Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Darwin was criticized by some for being a teleologist—for believing that Nature was working with some long-term end in view—and, conversely, by others for constructing a Nature in which random, purposeless variation is key. (“The law of higgledy-piggledy,” the astronomer John Herschel dismissively called it.) People had real difficulty grasping the concept of natural selection. His motives, sincerity, honesty, and ability were all questioned. Many who criticized him did not understand his argument or the cumulative power of the data he invoked in its support. Many—including some of the most distinguished scientists of the day, among them, painfully, Adam Sedgwick, his old geology professor—rejected Darwin’s insight, not because the evidence was against it, but because of where it led: seemingly, to a world in which humans were degraded, souls denied, God and morality scorned, and monkeys, worms, and primeval ooze elevated; “a system uncaring of man.” Thomas Carlyle called it “a Gospel of dirt.”

None of these moral and theological criticisms is compelling, Darwin, Huxley, and others labored to show: In astronomy, we no longer believe that an angel pushes each planet around the Sun; the inverse square law of gravitation and Newton’s laws of motion suffice. But no one considers this a demonstration of the nonexistence of God, and Newton himself—except for a private reservation about the notion of the Trinity—was close to the conventional Christianity of his day. We are free to posit, if we wish, that God is responsible for the laws of Nature, and that the divine will is worked through secondary causes. In biology those causes would have to include mutation and natural selection. (Many people would find it unsatisfying, though, to worship the law of gravity.)

As the debate proceeded over the years, natural selection seemed less strange and less threatening. Increasing numbers of scientists, literary figures, and even clergymen were won over. But by no means all. In July 1871, The London Quarterly Review—which eleven years earlier had published Bishop Wilberforce’s anonymous diatribe—remained unreconstructed, wholly missing Darwin’s point. “Why should natural selection favor the preservation of useful varieties only? Such action cannot be referred to blind force; it can belong to mind alone.” Not only are evolution and natural selection rejected, but so is the newly discovered law of the conservation of energy,¹² one of the foundations of modern physics.

Some of the underlying emotional reasons for rejecting natural selection were later vividly expressed by the playwright George Bernard Shaw:[T]he Darwinian process may be described as a chapter of accidents. As such, it seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous … If this sort of selection could turn an antelope into a giraffe, it could conceivably turn a pond full of amoebas into the French Academy.¹³

Fine words. But what if undreamed-of powers lie hidden in “inert and dead matter,” given 4 billion years of preserving what works? Such objections address (and far from compellingly) only the philosophical and social implications of natural selection, and not the evidence for it.

Naive Darwinists, including many capitalists, have self-servingly argued that oppression of the weak and the poor is a justified application of natural selection to human affairs. Naive biblical literalists, including some high officials charged with safeguarding the environment, have self-servingly argued that the destruction of non-human life is justified because the world will shortly end anyway, or because of the injunction in Genesis that we have “dominion … over every living thing.”¹⁴ But neither evolution nor the sacred books of various religions are invalidated because dangerous conclusions have been mistakenly drawn from them.