Scientific American
Permanent Address:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=charles-darwin-confessions
Darwin on a Godless Creation: "It's like confessing to a murder"
200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, his theory of evolution still
clashes with the creationist beliefs of some organized religions. For him
personally, it meant the end of his belief in creation by God
By Christoph Marty | Thursday, February 12, 2009 | 318
Image: J. CAMERON, 1869, VIA WIKIMEDIA
Advertisement
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in Spektrum, and has been
translated from German. We are publishing it as part of our tribute to Charles
Darwin on his 200th birthday.
Before marriage, Charles Darwin had confessed everything to her. That he was in
the process of rewriting the history of life. That, according to his
convictions, all living things descended from a common ancestor. And that
species were not to be attributed to God's endless creativity, but were the
product of a blind, mechanical process that altered them over the course of
millions of years. This alone was pure heresy. Darwin even nursed doubts about
the very survival of human beings.
And this man, who had gone around the world once, and was going to marry Emma
Wedgwood, did not believe a single word of the biblical story of creation.
"Reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin," wrote
the deeply religious Emma to her betrothed in a cautioning letter in November
1838. "But I felt that it would be a painful rift between us." Charles was
supposed to find his way back to the right faith by reading the Bible: "I
implore you to read the parting words of our Savior to his apostles, beginning
at the end of the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to John," she wrote.
But for Charles Darwin there was no turning back. He definitely assured Emma in
his reply that he would take her concern seriously. But in fact he was
experimenting at that time with all kinds of heretic theories. "Love of godhood
is a result of intellectual organization, oh you materialist!" he confided to
himself in revolutionary words in his secret notebook. And although his
theories were not yet mature, he was completely aware of their explosive
nature: By dissociating intellect and morality from god's power of creation,
and attributing them instead to self-evolving forces, Darwin undermined the
very foundations of a society shaped by the Anglican Church, with its hopes of
eternal life and the omnipresent threat of punishment.
"As soon you realize that one species could evolve into another, the whole
structure wobbles and collapses," he remarked. And if man were nothing but a
superior animal, where would that leave his spiritual dignity? And if he
himself is the product of evolution, then what about his moral accountability
to God?
Believe only what is proved
"Charles' confession was a big shock for Emma," explains the science historian
John van Wyhe from the University of Cambridge. "On the other hand, he
impressed her with his openness and honesty. Nothing would have hurt her more
badly than the feeling that her future husband was keeping secrets from her."
But Emma's worries over the well-being of Charles's soul could not come in the
way of her wedding at the end of January 1839. His habit of "never believing
anything till it is proven" had apparently prevented him from "taking into
account other things that cannot be proved in the same manner, and which, if
they are true, would probably go far beyond our power of imagination," she
complained in another letter. Emma's worst fear was that Charles was forfeiting
his salvation through his religious disbelief, and this threatened to separate
them in death.
Her letter was to go unanswered. "Charles respected Emma's faith and probably
kept his religious doubts to himself," van Wyhe says. The man from the English
town of Shrewsbury, northwest of Birmingham, had drawn his theories from it.
His wife's reactions had shown him how difficult it was to convince other
people of his ideas: The criticism would be devastating were he to publish his
theories without adequate proof; and his scientific career would be ruined.
If he wanted his theories to be accepted, he would have to leave the tricky
"issue of apes" on the periphery and write only about how oranges or animals
changed gradually. And he would need collaborators, respected naturalists who
would stand by his sidescholars like Charles Lyell, whose Principles of
Geology had given him important intellectual stimuli.
He had collected enough facts. Charles Darwin had spent five long years in the
remotest corners of the Earth and observed, described and dissected with
inexhaustible meticulousness. But his proud booty was to reveal its secrets
only gradually; small bits of a puzzle that fell into place slowly, forming a
larger, overall picture, and gave shape gradually to his theory of the
evolution of species. "The journey on the Beagle was, by far, the most
important event in my life, and shaped my whole career," Darwin once said,
looking back on his time on board the ship.
In August 1831 the British Admiralty was looking for a young gentleman to
provide company for Capt. Robert Fitzroy, a small, dark haired man with fine
features and an aristocratic arrogance during his long mission. The HMS Beagle
was supposed to chart the South American coast on its survey journey. "You are
exactly the person they are looking for," the old botany professor John Stevens
Henslow wrote to his former student, the 22-year-old Darwin. Fitzroy wanted a
natural scientist as companion, because this would mean unprecedented
opportunities for him to engage in research on the extended stopovers on land.
The ship was equipped for scientific research; a man of "commitment and
intelligence could do wonders," Henslow gushed.
Darwin was indeed not a full-fledged natural scientist, but he could still make
up for this deficit by taking along some books. The young man plunged into the
preparations as if electrified, and in all haste: the journey was to begin
soon. It was the chance of a lifetime. But sober reality didn't dawn on him
until after the Beagle set out from Plymouth, shortly after Christmas in 1831.
If only he had listened to his father! Robert Waring Darwin had been against
Charles's feverishly embraced the adventure, right from the start. Another of
these useless ideas that had gotten into this fickle son's headfurther proof
of his aimlessness. The aspiring natural scientist had abandoned his study of
medicine, and the homeless years in the company of rough seamen were going to
ruin him completely. It was only the appeal of an uncle that persuaded the
elder Darwin to consent. But after just three days on rough seas, the aspiring
natural scientist was already yearning for the soft meadows of his Shropshire
home, on the Wales border. Even a lonely parish in the country would have been
an utterly welcome prospect to him now: firm land beneath the feet, above all!
All day he could not hold down anything but rusks (breads) and raisins or, if
even these repulsed him, glögg (spiced wine), offset with sago. And when he
tried to stand up in his tiny cabin, he almost knocked himself out cold. From
the deck, he could hear the shrill voices of four crewmen, who were being
punished by Fitzroy with a total of 134 lashes for their Christmas escapades.
"Before the journey, I used to say often that I was certainly going to
thoroughly regret the whole enterprise," he wrote in his dairy that day. "But I
had never thought how vehemently I was going to do so."
Fitzroy, who swore by physiognomy (judging character based on outward
appearance), had also known it all along: Darwin's nose pointed to a deficiency
in energy and resoluteness; his knowledge of people indicated that this young
gentleman was never going to make it till the end of the journey.
Chaos of rapture
And how wrong he was! Once the Beagle reached the South American coast on the
28th of February 1832, Darwin became enraptured by what seemed to him to be
paradise. While the crew chartered and plotted the harbor of Salvador in the
Baía de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), Darwin wandered in
astonishment through the Brazilian rainforest, caught in the "chaos of
rapture," completely bewitched by its wealth of vegetation. "The landscape in
Brazil is like looking into a Thousand and One Nights, with the advantage that
this is real," he wrote in his diary.
Resting in a shaded spot, he listened to the humming, squeaking and pulsating
life around him. He heard parakeets screeching, saw hitherto unimagined
varieties of orchids and anthills standing more than 10 feet (three meters)
tall. Not a single bizarre detail seemed to escape the young researcher: He
once discovered a spider that preyed on alien webs and played dead and fell
down if it sensed danger. Then he came across a wasp that stung caterpillars
and used them as food for its own larvae in its nest of loam. "And imagine," he
cried out after having shot a particularly magnificent lizard, "calling a
pleasure such as this duty!" but the journey had some more surprises waiting.
In the bay of Punta Alta in Argentina, Darwin chiseled out the fossilized bones
of a colossal protozoan from the cliffside. Beside himself with joy, he lugged
the valuable find on board the Beagle. The booty, scorned by Captain Fitzroy as
"a box full of useless stuff," was to make him famous later. There was only one
comparable specimen in England at that time. When he returned to the site a few
months later, he was able to free from the cliff almost the complete skeleton
of a bizarre mammal, the size of a horse, with an enormous pelvis and a narrow,
long face, resembling that of an anteater. "Formerly, this place must have been
teeming with large monsters", he recorded later in his travel log. But why did
they die out? And why were the extinct giants so similar to the animals now
found in South America, except for their size?
Darwin began to ask questions. The gauchos told him about a unique variety of a
South American bird called a rhea, smaller and darker than usual in form. Very
few had seen one, but their nests had been found, and everyone confirmed that
it was found more frequently farther south. After a long search, he found the
unique creature: on his plate for dinner! Incredible: he had finally found the
unique bird and almost eaten it inadvertently! Fortunately, it was still
possible to save the "head, neck, legs and one wing," and some large feathers;
they were conserved promptly and stacked away in the hold. Why is a type of
ostrich found only in North Patagonia, and the others are found only in the
south? Why did the Almighty have to create two such closely related species,
whose environments hardly differed?
In the beginning of the year 1835 the Beagle reached the coast of Chile. After
a morning ramble through nature, Darwin was stretched on the ground when it
began to shake. "The Earththe epitome of firmness," the natural scientist
wrote, trembled under his feet "like the crust on a liquid."
It was only in the following days that the terrifying dimension of the
catastrophe that lasted about two minutes, became evident to Darwin as the
Beagle sailed up the long Chilean coast. "The entire coast was strewn with
balconies and household objects, as if a thousand ships had been stranded", he
reported. The city of Concepción at the foot of the Andes offered a terrible
scene: "The ruins were so scattered and the whole scene had so little of
anything akin to a habitable place, that it was barely possible to still
imagine the earlier state." The inhabitants spoke of the worst earthquake
mankind had ever known. The shock waves had reached Concepción, "rumbling like
distant thunder"; fires had broken out everywhere. Those who had managed to
salvage their material possessions were living in fear of plunderers. And then
the wave came: a tsunami, taller than 20 feet (six meters), broke over the
city. Innumerable people drowned or were washed away.
Once he had recovered from the initial shock, the young researcher went looking
for the cause of the quake. The local people along the coast told him about a
shallow edged by cliffs, which was earlier covered completely by water, but had
become exposed after the earthquake. And on the island of Santa Maria, barely
30 miles (50 kilometers) or so away, he came across fresh banks of mollusks
just above the flood line, which had already begun to rot away. The land must
have heaved just a few meters away! That was the unequivocal evidence for the
hypotheses postulated by Charles Lyell in his "Principles of Geology":
mountains such as the Andes had not been formed in one colossal upheaval, but
grew, barely perceptibly, over the course of millions of years, as the result
of countless small quakes, to which Darwin had just been a witness. But had not
the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, calculated in 1658 the Earth's age
accurate to the day? Accordingly, god must have created our planet on the night
preceding October 23, 4004 B.C. on the Julian calendar.
Cultivated part of hell
Toward the middle of the year the Beagle left behind the South American
continent and set sail for the Galápagos islands, where the crew came upon a
cheerless scenario: "A jagged field of [irregular or wavelike layers of] black,
basaltic lava pockmarked with huge fissures, and covered everywhere with
stunted, sun-burnt brushwood," Darwin complained in his report. The land,
overheated by the midday sun, lent the sweltering air a closed and oppressive
feeling, like an oven; and it smelled very unpleasant. Countless crabs and
iguanas ran helter-skelter in all directions as the new arrivals clambered from
cliff to cliff, "like one might imagine the cultivated part of hell," Darwin
wrote. The birds were not afraid of human beings and were very tame; where was
the joy of hunting, then?
Conscious of duty, he added the animals to his collection. He thought he had
collected wrens, finches, black and spotted thrushes. But the forms of the
beaks puzzled him: some were thick and strong, like those of the grosbeaks,
others, on the contrary, were thin like those of songbirds. But he did not stop
to figure out which bird came from which island. It was too late when Darwin
realised that he had missed an opportunity. Shortly after departure, the vice
governor of the English penal colony at the Galápagos Islands told him that
each of the colossal turtles that were native to these islands could be
assigned to its respective island of origin, based on the appearance of its
shell. In other words, the turtles of those islands were unique variants,
perhaps even separate species; Darwin had already suspected something similar
for the plants. Could it possibly be true for the birds as well? It was no
longer possible to discover the truth, because his specimens were not
adequately labeled and the Beagle was already on its way home across the
Pacific.
On October 1836 the ship reached England. Barely had he touched shore when
Darwin handed over the birds from the Galápagos to the renowned ornithologist
John Gould. The latter was not too bothered about how the bills had evolved on
the birds. In the case of the spotted thrushes, Darwin had suspected that they
were distinct varieties (ranks below that of a species). Gould, however, found
that these were in fact three new species, closely related to the species that
are native to the South American continent. Darwin had made another mistake:
Gould recognised that what were supposed to be black thrushes and wrens were
also types of finches. They were so unique that he later put them under a new
group of finches that consisted of 14 species, each of which had its own
ecological niche on the Galápagos. Was it possible that something similar
applied to the species Darwin had originally classified as finches as well?
Darwin contacted Captain Fitzroy, whose crew members had put together their own
collections, and had been more conscientious in labeling them. And indeed, like
in the case of the thrushes, every island had its own species of finch! Had God
created separate kinds of birds for each island? Darwin had his doubts.
In his notebook, he speculated on the uniqueness of animals: Darwin's finches
now no longer lived in the 6,000-year-old world created by God in seven days,
but on an archipelago that must have risen, not too long ago, at least in
geologic terms, from the Pacific.
Once they had appeared, birds from the South American continent could have
reached the group of islands. Over generations, the animals changed and adapted
themselves to their respective environments, finding their way into as yet
unoccupied ecological niches.
In his notebook, he drew a branched genealogical tree showing how old species
gradually evolve into new ones, or else they would die out, like the large
mammals that Darwin had chiseled out of the stone in Patagonia. In his
thoughts, he slowly came closer to the question of the origin of humans. At the
London Zoo he studied the latest attraction, a female orangutan called Jenny.
In her face he recognised traits that babies also have. "Man from monkey?" he
asked himself in his notes.
Idea of natural selection
Now the young researcher stood on the threshold of heresy. While he made
preparations for his wedding, Darwin also looked for the mechanisms through
which species underwent change. One evening he came across the bleak book An
Essay on the Principle of Population written by the British economist Thomas
Robert Malthus (1766 to 1834). In it, Malthus showed why the population was
destined to explode in the course of a few years unless checked by hunger
catastrophes or epidemics. His calculations were simple: Whereas the sources of
food followed an arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3,
), the rate of propagation
followed a geometric one (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,
). "Hence, it can be claimed
with certainty that the population will double every 25 years unless
controlled", Malthus concluded. Darwin immediately drew parallels in the
natural world: "Every species must have the same number killed year [after]
year by hawks and cold and other reasons, even one species of hawk decreasing
in number must affect instantaneously all of the rest
. One may say there is a
force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted
structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by
thrusting out weaker ones."
The idea of natural selection as the driving force in evolution was thus born.
Accordingly, there is a relentless competition for survival going on in nature.
Some individuals have an advantage because of certain characteristics they
possess, which improve their chances of survival in the environment they
inhabit. Hence, their chance of bearing offspring is disproportionately higher
so that these characteristics can be passed on from generation to generation.
The changes are no doubt too small to be observable from one generation to the
immediate next one, but as a passionate geologist, Darwin was thinking in terms
of entirely different timeframes. "I now had a theory, finally, with which I
could work," he wrote later. However, it was to take several years until it was
published.
Life's work shattered
One day in June 1858 Darwin received mail from overseas. The sender, Alfred
Russel Wallace, a young and enthusiastic natural scientist who had traveled
around the world at his own expense, and earned his livelihood by exporting
exotic animals. Darwin had requested two years earlier the bellows (lungs) of
pigeons and poultry breeds from the Malayan archipelago; since then, Wallace
had been in touch with the already well known private scholar.
The package, which was collected from the Moluccan island of Ternate, however,
did not contain information about Malayan bird species that Darwin had
requested, but a scientific manuscript of about 20 pages. In an accompanying
letter, Wallace requested that Darwin to forward the essay to Lyell for
publication, if he felt it was significant enough. He hoped his ideas would
contribute to filling the "missing link" in the evolution of species. As Darwin
read the article, he saw his life's work "shattered": someone else had pulled
ahead of him. "Wallace could not have prepared a better resume if he had my
handwritten draft of 1842", he finally wrote, in an embittered missive to
Lyell. Even the vocabulary was the same: Wallace, too, wrote of "variants" that
had been eliminated through a "fight for survival" from their original species.
Darwin's comment in response was simple and to the point: "This has destroyed
all my originality."
Charles Lyell was not surprised. He had urged Darwin time and again in the past
to speed up his work, having read an article by a hitherto unheard of
researcher that had appeared in a scientific journal that encompassed the
essential arguments of the theory advanced by Darwin, and later even by Lyell
himself. But Darwin had ignored the dangers, informing his old teacher that
only an extensive tome with appropriate footnotes would be capable of
convincing the public of his theory. Hesitatingly, he had revealed to a few
other natural scientists his godless theory, over a period of nearly two
decades: "It is as if one were confessing to a murder," he wrote to his closest
confidante, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.
And Wallace had even read Malthus's work. While he was confined to bed
following a serious attack of malaria in Ternate, he applied the overpopulation
theory of the British economist to the natural world, around 20 years after
Darwin had done the same. Now, was a rank outsider going to steal the well
deserved laurels from the famous natural scientist Charles Darwin?
Together with Hooker, Lyell hatched a plan that was to go down in the history
of biology as a "delicate arrangement". Yes, they would publish Wallace's
manuscript, but only along with two extracts from Darwin's work which would
precede the article, so that their priority would be recognizable. Charles
Darwin, who was mourning the death of a son, consented. "I will do everything I
am told to do." And even Wallace consented to it after his return. "Wallace
never criticized this arrangement and acknowledged Darwin's priority,"
according to science historian John van Wyhe. "He acknowledged without envy
that he could never have documented the evidence of the mechanisms of evolution
so well."
At a meeting of the Linnaean Society of London on July 1, 1858, both works were
read without receiving much attention. The society's annual report noted that
the year 1858 had drawn to an end "without any discoveries that could
revolutionize the research disciplines". Now out in the open, Darwin did not
want to lose any time. He completed his work in haste. The day on which the
work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation
of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life was published, November 24, 1859,
started a new epoch in biology. This time, the response was overwhelming: all
1,250 copies of the book were sold out on the very first day of its appearance.
Under the chairmanship of Henslow, there was confrontation between supporters
and opponents on June 30, 1860, at the meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Darwin himself was ill and could not
attend. Nevertheless, the proceedings were heated. When Bishop Samuel
Wilberforce asked if Darwin's close friend Thomas Henry Huxley had descended
from the apes on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's side, he replied:
"Had the question been addressed to me, whether I would rather have a miserable
ape for a grandfather or a man highly talented by nature and with great
influence and importance, but who uses his skills and influence merely for the
purpose of bringing in ludicrousness into a serious scientific discussion, then
I would without hesitation confirm my preference for the ape."
Captain Fitzroy burst in on the commotion: Clad in military uniform and holding
up a Bible, the former commander of the Beagle swore in the presence of all
that he believed more in God than in human beings. The book published by his
travel companion of yore had apparently caused him a lot of pain.
It was not until 1871 that Darwin commented on The Descent of Man, on the
origins of our own species. Eleven years later, he died in his country home
near London. Until the very end, his wife Emma, with whom he had been married
happily for 43 years, had watched by his bedside. Darwin's ideas were to
survive, his much quoted prophecy, which was the only place in the On the
Origin of Species to give any insight into his own view on whether the "ape
question," was to become true. It is said there: "Light will fall on the origin
of man and his history."
© 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
* About Scientific American
* Advertise
* Subscribe
* Special Ad Sections
* Site Map
* Renew Your Subscription
* Customer Service
* Products & Services
* Terms of Use
* Buy Back Issues
* Partner Network
* Privacy Policy
* Press Room
* Science Jobs
* Contact Us
Email this Article
Darwin on a Godless Creation: "It's like confessing to a murder"
Your Email Address Recipient's Email Address (separate multiple addresses with
a comma) Comment (optional)
X
Please Log In
Username Password
Forgot: Password
X
Report Abuse
Are you sure?
X
Share this Article
*
* Digg!
* Reddit
*
* Slashdot
* Fark
* RT @SciAm Darwin on a Godless Creation "It's like confessing to a
murder": Twitter
X
------------------------------------
Post message: [email protected]
Subscribe : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : [email protected]
List owner : [email protected]
Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
