Celebrating Darwin’s Science in 2009

In presenting a new edition of this guide, we would like to mark the fact that 2009 will be a special year for all who are interested in Charles Darwin’s scientific achievement and its wider cultural implications. The 200th anniversary of his birth coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book for which he is best known: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Consequently, academic symposia and public meetings are being held in many countries, including a major Darwin Festival to be held at Cambridge in early July. This will be open to the public and also include lectures and panel discussions broadcast on the internet. Darwin’s life and work will be celebrated and assessed in radio and television programmes as well as magazines and newspapers. Of particular interest to schools, a fine exhibition on Darwin’s life and the development of his theory of evolution has been staged by the Natural History Museum in London.

Darwin’s achievement was not only to provide compelling evidence for the reality of evolution but also to propose a mechanism, natural selection, that provided an understanding of how new species could emerge from pre-existing species by a long process of gradual change. In many ways it was a profoundly simple idea. Given the existence of variations among members of a species, some might confer an advantage in a struggle for limited resources. Those individuals possessing the slight advantage would have the better chance of living longer and producing more offspring, which in turn would inherit the favourable characteristic. Through the accumulation of variation over countless generations a species different from its original progenitor would emerge, displacing intermediate forms. Although it was difficult at the time to produce direct evidence of the change of one species into another, the similarities between living and extinct forms were given an elegant explanation, without having to invoke independent acts of creation.

The great strength of Darwin’s theory was that it explained many features of the natural world that were otherwise disconnected. It explained the vast amount of extinction that could be inferred from the fossil record. It explained observable patterns in the geographical distribution of species, notably the presence of distinct, yet closely related, species on the different islands of the Galapagos archipelago – species whose closest relatives were to be found on the nearest continental mainland. The pattern was comprehensible if an ancestor from the mainland had migrated to the islands and had subsequently undergone changes that corresponded to its seizure of new habitats. The idea of repeated evolutionary divergence from a common ancestor also explained why the more ancient a fossil was, the more intermediate in form it appeared between species living today. It was this explanatory power of Darwin’s theory that made it so attractive to natural scientists who have continued to value the great insight with which Darwin saw how otherwise disparate features of the natural world could be integrated.

Applied to human evolution, Darwin’s ideas were revolutionary. A worry for his contemporaries, secular as well as religious, was the threat to human dignity if the human species had what Samuel Wilberforce disdainfully called “brute origins”. And yet to say that apes and humans had a common ancestor was not to say that humans are nothing but apes. For religious thinkers there were additional questions to consider. Could evolution be regarded as God’s method of creation? If natural selection was itself a perfecting process, and could therefore counterfeit design in organic structures, did it completely destroy evidence for design in nature? Or might the laws governing evolution themselves be regarded as evidence of design –a view that neither Darwin nor his main British disciple Thomas Henry Huxley wished to exclude? There were questions, too, concerning how the Creation narratives in the Bible were to be interpreted. A Christian intelligentsia had already abandoned a literal interpretation by the time Darwin published, recognising that the Bible contained many kinds of literature and that the most important message in Genesis was the dependence of all things (including natural processes) on a transcendent power.

It will be obvious from these brief remarks that many different responses were possible for religious thinkers, some definitely hostile but others genuinely receptive to Darwin’s ideas. One of Darwin’s first converts was the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley who went on to popularise the idea of evolution in his novels. Another prominent Christian evolutionist in Britain was Frederick Temple who became Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1880s. Darwin’s leading advocate in North America was the Harvard botanist and Presbyterian Christian Asa Gray. It is important to recognise the existence of a long tradition of eminent writers, some scientists, some theologians, who have experienced no fundamental difficulty in combining evolutionary science with their theism. During 2009, there will doubtless be many pronouncements from those with strong opinions on the compatibility or incompatibility of Darwinism with particular religious traditions or even ‘religion’ in general. This will continue a pervasive and controversial practice of using Darwinism to justify a whole host of ideological positions, political as well as religious and anti-religious. Well-known public figures today appeal to Darwinism to justify atheism. Historically it has been used to support a less dogmatic agnosticism. It has been invoked by some who (like Darwin) have renounced Christianity but who have still affirmed an ultimate Creator. It has also been used to support Christianity on the ground that it has helped to purge the faith of archaic models of divine activity that reduce the deity to a kind of magician. To have all species linked by a single process of evolution has also served the interests of those whose monotheistic belief implies a unity of creation. And one could continue. For Darwin and the co-founder of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, the new science underscored the unity of the human species in a way that undermined the idea of different primordial races and, with it, the practice of slavery. Socialism, as well as a laissez faire liberalism, has fed on Darwinian ideas, particularly Darwin’s suggestion in his Descent of Man (1871) that natural selection can be applied to competition between social groups, within which considerate, cooperative behaviour towards members of one’s own group would confer survival value on that group.

Because Darwin’s own views on religion will doubtless feature in many ideological pronouncements, it is particularly important to be clear on where he stood. Again we should be wary of simplistic and dogmatic reconstructions. Sound-bites cannot do justice to the fact that his views changed over time. At Cambridge he studied to become an Anglican priest. By the time he wrote his Origin of Species he had rejected Christianity, finding the doctrine of eternal damnation for those outside the fold (which would include his father and brother) a “damnable doctrine”. But he had not yet abandoned a metaphysics in which the existence of the universe ultimately depended on a Creator who had “impressed laws upon matter”. In the early 1860s he was willing to countenance the idea that the great diversity of life was the result of “designed laws with the details left to chance”. As he grew older he claimed Huxley’s term “agnostic” for himself. Even then, two qualifications become important. He admitted that his views often fluctuated, at times embracing, at other times renouncing his theism. And secondly, in private correspondence, he denied ever having been an atheist, in the strict sense of denying the existence of God. It has always been tempting to ascribe his loss of a Christian faith to the consequences of his science, but even that would be a serious oversimplification. It was more that he found it difficult to see in the often tragic contingencies of human life any kind of pattern that spoke of a benevolent God. The loss of his beloved daughter Annie at the tender age of ten was a cruel and poignant example.

During 2009 there will undoubtedly be voices seeking to associate Darwin with atheism. They will be found among religious extremists as well as scientific materialists. There are, however, better lessons to draw from Darwin’s fluctuating beliefs and especially from the manner in which he conducted himself when addressing religious and metaphysical questions. Irrespective of personal preferences, it is impossible not to be impressed by Darwin’s humility in the face of intractable metaphysical and theological questions. In matters concerning discourse about God there were no simple answers. He tried to hold together beliefs that on one level seemed contradictory, at the same time recognising that on matters such as free will and determinism, or even chance and design, there was a paradoxical need for both. His humility found expression in the very continuity he proposed between humans and other animals. It also found justification in his concept of human evolution because, if the human mind is itself the product of a long evolutionary process, what guarantees are there that it is equipped to answer the limit questions about the origin and purpose of the universe? He would disarmingly write to Asa Gray that on such matters he was in a hopeless muddle.

In addition to Darwin’s humility there is much to learn form his honesty. Unlike many of his detractors, both then and now, he was willing to admit the difficulties of his position. Indeed a significant section of his Origin is devoted to scientific problems that he had once thought fatal to his argument. Brilliantly he then showed how they could be overcome. But the point is that he was not afraid to conceal the gaps in his science that remained to be filled. One of the reasons for his more acrimonious remarks about religion was the behaviour of some religious commentators, notably the Catholic evolutionist St George Mivart, whom Darwin considered dishonest in their stress on the difficulties confronting his theory while at the same time ignoring its strengths. There is much to learn from Darwin’s modesty and his sensitivity to the limits of his science. And in the context of teaching materials on science and religion, there is much to learn too from Darwin’s wisdom in sidestepping a temptation that, when it is succumbed to, becomes bad theology as well as bad science. The trap is to appeal to some form of divine activity to make good the gaps in the science. Whereas we recognise today the central role of genetic mutation in producing the variations on which natural selection works, Darwin was ignorant of the producing causes. Asa Gray tempted him to introduce a role for God here in leading the variations along propitious lines. Darwin was wise to resist the adoption of such a god-of-the-gaps whose jurisdiction in the world inevitably declines as the sciences advance. In that respect, the Darwin who in 1859 still wrote of a Creator creating by laws parted company from those whose God, he believed, was too small.

John Hedley Brooke - Autumn 2009