, more than any others, which gave that door a push. And his readable, modest and readily comprehensible prose – more than his grandfather’s rather windy heroic couplets, or Huxley’s later bombast – which persuaded the Victorians that ‘special creation’ was wrong and ‘evolution’ was right. To this extent, Wallace was absolutely right to single Darwin out as the greatest spokesman of evolutionary theory, even though, as the neo-Darwinians are honest enough to acknowledge, so many of the details of the first edition of The Origin are plumb wrong.
There is, moreover, another reason why Darwin’s position as the guardian of the evolutionary truth has remained inviolate since 1859. This is the extreme simplicity of the idea of descent by slow modification. All serious scientists, and most intelligent opinion in the world, now accept the fact of evolution. The question which remains is – how? (Leave aside the far more problematic – why?) The why? question might be answerable by metaphysicians but it is probably beyond science to provide an answer. Almost as soon as Darwin had gone into print with answers to the how? question, other life-scientists sought to modify, or to contradict, either his entire thesis or parts of it. None of them, however, came up with a complete, coherent rival system. None of them provided an answer to everything. Darwinism or neo-Darwinism in its purest form offers the kind of metaphysical consolation which is offered by religious ideas of creationism. For it is a catch-all explanation. Suppose, as many scientists have thought since Darwin began to publish, suppose that natural selection accounts for the elimination of species but cannot actually account for the emergence of new ones. Or suppose that natural selection accounts for the emergence of some species but not of others, and not in all cases . . . Suppose that some adaptations are plausibly explained by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as Lamarkianism proposes. Suppose in other cases, which palaeontologists for the most part would aver, that nature does sometimes leap, that new species or radically modified versions of an old species do suddenly appear, without seemingly the gradualism demanded by orthodox Darwinism. What then? Suppose that the true state of things, is that some of these explanations fit some of the evidence some of the time. It is not very snappy, is it? You could not write a Richard Dawkins-style best-seller by telling the public that the current state of scientific knowledge is actually quite ambiguous, quite confused. As Jean Gayon (Professor of Philosophy and History of Life-Sciences at the University of Paris) put it in his paper ‘From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology’ (2009), ‘in spite of its tremendously increased theoretical and experimental basis, evolutionary biology remains today a largely descriptive and historical science’.11 Thomas Nagel, foremost philosopher in the United States, made a similar point, as was indicated in the Prelude to his book, Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he questioned the reductionist simplicities of neo-Darwinism, reminding his readers ‘how little we really understand about the world’. He added, ‘An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive.’12 In other words, there are no catch-all explanations.
Religion, it must in fairness be said, never offered any explanations either. In purely scientific terms, saying that God was responsible for this or that phenomenon is both tautologous (for the Judaeo-Christian Creator God must, by definition, be held responsible for all that is) and unhelpful. It is not a saying which explains how nature operates. Life-science is about how. The lure of neo-Darwinism is that by linking itself to a very simple-minded reading of genetics it can give explanations for the development of all life-forms, and not only life-forms but of that much more mysterious phenomenon: mind, or consciousness. The trouble is that these explanations are often far-fetched, and many of them are unsubstantiated. While hitching themselves to the memory of Darwin, their hero, they actually do him a disservice. For if Darwin had one great virtue as a scientific theorist, it was – however unwillingly – a preparedness to change his mind in the face of evidence. Had he been given Methuselah-glands (or genes) and lived to see the development of modern genetics and the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, it is by no means certain that Darwin would have been a Darwinian. In one of the more comprehensive surveys of Victorian science, Philip G. Fothergill reminded us as long ago as 1952 that ‘at the time of Darwin’s death, Wallace was the only one who believed that natural selection was the sole causal agent in the evolution of species’.13 The synthesis propounded by the neo-Darwinians, of genetic facts with the reductionist fantasy that genes or memes can somehow explain everything, and that these explanations are compatible with Darwin’s 1859 micro-mutational theories, is only attractive to a certain type of temperament – the same sort of temperament which, in religion, became a neo-Thomist or a Marxist in the 1930s – someone whose mind craves a grand narrative. It may be that those of us who have learnt to live without a grand narrative have no need for Darwinism, any more than we need neo-Thomism or Freudianism or Marxism. An ‘uncertainty principle’ works well in areas other than physics.
John Keats wrote to his brothers in December 1817 (when Darwin was a boy of eight), ‘At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’14
This ‘irritable’ reaching after fact is, of course, the foundation of the modern obsession with science. Those who live in twenty-fìrst-century Western countries deride the misuse of science by the t
otalitarian regimes of an earlier age, particularly those of the Soviet Communists and the Nazis. Our sense of moral superiority to Hitler has the danger of blinding us to the extent to which we, too, can place undue belief in science, not when it is supplying us with factual data so much as when it is actually merely feeding us myths. Of these myths, one of the most potent is the Darwinian belief that ‘all of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant struggle of the strong over the weak’.15
One of the most cheering aspects of the current stage of the evolutionary conversation is the extent to which hardline Darwinism is now set to one side. (The sentence I quoted at the end of the last paragraph was, of course, spoken not by Darwin or Huxley but by Adolf Hitler in a speech entitled ‘World Jewry and World Markets, the Guilty Men of the World War’.) One of the most charming recent books to explore this theme both in evolutionary science and in anthropology is Penny Spikins’s How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality (2015). Spikins points out our tendency to impose our own preconceptions upon the imagined past. As a university teacher she has conducted a simple experiment, asking her first-year students to imagine a Neanderthal. In over 300 cases tested, although half the students were women, no one imagined a female Neanderthal, and no one imagined a Neanderthal child. (She, perhaps fancifully, herself imagines Neanderthal and human children playing together.) ‘Very often we assume that our ancestors would have been powerful, invulnerable, striding forwards alone, much like the image we see of human evolution – a man walking forwards, getting bigger, stronger and more upright as he goes.’16
This, of course, is precisely the ‘Darwinian’ picture of human evolution which was propagated by Huxley and is to be seen in natural history museums round the world. Yet, as Spikins reminds us, ‘evolution, both biologically and socially, has been about groups of people, not all of them strong and powerful’.17 Anthropology, a science which was in its infancy when Darwin wrote, and one in which he took surprisingly little interest, is full of examples of kindness and mutual dependency, these being essential ingredients in the survival of human groupings. Common sense would help us see this if we simply considered the difficulty of survival in extreme weather conditions and the often inhospitable parts of the globe where hunter-gatherers have, time out of mind, sustained life. Modern anthropologists studying peoples as far flung as the Hadza of East Africa or the Inuit of Canada or the Jo’huansi do not find ‘violent apes’, all grabbing for themselves along the pattern of Victorian carriage-folk. On the contrary, after an animal is killed, in all these communities, the food is stored and held in common. Polly Weissner, working among the Jo’huansi, chronicled 297 meals eaten by eight families at Xamsa village: 197 of these meals were shared, or provided by other families.18 The Malthus–Darwin picture of killer apes fighting their way to the top is simply untrue. Jane Goodall’s life and experience among the chimpanzees presents a mixed picture. The apes are aggressive and fight, but likewise they have their own form of morality, and constantly perform acts of unselfishness for one another.19
At the same time, the essential mysteriousness of how we, as human beings, differ from the apes is something which scientific and academic inquiry continues to unfold. Genetic evidence makes plain what, formerly, could only be felt by hunch. (One thinks of Sedgwick’s marginalia to Chambers!) The analysis of recent skeletal remains in the Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains of Russia provides the best evidence yet of the genetics of any Pleistocene-era individual. These skeletons are of individuals decisively different from Neanderthals, while possessing similar genomes – a fact which suggests a common ancestry. A minute fraction of human beings trace a portion of their ancestry to these Denisovans, suggesting that they interbred with humans at some stage (4 per cent of the population of Papua New Guinea and some of the native peoples of Australia possess some of this DNA). Yet again, genetic research reveals the enormous difference between these individuals and those who would evolve into humans. We all (including those Papua New Guineans and Australians who have the tiniest smattering of Denisovan DNA) have chromosome 2, which is an amalgam of two different chromosomes in the other great apes. Some time in the evolutionary past, two separate chromosomes fused into one, giving humans a karyotype of forty-six chromosomes, where chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have forty-eight.20
To everyone who considers the evidence, a slightly different perspective will occur. That goes without saying. What has been evident to thoughtful human beings ever since they considered the matter is how very different the human race is from the other higher primates. However we wish to stretch the meaning of words and to say that other creatures possess an aesthetic sense, or are able to use language, or have music, or laughter, the simple fact is that these things are among the palpable features which make us ‘human’.
In the generation after Darwin’s death, we can trace the ways in which his ideas began to feed into the common consciousness. Two of the most brilliant of English author-illustrators went into print with a masterpiece exactly twenty years after Darwin’s death: Rudyard Kipling published the Just So Stories and Beatrix Potter The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Kipling’s stories, of which perhaps the best is the story of how the elephant got its trunk – a comparatively squat nose, seized by a crocodile in the Limpopo river, was subsequently found useful in all sorts of ways – gently lampoons the irritable reaching after fact and reason and the essentially illusory nature of evolutionary ‘explanations’ for the state of nature. Potter, in her quiet way a deeper writer even than Kipling, subverts the differences between the species. Peter Rabbit, like the succession of creatures whose tales she told in subsequent volumes, both is and is not an animal. He looks like a rabbit, but he wears a little blue coat, and he speaks English and has all the instincts of a naughty English schoolboy. Potter, raised a Unitarian and subsequently fairly obviously an agnostic, comically posits the Darwinian/later-Victorian viewpoint of the kinship and fluidity of the species. Whereas Potter, with exquisite irony, reveals a world where mice can be expert tailors, and where foxes eat their duck roasted with sage and onion stuffing (or try to do so), the reductionist neo-Darwinian would want to make fellow humanity into a mere ‘violent ape’, and in the very act of so doing in fact resurrects the essential human mystery, which has been present ever since human self-consciousness dawned. Self-consciousness is perhaps the essence of the mystery, since it is impossible to envisage it in the fellow creatures with which we share so many other characteristics. We can search for nits in one another’s hair, just as the chimpanzees do, but the thought of a chimpanzee playing – or being – Hamlet would be as much an inversion of reality as a rabbit wearing a blue coat and contemplating the death of his father at the hand, or rake, of Mr McGregor.
The Bible gets its creation myths out of the way in the first couple of chapters. The rest of its thousand-odd pages are concerned with the chaos of human experience. The Darwinians are otherwise. In the attempt to give a more plausible Just So story to explain our origins, they have made origins the be-all and end-all of their discourse. Darwin himself saw eye to eye with Wallace about how natural selection worked, but the pair parted company after The Descent of Man. As far as evolution via natural selection went, Wallace was more Darwinian than Darwin. When it came to reflecting upon the mysterious phenomenon of what makes us human, Wallace was much closer to Darwin’s enemy Mivart. Darwin, naturally enough, was horrified. We can now see that both men were scientists who in the natural selection idea were trying to come up with the solution to a specifically scientific problem, and in the other matter – the definition of human nature – came unstuck. So might any of us. The world, however, moves on, and huge generalized descriptions of ‘who we are’ are not really necessary. Darwin the hero of the present-day Darwinians seems an almost risible figure, because the picture of humanity which The Descent provides is so inadequate. He strayed from territory in which he was a master – the field of observant natural h
istory – into generalizations about the human race, and immediately found himself reversing the very tenets of his supposedly scientific hypothesis. That is to say, having as a scientist proposed a theory in which natural selection proceeded by the elimination of the weak by the strong, he gazed, as an appalled Victorian gentleman, upon the opposite process at work. If they were not controlled, and if necessary sterilized, there was a distinct danger of the meek inheriting the earth, by the very processes – selection by sex – which Darwin’s own class were either too repressed or too bored to rival. It would be unfair to saddle Darwin with all the blame for the sorry history of eugenics, and for the habit of mind which produced not only the eugenic movement but the tyrannies of the twentieth century. It would not be fanciful, however, to see in the deification of Darwin, both by his few disciples in the nineteenth century and by the many in the twentieth and twenty-first, something emblematic. Science made such enormous strides from the late eighteenth century onwards because it established its intellectual independence, its right to be science. Among the many prodigious advances, perhaps none matched the truly extraordinary accuracy with which the science of genetics was able to map the structure of DNA and the progress of characteristics from one generation of species to the next.
Beside these advances, the claims of the Darwinians, and the equally strident dismissal of these claims by the anti-Darwinian Bible-bashers, are really just ‘noises off’. The very many accurate observations made by Charles Darwin the naturalist, observations which are scattered through his multifarious oeuvre, not least in his vast correspondence, are the lasting monument to his titanic stature in nineteenth-century science. The other stuff has already been shown to be ephemeral. Because we, the human race, have entered so many new worlds since the 1780s, it is hard to know whether the advances in science happened because of the changes in societal outlook or the other way around, or indeed whether they happened hand in hand. Huxley saw Darwin as the man who finally made it impossible for intelligent people to disbelieve in evolution. We now realize that, sooner or later, those who had read Lamarck, Lyell, Mendel, Huxley himself would have eventually come to see the truth. In that story, Darwin played a part. The idea, however, that he was alone responsible for the scales falling from the eyes of the human race is a piece of mythology, as implausible as many of the more ancient mythologies which his disciples believed themselves to have demolished. Two ideas, in the discussion of evolution, have been shown in this book to be distinctive to Darwin. One is that evolution always proceeds by infinitesimally gradual and small processes, that nature never leaps. This idea is, at the very least, proved time and again to be questionable. The second idea, that nature is everlastingly at war, and that evolutionary progress happens by conflict, is almost the reverse of the truth. Huxley, when he first heard of Darwin’s thesis, exclaimed, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’21 After nearly 150 years of thinking about these two ideas, many human beings have come to recognize that such sudden realizations of the truth are often indications of collective psychology. Huxley and the other Victorians who leapt at the idea of the survival of the fittest as the explanation of everything did so for other than scientific reasons. We can see that now. The passage of time makes it seem ‘extremely stupid’ not to modify such ideas. The great fact of evolution is now indisputable. Darwin and his associates played a major role in this story. Theirs, however, was not the monopoly of truth, and in the perspective of time their errors seem as towering as their achievement.