The number of generations that this evolutionary process required corresponded not to the relatively paltry succession of “begats” recorded in the Bible but rather to the scale found in an ancient pagan theory of human origins that Darwin certainly knew but that he was careful not to mention in The Descent of Man. That theory, which had deeply influenced his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, held that humans must have originated not all at once in a purpose-built garden but in a primitive struggle for survival.
Genesis envisioned the early existence of the dominant species as orderly as well as easy. Even the prohibited fruit was, in its way, reassuring, for it signaled that the world had laws and a lawgiver. By contrast, Darwin’s massive data and his overarching theory confirmed the pagan intuition that our earliest ancestors had no divine guidance, no assurance that their species would endure, no God-given laws, and no innate sense of order, morality, and justice. Social life as we know it, a life governed by a dense web of rules, agreements, and mutual understandings, was not a given but a gradual achievement.
In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius admired the ways that the earliest humans accommodated themselves to the harshness of the natural world and, in doing so, began to change their own nature. We would not have lasted long as a species, he wrote, had we not learned to modify our crudest instincts, to develop protective technologies, and to form social bonds. Fashioning clothing from skins, building huts, and mastering fire weakened our ancestors physically—“It was then that human beings first began to lose their toughness: the use of fire rendered their shivering bodies less able to endure the cold beneath the pavilion of the sky”—and at the same time enabled them to begin to live together, to foster the young, and to protect the weaker members of the group. It was in this formative stage of social life that we developed one of our crucial species characteristics, the ability to speak.
This ability had nothing to do with the power of any one figure to create language and impose it on the world. As if he had read or at least heard a version of the Hebrew myth, Lucretius wrote flatly that “the hypothesis that in those early times someone assigned names to things, and that people learned their first words from him, is preposterous.” Impressive as it is, our linguistic ability is continuous with the signification through variable sounds that we can observe in innumerable animals around us. A stallion’s neighing in desire is distinct from its whinnying in fear; there are birds that change their raucous notes with the weather; fierce watchdogs snarl in menace, but “when they begin to lick their pups tenderly with their tongue, or when they cuff them with their paws and, snapping at them with checked teeth, pretend gently to swallow them, the whining they make as they fondle them is a very different sound from the howls they give when left alone to guard the house.”
Lucretius’s observations from the natural world strikingly anticipated what Darwin brought in such massive detail to support his overarching theory of natural selection: random mutations, a ceaseless struggle for existence, innumerable extinctions, the shared life of animals, slow cognitive growth, a history without purpose extending over an unimaginable expanse of time. Thanks to the indefatigable research of Darwin and his allies, these ideas no longer seemed like archaic philosophical speculations; they had begun to take on the status of scientific truth. And with them Adam and Eve, once so real as to be almost tangible, receded into the filmiest of daydreams.
It was chalk, curiously enough, that played a critical role in this history. For what made Darwin’s theory of human origins seem entirely plausible—after centuries in which Lucretius was ridiculed for advancing strikingly similar ideas—were scientific advances in geology that brought a new sense of the immense age of the earth and with it a time-scale that allowed for evolution’s innumerable experiments. For English geologists like Charles Lyell, the celebrated White Cliffs of Dover served as Exhibit A: the familiar soft white porous rock, they showed, was formed by sedimentation that took tens of millions of years. A careful examination of the shape of this landscape, of the chalk, flint, and marl with which it is composed, of the fossils that may be found in it, leads to an inescapable and very unsettling conclusion: these are the consequence of geological events—sedimentations, displacements, upheavings, fractures—most of which occurred in what Lyell termed the Eocene Epoch, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago.
There was, Lyell argued in the 1830s, no sign of progress in the long, long history of the earth, no indication of providential design, no record of a universal flood that destroyed all living things save those that had found refuge on the ark. The same processes that had been at work in the most distant past were at work now. And the overall rate of geological change was always the same.
A pious Christian, Lyell struggled to hold on to his faith in the light of what he had come to understand. But it was immensely difficult to do so. There was certainly no question of maintaining any longer a literal belief in the six days of creation and the Garden of Eden. It had been difficult enough to hold on to the biblical story in the wake of the scientific discoveries that began to unsettle the world from the sixteenth century onward. Copernicus had displaced the earth from the center of the universe; the telescope disclosed the existence of untold multitudes of worlds; medical anatomies unveiled the inner workings of the body; the microscope revealed the hidden recesses of matter. Each of these had required major efforts to reconcile with traditional tenets.
But geology was a nightmare for the faithful. Fossils, such as seashells found far from the sea and bones that belonged to no known animal, had long been a conundrum, but they had been explained away by arguing that they were nature’s “sports,” or that they had been deposited on mountaintops and in deserts by Noah’s Flood, or by citing the biblical references to giants roaming the earth in its earliest days, or even by speculating on the enormous size of the first humans. Denis Henrion, a French mathematician born at the end of the sixteenth century, used fossil bones to estimate Adam’s height at 123 feet 9 inches, Eve’s at 118 feet 9 inches. But the deep time disclosed by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century geology made these explanations seem absurd.
In 1857 the distinguished English naturalist Philip Gosse—inventor, among other things, of the first seawater aquarium—published a book entitled Omphalos, the Greek word for navel. A fundamentalist lay preacher and Bible teacher, Gosse had been deeply unnerved by Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which made the biblical time scheme seem childish. It was always possible to interpret that time scheme in symbolic ways by positing that each of the “days” in Genesis represented a much vaster temporal horizon. But Gosse understood the perils of this path toward allegory. He was committed, as to this day fundamentalism remains committed, to the literal interpretation of scriptures that had first been championed by Augustine.
The subtitle to Gosse’s book was An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, that is, to acknowledge the force of the geological record and at the same time to hold on to his faith. His solution was simple and, or so he thought, ingenious. All living things, he observed, have built into them the signs of their development and history. This is true of the rings of a tree, the deposits of calcium carbonate that make up a seashell, the overlapping scales on a fish. These signs are detectable even in the youngest, most newly hatched of these creatures, and they are certainly detectable in humans as well.
Gosse then turned to “the newly-created form of our first progenitor, the primal Head of the Human Race.” To conjure him up properly and to distinguish him from all the beasts that perish, he quoted—as if he were citing an eyewitness—John Milton:
Of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honor clad,
In naked majesty, as lord of all.
Gosse let his eyes slowly survey this first human, and, describing in loving detail what he saw, he compiled what he called a physiologist’s report.
The human was evidently a fine specimen whose features—“the perfected dentition, the beard, the deepened v
oice, the prominent larynx,” and the like—all pointed to a man between twenty-five and thirty years old. But though we must conclude from the infallible words of the Bible that God created Adam at precisely this age, and not as an infant, Gosse noticed something strange: “What means this curious depression in the centre of the abdomen, and the corrugated knob which occupies the cavity?” This is, he answered exuberantly, “the NAVEL.”
Adam must have had a navel; he would not otherwise have looked right, let alone perfect. All great painters—Van Eyck, Michelangelo, Raphael, and the like—depict him with one. But the navel, of course, is a sign of a past, a link to the mother, that Adam did not have. This means that God created Adam with a perfectly formed, scientifically convincing trace of a history that never existed. And now, Gosse declared, like a lawyer who knew that he had proved his case, we can at last understand those fossils, those vast sedimentary deposits, those marks of ancient cataclysms, those agonizingly slow glacial transformations, that geologists study. The geologists’ findings are in their way perfectly correct; what they fail to understand is simply that the evidence was planted by God on the first day of creation.
Poor Gosse. His book was received with ridicule and contempt that dogged him for the rest of his long life. His contemporaries were emphatically not prepared to believe that God, as the Victorian writer Charles Kingsley put it, had “written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.” The navel would not, as Gosse had hoped, serve as life support for a dying Adam and Eve.
Only two years after the debacle of Omphalos, Charles Darwin triumphantly published his Origin of Species. Darwin was fifty, but the book had long been in gestation, at least since the time that he had returned at the age of twenty-six from almost five fateful years circumnavigating the globe as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, under the command of captain Robert FitzRoy. Darwin had taken a number of favorite books with him for his long sea voyage, foremost among them Paradise Lost. But the book that had the most far-reaching influence upon him was Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which FitzRoy presented to him before they set sail. First on the Cape Verde islands and then on the coast and in the interior of South America, Darwin repeatedly saw confirmation of many of Lyell’s key theories and began passionately to collect supporting evidence in the form of fossils and rock samples.
It was not only the immense age of the earth that struck Darwin, along with the fact that geological change could therefore happen at an almost unimaginably slow pace; it was also the realization that living species were not immune from this same slow process of change. It was difficult to track the transformations; the evidence was elusive, fragmentary, and enigmatic. “Following out Lyell’s metaphor,” Darwin wrote, “I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect.” Of this vast history only the last volume has survived, and of this volume “only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.” Nevertheless, enough of the record had survived to make it impossible to believe that “in the beginning” all the species on earth were created by God once and for all.
The crisis came to a head even before Darwin set foot on the Galápagos Islands and encountered the evidence that would lead to the theory of natural selection. The Beagle was carrying back to Tierra del Fuego three hostages who had been seized on a previous expedition, more than a year before, and brought to England. The hostages—called by the crew Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and York Minster—had been nominally Christianized. Dressed in English clothes, they had become familiar companions during the months at sea. The young naturalist must have looked up at them repeatedly when he wanted to rest his eyes from the pages of The Principles of Geology. He chatted with them—Jemmy Button, short, fat, and merry, was the universal favorite—and learned something about their reception in England, where they were treated as celebrities and received by King William IV and his wife Queen Adelaide. They were living proof of the malleability of even the most primitive humans.
Hence perhaps the intensity of the young Darwin’s shock when he witnessed the Yaghan people to whom the kidnapped converts, in their gloves and well-polished shoes, were being returned. Years later he still recalled with a shudder the effect that the sight had on him:
The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe.
“Such were our ancestors.”
After three years in English captivity, Jemmy Button at first seemed diffident, disoriented, and ashamed of his own countrymen. But as the weeks passed, while the English explored, mapped, and collected samples, he was evidently absorbed again into the world from which he had been torn. Before the Beagle sailed on, Darwin encountered him for the last time and was amazed at what he saw. “We had left him plump, fat, clean, and well-dressed,” he wrote; now he was “a thin, haggard savage, with long disordered hair, and naked, except a bit of blanket round his waist.” Pained by this spectacle, Captain Fitzroy brought him aboard the Beagle and offered him the chance to return to England. Jemmy refused. In the evening, Darwin and the others saw what they took to be the reason for this otherwise inexplicable refusal: “his young and nice-looking wife.”
For many years Darwin did not allow himself to articulate in public the full implications of this encounter. The Descent of Man was not published until four decades after he witnessed the Fuegians. But they at once haunted him and fortified his willingness to pursue the implications of the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion. That conclusion—that we were descended from ape-like ancestors—was widely viewed as a shameful insult to human dignity. For millennia humans had told themselves that they were the heirs to a perfect man and woman who had been made by God and had once lived harmoniously in the Earthly Paradise. Of course, the Fall had introduced sin and death into the world, but we could dream of an eventual recovery of our lost perfection and take pride in our glorious lineage. What Darwin saw for himself in Patagonia made him less inclined to cling to this pride of origin and less ashamed to recognize the actual line of descent. “He who has seen a savage in his native land,” he wrote, “will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins.”
Darwin’s critics called him the “Monkey Man” and excoriated him for besmirching our ancestry. But Darwin held his ground:
For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
The legacy of this response—a bold insistence on humanity’s primate inheritance braided together with a deep-seated Victorian belief in a cultural hierarchy among human populations—has haunted evolutionary biologists ever since.
THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE—at least among virtually the entire scientific community—signaled a shift toward a different conception of human origins. The conception called into question an entire structure of thought, a structure based upon the collective project of conferring on the figures in Genesis the vividness of real people. But the persistence of the belief in Adam and Eve’s literal existence suggests something more than the atavistic clinging to a discredited fiction. The story of Adam and Eve was the precipitate of a ver
y long, complex creative endeavor and has been teased out, in all of its implications, for thousands of years by people who have found it thought-provoking, compelling, and morally instructive. In doing so they were guided by specialized labors of great creative artists and thinkers who invested themselves deeply in the imaginary figures. The account of Lucy and our other hominid forebears is recent, murky, and in effect primitive. That this account of human origins happens to be true, according to our best scientific lights, does not in itself make it good to think with. On the contrary, its difficulty, its uncertainties, its resistance to narrative coherence, makes it one of the great challenges of our age.
The difficulty, apparent from the beginning, has led to repeated attempts to impose a satisfying plot of one kind or another on Darwinism. Some followers imagined natural selection as a triumphal progress toward higher and higher forms of life, culminating of course in our own species. The predestined dominion granted by God to the humans in Genesis was simply granted now by evolution. Others used Herbert Spencer’s famous characterization of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest” to serve as a brief for free-market competition in a capitalist economy. Still others, led by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, saw in the theory a justification for eugenics, the attempt to perfect the human race by ridding it of “undesirables.” That sinister enterprise, drawing upon the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s views on race and evolution, had its demonic expression with the Nazis.
Each of these and related variations on Darwinian themes has been exposed as a betrayal of Darwin and a fatal distortion of the massive scientific evidence that has accumulated in the wake of his generative insights. There is no progress in evolution, no march toward perfection. The concept of evolutionary “fitness,” from which the phrase “survival of the fittest” was derived, need have nothing to do with competition, let alone with particular economic systems or with warfare. And genetics has undone rather than underscored the whole notion of “race” as an evolutionary principle.
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Page 29