Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

1: Darwin: The Great Amateur

It seems that if an idea is repeated often enough, then however counter-intuitive it may be, people eventually come to accept it, and to believe that they understand it.

Paul Davies

The Fact of Evolution

Evolution is now generally considered a fact, except by some literalist or fundamentalist religions. “It has to be said emphatically: the theory of evolution is true and no manoeuvring will destruct its foundations, even if it is true that we do not yet understand all the mechanisms nor even all the modalities,” writes Claude Allègre.¹ And another scientist, Michael Ruse, states: “By any understanding of the terms, evolution is a well-established fact. It is logically possible that evolution is not true, but it is not reasonable to believe this.”² Evidence of the increase in the number of life-forms and their diversification has been abundantly found in the fossil record, the fact of anatomical structures common to various species, their geographical distribution, similarities during embryonic development, and DNA sequences.

In the general mind the idea of evolution is supposed to have originated with Charles Darwin, at a time that people still wore top hats, carried walking sticks and rode in horse-drawn carriages. But Darwin’s idea was preceded by a lot of research and theorizing, and to a considerable extent the result of it. And although it is true that in Europe the origin of the universe, life and the human being was for many centuries attributed to a Creator “in the beginning,” several cultures held that the world and everything in it had evolved.

One such culture was that of the ancient Greeks, who were the first (in the West) to propose answers to the basic questions of existence in a rational, original manner. Their common view was that the history of humanity and the world was cyclic; it repeated itself again and again at huge time-intervals from chaos to cosmos to chaos. But in the fragments left us from some early Greek thinkers one can find hints of a progressive evolution. Anaxagoras of Miletus is quoted as having taught that originally humans were born from animals. Archelaus, the first Athenian philosopher and a teacher of Socrates, said that at first men were included among the animals and were afterwards separated from them. And Democritus, also a contemporary of Socrates, gave a fairly consistent picture of the evolution from primitive hunter-gatherers to agricultural civilization.

Then there is the remarkable case of Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi (1207-1273), the great Sufi poet who, at the time of the Middle Ages in Europe but of a great cultural flowering in the Muslim world, wrote his Spiritual Couplets. Although orthodox Islam is creationist, we find in Rumi the following lines expressing a distinct evolutionary view:

I died as inanimate matter and arose a plant,
I died as a plant and rose again an animal,
I died as an animal and arose a man.

Why then should I fear to become less by dying?
I shall die once again as a man
To rise an angel perfect from head to foot!³

However, the clearest formulation of an evolutionary vision of the universe and life on the Earth is found in the Indian scriptures. “In certain respects the old Vedantic thinkers anticipate us,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “they agree with all that is essential in our modern ideas of evolution. From one side all forms of creatures are developed; some kind of physical evolution from the animal to the human is admitted in the Aitareya [Upanishad] … The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the fish through the animal, the man-animal and the developed human being to the different stages of our present incomplete evolution. But the ancient Hindu, it is clear, envisaged this progression as an enormous secular movement covering more ages than we can easily count … It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas.”⁴

What is evolution to the modern mind? The Oxford Dictionary of Biology gives this definition: “The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for at least the past 3000 million years.” According to Denyse O’Leary, “evolution is the theory that all life forms are descended from one or several common ancestors that were present on the early Earth, three to four billion years ago.”⁵ And Michael Behe writes: “In its full-throated, biological sense, evolution means a process whereby life arose from non-living matter and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.”⁶

Darwinism and ‘Darwinism’

It is erroneous to associate evolution exclusively with Charles Darwin, although proclamations that “we live in the age of Charles Darwin” and comparisons of Darwin with Copernicus, Newton or Einstein are rife in the popularization of science as divulged by the media. To avoid being controversial they lean heavily on the tenets of scientific materialism, back up this official science with their own hyperbole, and if they occasionally serve up unorthodox items, it is with a sauce of denigrating irony.

All the same: “Darwin is not a strict Darwinian,” and the man who said so was none other than a renowned self-proclaimed Darwinian, Stephen Jay Gould.⁷ In fact, as we will see, Darwin was anything but a strict Darwinian in the current sense. “Darwin must be distinguished from modern Darwinism. One of the primary justifications for examining Darwin’s own views is precisely to expose the frequent mismatches between the Darwin who is invoked by today’s biologists eager to defend their corner, and the Darwin who wrote The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.”⁸

Nor was or is Darwinism the sole evolutionary theory. There is e.g. Lamarckism, far from defunct although often so pronounced; vitalism, taboo in academe but stubbornly raising its head time and again in various disguises (evolution, after all, is about life); there is the ‘Omega Point’ theory of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his epigones; there is, of course, creationism, not only as narrated in some holy books, but also in its metaphorical variations; there is the intelligent design theory, which posits that the complexity in nature can only have been fashioned by a special Intelligence; and there is the very scientific but fiercely opposed theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ formulated by Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge. This enumeration is far from complete but will have to do for the moment. The situation is actually such that, some say, every evolutionary biologist has his own theory.

Then what is authentic Darwinism? It is the theory gropingly worked out by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), especially in two of his books: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), and The Descent of Man (1872). The first book has had an enormous impact on the way humanity came to see itself. It has become the bible of present-day Darwinian biology and is quoted with reverence. To this end it is very useful, as in some cases Darwin has defended both sides of his arguments. “Before Darwin’s death in 1882 the Origin went through a further five, often substantially revised, editions. They were revised so frequently and so radically because Darwin had found it increasingly difficult to deal with the problems presented to him by some of his more acute critics.”⁹

Given this reverence even by such rational and critical-minded people as positivist scientists, it is amazing to what degree Charles Darwin has been exalted, not to say canonized. “Reading Darwinist literature, one cannot help noticing the way in which each writer stresses his or her own orthodoxy and total fidelity to Darwin, much like bishops discussing the encyclicals of a pope.”¹⁰ Novelist Barbara Kingsolver describes Darwin’s idea of natural selection as “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”¹¹ And the philosopher Daniel Dennett credits Darwin with “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”¹²

What, then, is ‘Darwinism’? It is an agglomerate of theories assembled and frequently revised under an umbrella postulated to be Charles Darwin’s original idea. It is this cluster of more or less integrated theories which, after Darwin and up to the present, claims to prove that Darwin’s evolutionary machinery would have been working, though he lacked most of the parts. Gregor Mendel’s theory is among the best known; August Weismann’s work is familiar only to experts, although it was defining for ‘Darwinism’; and then came Hugo de Vries who introduced the mutations, Thomas Morgan and the application of mathematics to biology, ‘the new synthesis’ also called ‘neo-Darwinism’, the discovery of the double helix as the structure of DNA, sociobiology, and the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, to name the most important elements of the cluster.

Darwin knew nothing of the ‘mechanisms’ which could explain his variation, natural selection or inheritance. The composition of the cell, the chromosome and the gene would be discovered decades later; even the fertilization of the ovum by the spermatozoon was still a mystery; and the discovery of the double helix would have to wait till 1953, a century after the publication of the Origin. “Darwin’s scientific arguments are extremely weak, quite simply because in 1859 one was still completely ignorant of the mechanisms of reproduction and heredity,” writes André Pichot, a historian of science.¹³ Claude Allègre agrees: “Darwin’s book contains indeed little proof. His book consists for the most part of conjectures, because he did not have the essential elements at his disposal to establish his theory.”¹⁴ Darwin himself had admitted something similar in a letter: “It deserves especial notice that the more important objections [to his theory] relate to questions of which we are confessedly ignorant; nor do we know how ignorant we are.”¹⁵

A Sea-Going Naturalist

Charles Darwin was born in a rich family and could look forward to a life without financial worries. His grandfather and father were doctors, and Charles was expected to become likewise. He was therefore sent to the University of Edinburgh, the citadel of things medical in Britain. But young Charles could not stand the bloody slaughter on the dissection table which, at a time that anaesthetics were unknown, was a dreadful affair. What Charles did feel attracted to was nature and her landscapes, plants and animals. He was instinctively drawn to people like the zoologist Robert Grant, the first to talk to him enthusiastically about evolution and its explanations, in this case the theory of the Frenchman Lamarck.

As Charles did not have the character to become a medical practitioner, his father allowed him to join Trinity College, at Cambridge University, in order to study theology and become a member of the Anglican clergy. A college education was a sine qua non for a clergyman; this made the universities of Cambridge and Oxford the main breeding ground of the official religion. The prospect of a sinecure as a country clergyman, a vicar, attracted Charles, for then he would have lots of leisure to devote to his hobby of exploring nature. At that time many of the books on “natural science” were indeed written by clergymen. “Naturalism was mostly the preserve of enthusiastic amateurs: clergymen whiling away idle moments in their rural parishes, and genteel young women drawing butterflies and pressing plants …”¹⁶ – “I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect,” wrote Darwin in his Autobiography. “To my deep mortification my father once said to me: ‘You care for nothing but shooting dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’” Yet Destiny had other prospects for him.

When he was twenty-two, he received a proposal for a voyage on HMS Beagle, a 90-foot coaster of the Royal Navy preparing for a surveying mission. It had to test a new generation of clocks, of prime importance for calculating a ship’s position, and to map the coastlines of South America. The captain, Robert FitzRoy, himself only twenty-seven but highly qualified, was looking for a gentleman who would be a suitable companion and who at the same time could make himself useful on his ship. Darwin, with his intense interest in nature, could be the ship’s ‘naturalist’; and as FitzRoy was a rather fanatical Bible reader, Darwin’s theological studies would fit in nicely also.

To carry a naturalist, i.e. a person who studied nature, was normal procedure on a mission like this. Much of the planet and its denizens was still unknown, and the new knowledge favoured the expansion of the British Empire, the trade of its merchants and the zealous efforts of its missionaries. The nineteenth century was the age of geological, zoological and botanical exploration, of which the story of the mutiny on the Bounty is a telling illustration. Normally it was the ship’s chief surgeon who doubled as naturalist, with the assistant-surgeon, in most cases a young physician, as his helper. It was as assistant-surgeon that the botanist Joseph Hooker travelled to Antarctica on the Erebus under Captain Ross, and that Thomas Huxley visited Australia and the surrounding region aboard the Rattlesnake.

This made Darwin’s position on the Beagle quite exceptional, for he was not a surgeon but a sort of unqualified gentleman who paid for most of the expenses from his own purse. No wonder, then, that the chief-surgeon and actual naturalist, Robert McCormick, felt threatened by Darwin’s status as confidant of the captain and by his untiring activities as a collector and scientist. McCormick “would leave the ship at Rio, cursing FitzRoy for allowing an unqualified outsider to usurp his domain. Darwin thought it a good riddance: the man was a pompous ass with antiquated ideas.”¹⁷

HMS Beagle left Portsmouth in the last days of the year 1831 for a voyage around the world which would last five years. While the ship cruised down the east coast and up the west coast of South America, Darwin made several excursions inland. His voyage became one of discovery without end. He sent crates full of strange insects, gigantic fossil bones from unknown monsters, plants, birds and other animals to the motherland, where they were in eager demand for private collections and the first museums. He witnessed an eruption of a volcano, Mt. Osorno in Chili, and marveled at its titanic power to change the aspect of the Earth. And he was puzzled by the fact that, on an archipelago of small islands like the Galapagos, animals of the same species could show such marked differences. His “burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of natural science” still increased, and could not be tempered by the constant sea-sickness which would affect his health for the rest of his life.

From the Galapagos the Beagle set sail for Australia. Having dropped anchor in Sidney, “my first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.”¹⁸ And nearly two years later, after rounding Cape of Good Hope, Darwin set foot again on his native soil, in October 1836. This was no longer the naive nature-lover of five years earlier. He had become rated as one of the experienced and knowledgeable world-explorers for the natural sciences, and the narrative of his eventful voyage on the Beagle, based on his diaries, rendered him acceptable in scientific circles. “The great amateur”¹⁹ had arrived.

He would never go on another journey in his life.

Evolution in the Air

“Precisely when Darwin came to believe in evolution, whether it was a gradual dawning or a sudden realization, we will probably never know.” (Michael Denton²⁰) What we already know is that young Charles was driven by a “burning zeal” to add his personal contribution to natural science. He also thought of himself as a “philosophical naturalist”, which meant “a naturalist whose classifications should not merely fit the pragmatic purpose of recording observations, but one who looks to give some rationale for nature’s mode of organizations. More specifically, the rationale should be based on natural laws.”²¹ In other words, Darwin felt the urge not only to gather objects, facts and phenomena, but to look for explanations behind them and make them fit together in a theory.

There existed already a number of evolutionary theories when Darwin formulated his. The French philosophes, champions of the Enlightenment, had proposed several solutions to the transformations in the world of life, and Denis Diderot had summarized them in his influential but officially proscribed Encyclopédie. Buffon (1707-88) and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) were learned and widely respected scientists with strong opinions for and against evolution. But the profoundest influence went out from the classification of all (then known) natural things by Carolus Linnaeus, the Latinized name of the Swedish botanist Karl von Linné (1707-78).

Linnaeus was, like everyone at the time, familiar with the Chain of Being, an age-old order of existence in a hierarchy of increasing complexity and consciousness: minerals, plants, animals, and at the top the lord of creation, the human being. But in his Systema Naturae (1735) he undertook the daring step to include the humans into his classification of nature, still at the top, yes, but all the same in the company of the animals. To this end he created the class of the ‘primates’, containing the monkeys, the apes and … the human beings. Because he never openly put the Christian creation myth in doubt, Linnaeus became a much honoured scientist in his own country and in the rest of Europe. He became known as “God’s Registrar”, and it was said that Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit: God created, Linnaeus classified.²² The inclusion in his classification of the human species, Homo sapiens, would be essential in the evolutionary theories to come, and his influence, though rarely acknowledged, has ever been of the essence.

A direct precursor of Charles Darwin was his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). Erasmus was an excellent doctor, invited by King George III to be his personal physician – an offer which the doctor declined. He was also a man of the broadest interests, a freethinker and “unabashed materialist”, and as such “the very embodiment of enlightened values.”²³ He constructed his own comprehensive theory of evolution. “He reasoned that life had not been created in the Garden of Eden but had arisen naturally and gradually, by stages, from the most elemental microscopic stuff.”²⁴ His thought ran along the same lines as Lamarck’s: species changed by adaptation to their environment. Charles Darwin certainly read his grandfather’s Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life (1796). Yet, in his Origin of Species he dismissed him in a footnote as “a pre-Lamarckian harbinger of Lamarck’s confusion. And in his Autobiography Darwin spoke disparagingly of Erasmus’s Zoonomia, the book that may well have planted in Darwin’s mind the seed not only of evolutionism, but of the theory of natural selection.”²⁵

One may be amazed to learn that Darwin was a Lamarckian himself, a fact which has long been disclaimed by Darwinian authors but which they can no longer deny. The Darwin-versus-Lamarck controversy has been one of the main features of evolutionary biology. “The caricature of Lamarck’s position that we have inherited today” can still be found, whenever he is mentioned, in curt negations of his historical importance, like: “Lamarck believed in all sorts of things that have been rejected.” Statements of this kind usually betray an un-scientific attitude or a lack of knowledge. It is a frequent experience for the student of the history and philosophy of science to find how reputed authors blindly copy incorrect matters or references, and thereby contribute to the creation of untruths and outright legends. André Pichot does have reasons to write: “The history of the biology of the last two centuries has been altered by numerous legends.”²⁶

Lamarck (1744-1829) was the first great evolutionary theorist. Goulven Laurent, in “The Birth of Transformism – Lamarck between Linné and Darwin,”²⁷ calls him “the French Linnaeus”. He attributes to him the classification of the invertebrate animals, the founding of their paleontology, the promotion of the concept of biology (a word he coined), the introduction of the word ‘fossil’ in its present sense, and the formulation of ‘transformism’, the term then used by French scientists for what we call ‘evolution’. Lamarck based his view on pure materialism (although, as a good deist, he recognized “a sublime Author of all things”).

His theory of ‘transformism’ rested on two principles: organs are created by the need and use of them, and acquired characteristics can be inherited. This second principle means that change in the species could take place from the outside inwards: the changes in a living being during its life could be transmitted to its offspring. Darwin, on the contrary, held that inherited changes were the result of small variations within the bodies of a species which resulted themselves gradually in changes on the outside. Neither of them had an explanation for the mechanism of their ‘transformations’. (Darwin himself did not use the word ‘evolution’ in his Origin, he called it ‘transmutationism’.) Science had not yet progressed sufficiently to allow an understanding of what were, in sum, guesses based on research and experience. This lacuna made Darwin, conscious of the fragility of his position, defend his theory all the more tenaciously, not to say desperately, and may explain his denigrating remark about Lamarck quoted above.

The astonishing truth is that Darwin was as much a Lamarckian as his French predecessor! “It is Darwin who has used for the first time the term ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, unknown to Lamarck, and who has tried to make it into a theoretical justification for his ‘pangenesis’.”²⁸ Lamarck had never presented a theory to support the inheritance of acquired characteristics; it was at the time the consensus among scientists, and it would remain so throughout Darwin’s life. Darwin, however, concocted a theory of pangenesis and ‘gemmules’, secreted internally by each part of the body, gathered in the sex cells, and transmitted to the embryo through the union of sperm and egg. This idea was later discarded as one of his blunders and fell into oblivion. But “the Darwinian heredity of acquired characteristics is clearly affirmed in several places of The Origin of Species, and even, rather curiously, in a fully Lamarckian manner.”²⁹ It was the reason that Darwin grew obsessed with the fear that his children might have inherited the illness he had contracted on the Beagle, which was impossible according to his own theory of variation and natural selection, so often held to be his only and definitive view.