Darwin’s Theory
No monkey business

A hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, there is no certainty about the ‘Heavenly Father’ not having had a role in Creation, writes A.J. Philip

WHILE promenading at the Sydney harbour, I accidentally stepped on a copper plaque that commemorates Charles Darwin’s visit to Australia to collect material for his magnum opus, The Origin of Species. Of course, I did not cause any sacrilege, as the plaque was one of several on what is called the "Writers’ Path".

The plaque reminded me of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s theory on July 1, 1858. When he presented his theory at the Linnaean Society in London on that day, it did not set the Thames on flames.

After all, Darwin was not the first to propound the theory, which was "already an old, even a discredited one". His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had expressed the theory, partly in verse:

Greek thinkers had held the view that life had developed gradually out of a primeval slime. As the story goes, Plato’s definition of man as a "two-legged animal without feathers" was ridiculed by Diogenes, who produced a plucked cock, saying, "Here’s Plato’s man".

Darwin was compelled to make public his theory when he received a parcel of papers from Alfred Wallace propounding a similar theory. Both Darwin and Wallace were asked to present their papers at the July 1 meeting of the Linnaean Society, the latter making a better impact on the audience because his paper was better drafted than Darwin’s. One Patrick Matthew even went to the extent of claiming on the titles of his books as the "Discoverer of the Principles of Natural Selection", much to the annoyance of Darwin.

All this compelled him to hasten the publication of his book, titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, the year he turned 50. The year 2009 will, therefore, mark the 200^th birth anniversary of Darwin (February 12) and the 150^th anniversary of the publication of his book.

Darwin’s publishers John Murray, London, were delighted to find that all the 2000-odd copies were sold on the first day itself. One reason why the book was an instant hit with the readers was that it was lucidly written and was free from "technical jargon and sophisticated mathematics", the hallmarks of scientific books. Not that everybody approved of Darwin’s writing. Novelist George Eliot, his contemporary, found The Origin... "not impressive from want of luminous and orderly presentation".

Darwin was unassuming to the core, admitting that he had "no delight in words as such, and little feeling for literature". The Origin`85 vindicated his life-long obsession with all living creatures. In his father’s unsympathetic and admonishing words, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family". His father had no clue that one day his son would develop his own father Erasmus Darwin’s theory about the struggle for existence and the competition for females into "sexual selection" as among the factors promoting evolution.

The book earned him fame the world over. J.S. Mill commented: "Nothing can be at first sight more implausible than his theory, and yet after beginning by thinking it impossible, one arrives at something like an actual belief in it". T.H. Huxley’s reaction – "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that" – suggested that his thesis had only to be understood to carry immediate conviction to anyone, not blinded by prejudice.

In the process, Darwin also became a butt of ridicule. "His children laughed at him for the naïve enthusiasm of his descriptions, seizing particularly on his account of a larval cirripede "with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae", which they said sounded like an advertisement. This gave rise to a popular joke that when the children who drew the picture of an animal with the head of a lizard, the wings of a parrot, the body of a snake and the limbs of a chicken asked him what it was, he answered: "A humbug".

The freshness and vitality of his writing were never in doubt. "When one sees nipple on man’s breast, one does not say some use, but sex not having been determined". The Origin`85 undermined to some extent the belief that in His infinite wisdom God created the universe and placed man at the centre of His creation – "like a king in a palace stored with all to please him," to quote theologian F.B. Meyer.

The creationists condemned Darwin as the wickedest, the most contrived and the most fraudulent. "If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madness; and man and woman are only better beasts", lamented one.

Darwinism was nicknamed the "monkey theory". There is the celebrated story of an encounter between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley. The bishop sarcastically inquired whether Huxley claimed descent from an ape on his father’s or his mother’s side. To this Huxley retorted that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who misused his gifts to obscure important scientific discussion by rhetoric and religious prejudice.

To be fair to Darwin, he had deliberately not said in The Origin though his argument implied it, that man was first cousin to – not descended from – the apes. Similarly, he never used the word "evolution" and the term "survival of the fittest" in the early editions of his book. Instead, he used the words "mutability" and "natural selection".

Darwin was not a trained biologist. A nature-lover, he was curious about all living things. He would not have become the great Origin man but for a chance to travel on board HMS Beagle for a 40,000-mile voyage when he "collected, observed and tried to interpret the flora, the fauna and the geological formations of South America and the Islands of the Pacific and the South Atlantic, Australia and South Africa". Altogether, he took 20 years of study before he sat down to write The Origin. He could, thus, provide flesh and blood to a theory many had independently arrived at.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were so impressed by The Origin that they wanted to dedicate the English translation of Das Kapital to Darwin, which he politely declined. Hitler took the "survival of the fittest" argument to carry forward his own theory about the supremacy of the Aryan race and the need to exterminate the "useless" physically and mentally handicapped.

The Origin was and still is a theory. A hundred and fifty years later, there is no certainty about the "Heavenly Father" not having had a role in Creation. Darwin depended considerably on the Malthusian theory that population growth would always tend to outrun food supply unless the former was checked by war, famine, disease, or voluntary restraint. Long after his death, the Green Revolution disproved this theory.

Darwin could not envisage that in a nuclear war even the "fittest" would not survive. He had also no idea of the pioneering work of a Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel, who theorised that the genes controlling reproduction are transmitted intact and are not blended. Darwin and Mendel may have complemented each other but the difficulty to believe that "our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was a hermaphrodite" still continues among all believers.

Neither Darwin nor his successors have been able to explain how life was created. They seem to believe that it came into being without a cause or "out of the nowhere into here". The evolutionists have also failed to bridge the gap between the ape and the man. The missing link has ever been a source of trouble for those who hold aloft the theory of evolution.

It does not explain why man alone is able to express thought in articulate speech, make and use tools and can choose between the good and the evil which prompted Tennyson to say, "Man is man, and master of his fate". Exhaustive tests have shown that monkey’s blood is vastly inferior to man’s.

Darwin believed that no organism would develop an organ harmful to itself but useful to others, as the rattle-snake’s rattle and the mosquito’s blood-sucking ability were taken to be. This does not negate the creationist’s belief that the designer of the butterfly’s wing surely cared for human delight, just as the existence of materials for human food and shelter testified to a divine concern for human comfort and well-being.

Darwinism no longer rattles the believer except, perhaps, in the Bible belt in the US. Many Christians see creation as described in the Book of Genesis as more metaphysical than real. Even there, significantly, life first appeared in water. Vishnu’s first avatar was also as a fish. There has been much speculation about the religious belief of Darwin.

His disappointment with Christianity stemmed not from his insights into the evolutionary theory but from the personal tragedy of losing his daughter Annie at the age of 10. Chronic illness, which debilitated Darwin for months at a time which today remain undiagnosed, were also a factor, because they made it difficult for him to reconcile a loving God with his experience of much suffering in his own life.

By the time he came to write The Origin, he had lost all Orthodox belief and come to the conclusion, which he retained to the end of his life, that questions of ultimate causes and purposes were an insoluble mystery. He had to pay a heavy price for his singular focus on science:

"But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music`85 Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight, which it formerly did`85 My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts".

Darwin also wrote The Descent of Man (1871) as a sequel to The Origin`85 and his Autobiography. He also made many changes in the subsequent editions of The Origin. However, the puritans among the evolutionists consider the first edition of The Origin as the best. Be that as it may, few doubt that Charles Darwin was the best evolutionist.

The historical details are drawn from’ The Origin of Species, edited with an Introduction by J.W. Burrow (Penguin Classics), All the Doctrines of the Bible by Herbert Lockyer (Om books) and The Delusion of Disbelief by David Aikman (Salt River).

— Photos by the writer

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