9
Charles Darwin has often been dealt an embarrassing hand by his most fervent disciples. Some of his letters suggest that the adulation of certain admirers, who found in his writings a focus for their own atheism, made him feel awkward. (The adulation displayed by the visiting German Ernst Haeckel to Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent, in August 1866, is a case in point.) And Darwin was especially disconcerted when radical atheists and secularists, such as Karl Marx, read revolutionary political interpretations into his works. Also, I suspect, he would have been acutely embarrassed by much that is campaigned for in his name today. Darwin did not see himself as the fierce evangelical St Paul of atheism, so much as an honest gentleman of science. Indeed, he was not only a gentleman, born and bred, but a genuinely gentle man, who preferred peace and quiet in the bosom of his large family to rumbustious public meetings, and was deeply attached to his beloved and devoutly Christian wife Emma, as she was to him. And his burial in Westminster Abbey in April 1882 clearly indicates that this often troubled and regretful but kindly agnostic – for Darwin was never an atheist – did not lack friends and admirers in high ecclesiastical places. Indeed, the funerary addresses delivered by canons of the abbey and by the Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, praising Darwin’s humility, patience, moral goodness, integrity, generosity, and charity, make clear the respect in which he was held as an English gentleman and an “honorary Christian”. For the Charles Darwin of historical record was certainly not a campaigning figure to be confused with Richard Dawkins in a frock coat and stovepipe hat (and I am in no way questioning Dawkins’ standing as an honourable gentleman), and to see him thus is yet another example of the way in which certain modern-day evolution-obsessed atheists spin myths to serve their own ideological ends.
One of the saddest consequences of such myth-spinning I know of was an incident related to me by an American student recently. She said that, when visiting Westminster Abbey as a schoolgirl some years before, she had witnessed another schoolgirl spitting on Darwin’s tombstone. I have also heard of other attacks on Darwin’s abbey grave. For was not Darwin the ungodly monster who said we all came from monkeys?
Yet what was it about On the Origin of Species that was capable of stirring up so much bitter controversy and even hatred for over 150 years, in a way that far outstripped reactions to Lamarck, Vestiges, or other “transmutationist” books? One factor, of course, was its sheer thoroughness, minutely marshalled inductive evidences, and analytical rigour. Another was Darwin’s very honesty in facing up to the weaknesses inherent in his theory, which he tried in some ways to address in advance. Origin chapter 6, for example, is entitled “Difficulties on Theory”, while the subject of his concluding chapter 14 is a “Recapitulation of the Difficulties of the Theory of Natural Selection”. If there was one thing that Origin most definitely was not, that was sensational in its presentation or outrageous in its argument. And one suspects that Darwin had been made especially conscious of this danger from the way in which the best-selling Vestiges had been assembled, and the howls of hysterical academic fury that it had attracted. Darwin also went out of his way to distance himself from Lamarck, not so much because Lamarck was not a good scientist (which he was), but rather because of his implied association with godlessness and French Revolutionary and Napoleonic excesses, and transmutationism’s undermining of man’s unique dignity. For Charles Darwin was not only a highly respectable English gentleman, Kentish squire, and county magistrate, but was already a very greatly respected man of science and FRS by 1859. The title page of his masterpiece, moreover, would proclaim it to be “By Charles Darwin M.A., Fellow of the Royal, Geological, Linnaean etc. Societies”, an established scientific author. No “guess the author” anonymity here!
Surprising as it may appear to some people, there is one thing that Origin most definitely does not say: namely, that humans are descended from monkeys! This in itself must qualify as a myth of gargantuan proportions. In fact, men and monkeys scarcely get a look in, for the book is about plants, birds, reptiles, animals, and fossils. Nor does Darwin (in one of his few similarities with the author of Vestiges) express any qualms about discussing the “Creator” as an initiator of things. For what Origin does share with Vestiges is the tacit acknowledgment that natural science is about unravelling the processes by which nature operates; it is not about where nature actually comes from, or why. So Darwin can in all sincerity (and not as a “sop to the church”, as some have implied) speak of a “Creator”, because he is concerned with establishing how species originated, and nothow life itself came about in the first place. That did not fall within the remit of experimental, inductive, or observational science, but was the business of the theologian or philosopher.
Central to the whole book, however, is Darwin’s great discovery, the theory of natural selection. As he – and every naturalist, gardener, and farmer was aware – all individual living things vary slightly from their ancestral stock, and no two are identical. And as every expert gardener and farmer knew, one could select the breeding pairs of living things to enhance a particular trait. This was “artificial selection”, and it was done for the agriculturalist’s own profit, in so far as it produced a better yield, be it a richer grain harvest, very woolly sheep, or extra beefy cattle. On the other hand, these artificially selected traits did not generally benefit the plant or animal, for if, instead of genetically protecting the artificially selected group, you let them breed with common stock, their offspring rapidly “reverted to type” and lost their farmer-induced traits.
This reversion puzzled Darwin and many others, until he realized, after returning home from his HMS Beagle voyage, and reading the Revd Thomas Malthus on human population, that what the “common stock” of creatures possessed were traits that served to make them more able to cope with life in the wild. Sheep bred under “domestication” on a protected Norfolk farm, for instance, might be abnormally woolly, with numerous succulent lamb chops just crying out for market. A semi-wild sheep, living high in the Pyrenees, by contrast, might be thin, scraggy, and without much wool. Yet when the big bad wolf came along, the “wild” sheep had the agility to run away. Should a hungry feral dog chance to break into the Norfolk pasture, however – well, it was a canine Christmas feast!
Around 1839, Darwin realized that this difference was crucial. Plants and animals breeding in the wild produced all kinds of variations in their offspring, some of which gave their possessor a survival advantage: better nourishment, capacity for defence, or mates. And if two favoured creatures chanced to mate together, then they might produce very well-favoured offspring. Yet this natural advantage only served a useful purpose if the “favoured” creatures just chanced to mate with similarly “favoured” members of their own species.
This was “natural selection”: the well-favoured in any population just chancing to mate with similarly well-favoured individuals to produce offspring that could succeed where the less-favoured failed. And especially if environmental conditions were changing, what could be classed as a “well-favoured” creature was one that just chanced to have the right traits. If, for example, a reptile’s ancestral swamp were drying up, then the one that had projecting addenda which enabled it to crawl and live on dry land and to mate with similarly “lucky” types survived, and its addenda-lacking relatives eventually perished.
“So what?” you may argue, “That is how the clever, the cunning, and the strong have always come to gain dominance, be they human or animal!” Yet where Darwin was so revolutionary was in his argument that survival traits in nature were not the work of a divine farmer modifying his flock by direction and design. Instead, they were entirely random, and the whole of nature, from the behaviour of microscopic algae to that of Fellows of the Royal Society, was a product of sheer chance!
And it was the randomness of natural selection that caused such concern. Darwin did not need to talk about men and monkeys for the penny to drop that if “natural selection” was, indeed, behind “the origin of species”, then men and monkeys just might chance to come about!
Yet what linked Origin and monkeys together in the public sphere was itself a pure chance circumstance. At the same time that Darwin’s book was being talked about, not only did the French-American African explorer, Paul Belloni du Chaillu, exhibit some of the first articulated gorilla skins ever seen following his return to Europe in 1859, but his rather sensational book of 1861, with stories of these great apes abducting human females, led the popular press to put two and two together. And in the pages and cartoons of Punch in particular, Man became Gorilla, by the fortunate confluence of Darwin and Chaillu over 1860–1.
“Mr G. O’Rilla” and his namesakes became the laugh of the day: Mr “G-g-g-o-o-o-rilla”, resplendent in white tie and tails, and with a beaming smile, caused the footman’s hair to stand on end in one Punch cartoon of 1861 as he entered a fashionable venue; and there were lots more cartoons, comic poems, and songs besides. This was what Punch would come to run as “Monkeyana”. It is likely, moreover, that it was this humorous vein of late 1850s sensational “monkey business” news that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was alluding to in his cheeky quip about Huxley’s ape grandparents at the so-called “Oxford Debate” in June 1860, which we examined in Chapter 7, rather than his remark being the embittered “fundamentalist” slur of mythology.
Although Darwin said nothing about men and monkeys in the Origin of 1859, he certainly did so in his pioneering anthropological studies, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In these works Darwin marshalled evidence from animal – especially ape – behaviour, “primitive” humans, and contemporary Western civilization to draw powerful parallels in such areas as mating rituals, music as a sexual attractor, facial expressions, and aggression. Much of Descent, for instance, was about “sexual selection” and the finding of suitable mates in human and animal groups, while Expression analyses what feelings and meanings we can read into faces and other bodily gestures.
Yet if the press had a field day with Chaillu and his gorillas in 1860 and 1861, then they had a circus in the 1870s, for it is from this decade that the most famous “Darwin as a monkey” cartoons date, although modern-day myth-building popular book editors often include these 1870s cartoons in tedious rehashings of the “Oxford Debate” of 1860! But let me point out that there are instant clues to this editorial skulduggery. Firstly, none of the 1860s cartoons feature or mention Bishop Wilberforce, the mythic anti-evolution villain. Secondly, the pictures of Darwin as a tailed primate of the 1870s show him with the long white beard and furrowed face that was his appearance from his mid-sixties onwards. Yet look at Darwin photographs of c. 1859, and you see the balding, black-haired, clean-shaven (albeit careworn) man of fifty that he then was.
Even so, Darwin had become a veritable gift to the cartoonists by the 1870s: the gaunt, high-ridged brow, bald head, worried look, and luxuriant white beard almost suggested a venerable great ape even before the cartoonist divested the Sage of Down of his frock coat, and gave him a monkey tail!
Yet what invariably gets forgotten when the words “Darwin” and “evolution” enter the religion and science “debate” is what else was going on in the human sciences after 1860. Not only were archaeology, Egyptology, and Assyriology casting new and yet sometimes problematic light onto our understanding of the Old Testament world, but anthropology was also suggesting that humanity was much older than the biblical record.
Who, for example, were the peoples who had lived in the anciently sealed and recently discovered caves in places like Brixham, Devonshire? Peoples who had hunted now extinct animals, at least in England, yet had fashioned stone tools, and even made fires in their caves? And yet their cultural remains were now covered with thick layers of slow-forming ancient stalagmite deposit. And when the amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his daughter were digging in the Altamira Caves in Northern Spain in 1879, they were amazed to discover naturalistic paintings of bulls and other animals. Who could possibly have painted them? And how long ago? For they too were covered with stalagmite films! They seemed to greatly antedate the biblical chronology of Adam and Eve. And when fresh analyses of bits of bone (discovered in 1856) from the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf came to be made, did this indicate that there had once been races of “humanoids” living in Europe who were not quite like us? Was humanity, therefore, a product of slow evolutionary change? And were there “missing links” connecting us to the apes after all?
So what was the response to all of these discoveries? One thing we must be on our guard about is the evolution myth-builder’s tendency to telescope everything into the period around 1860, when Darwin’s Origin somehow “proved” that we all came from monkeys, and Christianity went into embarrassed retreat.
Let us begin by looking at one thing that casts an interesting light on the evolution hysteria: humour. Of course, modern-day atheist and secular myth-builders may enjoy reprinting Darwin cartoons out of historical context, but I have yet to read a “canonical” account of evolution that asks: “Why, if the Victorians were so po-faced, serious, and shocked by Darwinism, were there so many cartoons, comic poems, and jokes about it?” Surely, they should have been swooning with self-righteous indignation and sending letters of commiseration to Bishop Wilberforce rather than buying Punch, Fun, Vanity Fair, and other middle-class-market publications which had a good laugh at the whole evolution caper. “Mr G-g-g-o-o-o-rilla” and his compatriots, indeed, should never have been arousing laughter around the firesides of respectable churchgoers, but they clearly did. And one indication that the humour was appreciated was that the magazines carrying it sold and sold again. So who was evolution offending?
One obvious group were those who still read their Bibles as literally true from Genesis to Revelation. And I won’t deny that they were a significant community, especially among Dissenters and “Low Church” Anglicans, who sometimes regarded the “interpretation” of Scripture as a wicked Papist perversion. On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 5, biblical “criticism” and interpretation went back to the early church, and encompassed most major theologians over the centuries who prayed about and wrestled with Scripture’s inner contradictions. And in this context, let us remember – and I apologize for repeating myself, but it is a very important point – St Augustine’s c. AD 400 advice to fellow-Christians about not making the faith and themselves look foolish by trying to defend a Genesis flat-earth cosmology when talking with geometrically educated Greeks.
There was, however, another theological constituency which had qualms about evolutionary ideas. Namely, those practitioners and friends of science who could accept an ancient earth, dinosaurs, and a sequential progression of “special creations” that began with aquatic blobs and ended with gorillas, but who saw humanity as biologically separate. For were we not uniquely created in God’s image, and did we not have something that not even the cleverest gorilla possessed: an immortal soul? People who thought this way, and they were still plentiful in 1860, would have remained in full agreement with the classic natural theological tenets expressed in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), which was undergraduate reading in both Oxford and Cambridge, and which argued that every leaf, bird’s feather, and creature was the direct handiwork of God, even if that handiwork had been in progress over millions of years. Buckland, Sedgwick, Bishop Wilberforce, and most of the geologists thought along those lines, and Darwin himself had been brought up on Paley’s ideas. And in many ways, Darwin’s own loss of a personal faith had come about not because he had any problem with a creator, so much as with a constantly directing and sustaining God. And that loss of faith – exacerbated by the seemingly pointless death of his daughter Annie – had been a source of regret for him, especially as his still deeply Christian wife Emma found his agnosticism so painful.
On the other hand, it is all too easy to forget, awash as we now are in our modern sea of evolutionary mythology, that many devout Christians, including many in holy orders, actually found spiritual inspiration in evolution: or at least did not feel their faith necessarily compromised by it. While nature might, in the pre-Darwinian words of Lord Alfred Tennyson, be “red in tooth and claw”, with countless species condemned to oblivion because circumstances meant that they would never “evolve”, things were not necessarily that bleak. After all, the dinosaurs might well have been doomed, from our standpoint, to pointless extinction, in so far as they would never become gorillas or men, yet who are we to say that they were not happy, fulfilled, and contented doing what micro-brained creatures like dinosaurs best loved doing? Could you not thoroughly enjoy lording it over the earth, eating whomsoever you fancied, copulating, excreting giant “coprolites”, and basking in the sun, until suddenly you found a younger, fitter dinosaur with his teeth in your windpipe, and you promptly floated off to that great swamp in the sky? Was this necessarily a wasted individual or species existence? Was it a life of any less account than that of “Mr G-g-g-o-o-o-rilla” and his real-life counterparts?
Yet at the heart of the evolution question, theologically speaking, in 1859, and especially after The Descent of Man (1871) and Expression (1872), was the source and uniqueness of the human soul, and its relationship to God. If natural science could make a credible argument for the animal descent of our human bodies and even brains, then where had our immortal souls, moral sense, and higher cognitive faculties come from? Were they no more than the resonances of superior organic machinery? A way of reasoning, indeed, that had a clear ancestry in Thomas Hobbes’s argument that the master was superior to his dog only in the wider range of signals that he could respond to!
Yet implicit in Darwinian evolutionary thinking was a reductionism that could see truth as only accessible through science and matter. Like Hobbes, it could countenance no immaterial spirit. But we will return to these reductionist ideas in more detail in Chapter 11.
Likewise, was Darwinian natural selection of necessity random? Was this essentially philosophical prerequisite of evolution actually demanded by inductive evidence or by observed experience, or did it depend on the wider beliefs of the “narrator”? Here we encounter those intangibles of which both Victorian and modern thinkers have always been aware: namely, how far do we frame our scientific ideas in accordance with our individual “world-pictures” or even temperaments? Rather in the same way that some people are instinctively drawn to the music of Mahler and others to Gilbert and Sullivan, some to the novels of Kafka and others to those of P. G. Wodehouse?
To conclude, therefore, I think that temperament and an individual’s tendency to instinctively see an idea one way rather than another have received too little attention, obsessed as so many scholars are with perceived “arguments”, “debates”, and pure “rationality”. And so focused upon intellectualizing the whole affair have many scholars dealing with evolution and religion become, that they not only overlook the humour popularly engendered by Chaillu’s gorillas, but also wider attitude changes going on in Victorian society.
Take, for example, the responses to Darwinism across that spectrum of people who were publicly or actively Christian, be they ordained or lay. The received mythology tells us that after Origin in 1859 and the “Great Debate” of 30 June 1860, and indisputably after The Descent of Man in 1872, all unbelievers proudly trumpeted their monkey-hood from the roof-tops, while all believing Christians were driven into either embarrassed silence, or else furious, Genesis-punching, anti-scientific reaction and blind superstition. Yet this is the story according to mythology rather than according to historical evidence. Just as men of science had been developing new ideas about geology, species, and biological ancestries, especially since 1800, so thinking Christians had been doing the equivalent in their own sphere. Textual criticism, archaeology, linguistics, and other disciplines, not to mention new scientific discoveries, had given them a richer and profounder knowledge of the biblical world and humanity’s place within it than they had possessed a hundred years before. Of course, the mythologists try to put this down to an erosion of faith by the onslaught of “truth”, but that is not the case. Just as Archbishop John Tillotson gave a Lambeth MD to Robert Hooke in 1691, so many Victorian Christians saw no threat in the new science, and some even found it strengthening their faith.
Eminent lay scientists, such as the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s correspondent and “apostle” in America, found inspiration in Origin, seeing natural selection operating in a similar way to that in which rivulets running down a mountain-side after rain contribute in their diverse and complex ways to the great river at the bottom of the valley. And far from being an atheist, Gray was an active and committed Trinitarian Protestant, and involved with various Christian enterprises.
But what about the Church of England? Mythology tells us that its ranks were made up of elite, reactionary men, sworn to defend every jot and tittle in the Bible, oblivious to the economic exploitation of the working classes, and determined to enforce Christian conversion upon innocent souls across the empire. But there is a simple one-word response to this fairy-tale view: rubbish! The Anglican Church has never been a homogeneous or conformist body, any more than the Roman Church: not in King Henry VIII’s time, nor in Queen Victoria’s, nor today! In the 1860s, moreover, the church was riven with differences of opinion within the very ranks of its clergy: Low Church evangelicals, High Church “Puseyites”, crypto-Roman Catholics, devout men of science, and a glorious gallery of independent-thinking eccentrics whose antics embraced hunting or cricket mania at one end and Druidism or ghost-hunting at the other. Differences of opinion, moreover, that often amazed and exasperated the quiet and homely Darwin. And responses to evolution must be interpreted within this context.
Just as there were reactionary parsons, so there were open-minded ones. Sympathetic responses to the authors of Essays and Reviews or Bishop Colenso in the early 1860s (as we saw in Chapter 5) were part of this rich spectrum of Anglican opinion. And very important were the “Broad Churchmen” and the Christian socialists, both of whom tended to be warmly disposed to new scientific ideas without necessarily decrying the power and inner meaning of the Christian gospel message. Of course the “Broad” men and the Christian socialists had much in common: a realization, for example, that new scientific ideas gave us fresh glimpses of the majesty of God’s creation that had not been revealed in earlier generations – such as the mathematical beauty of Newtonian gravitation in the seventeenth century and the insights of geology and biology in the nineteenth. But this was no more about theologians “changing their minds” than to say that a freethinking botanist of 1860 had somehow reneged on scientific truth by abandoning the Linnaean fixity of species of his youth. Science progresses, and humanity’s understanding of God’s glory in nature similarly progresses, and it is not only a myth, but a deep intellectual injustice, to credit progressive understanding to the one while denying it to the other.
And far from being smug in their Barchesterian fastness, the Christian socialists, such as Frederick D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, openly campaigned on behalf of the poor, as did the “slum priests” movement by the 1880s – men in the noblest tradition of the Christian reformer and active in the promotion of social justice, yet to whom revolutionary, radical, and violence-based philosophies were total anathema. And many of these parsons were actively interested in science and technology, being involved with sanitary reform, provision of medical services for the poor, and trades unionism – as well as being adherents of evolution. For did not Christ send out his disciples to minister to the poor and outcast, and, if our God-given intelligence had enabled us to demonstrate that our bodies had evolved from monkeys, so what? Our immortal souls were still unique gifts of God, irrespective of how he had inserted them into our frail bodies. After all, not many gorillas have written books on science or ethics! So could not we humans really be special after all?
And then, in the 1880s, in full knowledge of Darwin’s post-1871 explicitly monkey-related works, other groups of Anglican theologians explored mankind’s relation to God through Catholic, mystical, and scientific avenues, such as the contributors to Lux Mundi (“Light of the World”) in 1889. One of these authors was the clerical Oxford don Aubrey Lackington Moore. Moore, who was interested in science, suggested that evolution had shown God not to be a distant, aloof “absentee landlord”, but an improving landlord, who continued to tend his creation through the mechanisms of nature. An early expression, in some ways, of the present-day theology of the environment!
I have devoted a large amount of space to Darwin and his impact because no single scientific writer or idea has been so widely or so ruthlessly used to feed the science and religion conflict myth. But we can only properly understand Origin and Darwin’s later works by placing them in context. And that context, Victorian England, was a much richer, livelier, more argumentative, and “cheekier” society than po-faced mythologists like people to realize. For while some Victorians – such as Darwin himself – did lose their faith because of a wide variety of scientific and personal reasons, many also found spiritual inspiration in scientific discovery. To the Victorians, God was big and expansive, and prevailing Victorian culture was confident, so no one felt obliged to apologize for believing in him. Being a Christian socialist or devout evolutionist, moreover, did not necessarily mean that one was a churchgoing “soggy liberal” or “wishy-washy”.
But let us finish with a quotation from Bishop Wilberforce FRS’s powerfully scientific, deeply learned, and anti-simple-biblical-literalist review of Darwin’s Origin, which he published in the very prestigious Quarterly Review (July 1860, pages 225–63). While Wilberforce made it clear that he believed humans were more than just superior animals, he was nonetheless acutely aware that science possessed an unassailable intellectual integrity of its own when he wrote:
… we have objected to the view with which we are dealing [evolution by natural selection] solely on scientific grounds… We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by [divine] Revelation. (p. 256)
Indeed, it is a great shame that so many people who generate mythological nonsense about Bishop Wilberforce and Darwin’s Origin don’t take the trouble to read this review carefully, for it is the nearest detailed (summer of 1860) statement that we have as to what Wilberforce actually thought.