How Darwin Changed My Life Dominic Kirkham offers a bi-centennial reflection on the importance of Darwin’s work.
Charles Darwin was born two hundred years ago, in 1809, into a very different world from ours. The world became aware of him fifty years later with the publication (in 1859) of his seminal work, The Origin of Species. Since then, perhaps more than of any other single person, one can say that his legacy has changed the world.
I came to Darwin late in life, just a century after the publication of The Origin, and rather circuitously.
But then Darwin himself came to an awareness of his own ideas in a similar rather tortuous, if not tortured, way. For those of us who grew up under what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls ‘the sacred canopy’ of religious belief he was a marginal, vaguely threatening figure.
The believer had come to accept that no doubt things changed – even evolved – with time but, even so, everything hung together beautifully in a grandly providential way. It was only a matter of time before all things would come to a very clearly defined fulfilment.
Darwin had nothing to add to this vision.
Despite this one figure rather provocatively thought otherwise: Teilhard de Chardin, whose thought burst on the 1950s with something of the same frisson as Darwin’s in the 1850’s. (By amazing coincidence The Phenomenon of Man was published – in English – exactly one hundred years after The Origin). Here was full blown theological evolutionism. Teilhard’s cosmogenic rhapsodising introduced a sense of excitement beneath the hitherto staid restraints of the sacred canopy. But responses were mixed: was he a Trojan Horse, smuggling subversive ideas under the canopy? His was an emergent universe, marvellously structured around a basic unifying law (of things becoming more complex and so more conscious), which would ultimately lead to a final spiritual goal – the omega point. To scientists – like Sir Peter Medawar – this was twaddle, to traditionalist theologians it was heretical, but to many lay people, like myself, it was electrifying; this was the radical sixties and just what was needed to take one beyond the petty denominational squabbles that had previously so often ruffled the sacred canopy.
The problem of how to reconcile such an evolutionary view of the world with traditional ‘sacred’ thinking soon became apparent when certain Dutch theologians made the attempt in a new ‘adult’ catechism. Almost from page one the work ran into the ecclesiastical buffers over the doctrine of Original Sin.
This had a very different perspective of the past from that of a progressive drama. It also required a very specific first individual falling from a state of previous perfection: rather the reverse of the evolutionary vision.
As the entire justification for a sacred canopy rested on the assumption that people needed saving – and so neatly justifying the existence of its clerical gate-keepers – it was not long before the catechism was banned.
To me, then a seventies seminarian, the stumbling block in the drama of cosmic progress also focused on humanity, or rather more specifically man, Adam.
This was a time when the anthropologist Richard Leakey was making some amazing discoveries in the ‘Eden’ of East Africa. The bones he uncovered told an altogether different story of human origins from that of traditional theological prescience. It was indeed one of seamless emergence over millions of years from a very humble ancestry; a view of history very much at odds with Salvation History. But what most perplexed me was the theological status of other humans such as the Neanderthals: what happened to their invite to the sacred canopy?
Emma and Charles Darwin had 10 children, not all of whom survived An air of mystery surrounds what really happened when our African ancestors met their European cousins; an encounter charged with tragedy and pathos. There is evidence that on the level of technology and artifice the Neanderthals learnt from their more sophisticated African cousins but on the level of ritualised behaviour and social organisation they were unable to grasp what their fellow humans were up to because of the inadequacy of their cognitive abilities. They had been genetically condemned to be congenital atheists and in the vital stakes for survival they were not up to the sophisticated social organisation of the newcomers. So, after a quarter of a million years they were eclipsed and simply disappeared from the face of the earth. How very unfair!
That neither fairness nor morality had anything to do with survival was an issue that came to preoccupy Darwin. Only one thing seemed to count in nature: fitness. The ability of a species to adapt to a niche, developing slight advantages over its rivals, was the key to survival. In fact, the evolutionary story, with its vast and arbitrary mass extinctions, not to mention the predatory savagery of normality, showed no evidence of any moral sense or purpose. This realisation became a disturbing feature of Darwin’s thought, one made all the more unbearable by family tragedy. But there was a deeper, darker quandary: if all living things were connected by processes of natural causation they could not also be the result of periodic creation. The realisation that there is a radical choice to be made between an evolutionary view of life and one based on a belief in individual creation is disturbing and traumatic for anyone having grown up within a theistic tradition.
The choice was starkly and ominously presented to Darwin by his mentor, Charles Lyell, in the pages of the second volume of his Principles of Geology. Darwin received a copy of this work whilst on board the Beagle in the early stages of his voyage. To the naturalist who had set out as a pious and convinced creationist the implications of such a choice would be momentous, reaching far beyond biology to the whole way in which humanity was to be perceived. To the captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy – a convinced creationist – even the possibility of there being such a choice was simply unconscionable and it became a source of estrangement between the two men. For myself, there was a time I could hardly bear to think about it, finding evidence for the evolutionary origins of humanity almost unbearable to read. Since then I have come to realise many do likewise, simply dismissing the ‘inconvenient’ truth.
Over the years Darwin agonised in secret over this issue, as must anyone who confronts the possibility of the collapse of that sacred canopy, with its centrally supporting narrative of humanity as a created entity. It explains much about both his recurrent ill-health – of which he declared his work on The Origin to be, ‘the main cause of the ills to which my flesh is heir’ – as well as his prolonged reticence to publish his work. To a friend he declared that it was like ‘confessing a murder’.
That death, of course, as Nietzsche was later to more dramatically proclaim, was that of the ultimate object of belief, God.
Despite this Darwin remained focused on the careful observation of nature. His imagination was first triggered by the immense variety and richness of life in the South American jungle. After his first visit on 28 February 1832 he recorded in his Journal the deep impression this made upon him: ‘To a person fond of Natural History such a day as this brings with it a pleasure more acute than he may ever again experience… Amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking.’ From this grew his sense of the coherence of life – what we now call biodiversity. The core of his work culminated in the key insight of how all life forms grow and diversify through adapting to their environment.
There was much that would always lie beyond Darwin’s understanding. He could explain selection but not variation, the genetic basis which remained hidden from him. He focused on the species as the unit of survival but it has become clear that what survives is the organism-in-its-environment: as Fritjof Capra sagely warned, ‘An organism that thinks only in terms of its own survival will invariably destroy its environment.’ Darwin shied away from the cosmological implications of his theory on the origins of life but we now see the basic dynamics of evolution begin with a holistic view of systems in homeostasis – a state of dynamic equilibrium.
Regardless of so much being hidden from him, to me what has always been most inspiring about Darwin is the relentless way he searched for truth, always willing to confront new evidence, even if it seemed to challenge his established convictions; always meticulous in considering every aspect of an idea.
There was nothing strident in any of this. It represented not so much a shaking of the foundations of the sacred canopy as its gradual dismantling.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett has aptly described Darwin’s thought to be like a corrosive – a ‘universal key insight of how all life forms grow and diversify through adapting to their environment Darwin studied barnacles acid’ – that gradually dissolved the traditional beliefs of Providential design. To me it led to an increasingly radical realisation that the whole idea of a sacred canopy was in fact no more than a human fabrication to justify our own exceptionalism. It had been integral to the whole of my religious upbringing that humans were to be defined in terms apart from nature rather than as a part of it, against the natural world in favour of some supernatural destiny. Mircea Eliade pointed to the essential characteristic of mythical and religious thinking as being to look beyond the tangible world to a greater reality whilst Cardinal Heenan once tersely responded, when asked how he saw the purpose of his life, by saying, ‘To save my soul’.
It was such ‘trans-earthly’ illusions that Darwin gently, but firmly, punctured. His essential greatness lies in the fact that for the first time in history a coherent explanation was made possible of how complex organisms, like ourselves, could arise from simple processes without invoking an overarching theistic causation. For this he was demonised as a ‘devil’s chaplain’. He was subsequently accused of being prophet of a godless universe, destroyer of moral values, legitimator of neo-barbarism and the progenitor of inhuman eugenic programmes. All of which is grossly unjustified. To hold him responsible for the misrepresentations of others is like holding Jesus Christ responsible for the Spanish Inquisition or European witch-hunts.
With the benefit of hindsight we can see that many initial responses misrepresented Darwin’s thought.
Almost immediately his theory became entangled with the Victorian political agenda of progress. Other popularisations were misleading: for example, Huxley’s description of evolution as the survival of the fittest, or Nietzsche’s solitary superman pitted against a soulless universe. There is no better contemporary illustration of how wrong all this was than the recent Olympic achievement of the British cycling team. Their amazing success (survival) was not just about the fitness of supermen (and women) at their peak, but equally of their fitting into a team which was collectively constantly re-assessing every slightest detail – from the structure of the bikes and sportswear to the diet and mental state of the cyclists – so that advantages of tiny parts of a second would collectively add up to a significant difference. This approach is what the team manager, David Brailsford, called ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’, a perfect expression of Darwinian thinking applied to life. The outcome was wholly benign and enhancing, eloquent testimony to the survival (triumph) of those who fit in!
On a cosmological level there has been a similar, more positive appreciation that has moved beyond the bleak mechanistic view of a universe indifferent to human fate we find, for example, in the novels of Thomas Hardy, to one conducive to life. What Darwin gave us the means to discern was that we do not just live our lives, we are part of an organic process.
Developments in cosmology have revealed that we do not just live in a static cosmos, we are part of a great drama of cosmogenesis; we live, as the ecologist (also Catholic theologian and priest) Thomas Berry has written, in ‘a universe ever coming into being through an irreversible sequence of transformations moving… from a lesser to a greater order of complexity and from lesser to greater consciousness.’ In this neo-Teilhardian sweep of mind we can begin to grasp that the human is rooted in a cosmic drama to which we are integral, not an addition or extra but as its most extraordinary expression: matter becoming reflective on itself as mind.
Though this sounds rather like Hegelian mysticism it is Darwin who provided the key empirical analysis which enabled the new understanding of our world as an evolving entity; of nature as the epiphany of its own mystery. Stuart Kauffman of the Sante Fe Institute is typical of those scientists who have taken this understanding forward, believing that, ‘evolution is richer than Darwin supposed.’ His theme is of how emergent processes have led us to the numinous beauty of the world of which we are part; we are here, at home in the universe, because of a creative self-organisation that is the hallmark of natural processes. Neither entirely random nor predetermined, ‘Self-organisation mingles with natural selection, in scarcely understandable ways, to yield the magnificence of our teeming biosphere.’ It is no accident that one of his works should be entitled At Home in the Universe.
This is now part of a new ‘sacred’ story that has emerged from Darwin’s legacy: the Epic of Evolution.
It is not just ‘a theory’ – it is a radically new vision, that weaves all inert elements and living things, matter and mind, into a seamless web of life. To understand the carbon molecules from which life has grown is also to understand the stellar conflagrations that created them. Again, to quote from Thomas Berry’s ecological manifesto, The Great Work, ‘The human is neither an addendum nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe. In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.’ This is an awesome vision. It transcends in grandeur and scope and detail all other previous ‘sacred’ cosmogonies. What is so radical in this new story is that it locates humanity within nature, not above or over it. In doing this it takes us beyond the traditional understanding of Western civilisations, from their Classical origins even back to a time before the Neolithic revolution when humans began to manipulate (domesticate) nature for human ends. It takes us back to those prehistoric, shamanistic times, when humanity viewed nature as a spiritual entity, entered into communion with other beings and where every being was respected for its own unique value. Such societies Darwin was demonised as a ‘devil’s chaplain’. were once condescendingly dismissed as ‘primitive’.
I have gradually come to see how much we can learn from these distant times and have come to respect their pre-theological spirituality.
The key word is respect. It encapsulates the essential disposition to nature which modern exploitative humanity has lost. In choosing to view nature simply as a commodity or resource we are now not only in imminent danger of destroying what has taken millions of years to unfold, but in doing so are in danger of destroying ourselves. The unprecedented challenge that now faces humanity is not just how to save its natural habitat, but how to save itself from itself. To do so is impossible without a profound change of disposition.
To respect nature is to recognise its rights, and in doing so to recognise that our rights are limited: we have no rights over other living things, other than those of the all powerful predator; we have no rights as one species to threaten the bio-diversity of the planet, to absolutely destroy the habitats of other species. To recognise this is to recognise the right of nature to be itself, to be wild. This is the ultimate challenge to an all-conquering anthropocentric consumerism.
Wilderness may conjure up images of vast untouched open spaces. But this is not the only dimension.
Wildness can exist in those little hidden worlds on our doorstep: a handful of soil is a little universe of life. It was in his sensitivity to this that the real genius of Darwin lay, a genius that drew its strength from the tireless observation of the most humble things – earthworms, barnacles, pigeons. His great work, The Origin of Species, concludes with him contemplating an ‘entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and the worms crawling through the damp earth.’ It was from such observation that he was able to intuit the laws acting around us. And though his epochal world voyage and visit to the wilderness of Galapagos is often treated as seminal to his theories, no less so were the daily walks along the garden paths of Down House. It was here, in a little natural arena, that he formulated all his ideas.
In a world of increasing urbanisation it is this local connection to nature that I now treasure most. Though born in an industrial town I was privileged to grow up near green open spaces of parks, allotments, golf courses, reservoirs and small farms, which provided an entrance into an entrancing world of ‘otherness’, of nature. After departing from beneath the sacred canopy I have returned to these treasured natural places. They are my solace.
But, like many people, I now view their destruction with a sense of profound grief, which resonates with what is happening to the larger world of nature.
This is about more than just personal loss. It is about the recognition that our humanity is rooted in nature, and that without these roots our lives wither. For we carry within us still the marks of our ancestry, an ancestry which for countless millennia dwelt among the open grasslands, rivers and woods.
The emotional and aesthetic satisfaction that comes from connectedness to the natural world is at the heart of human well-being. Even a picture of a natural scene on a hospital ward aids recovery!
As the great naturalist E.O. Wilson warned in his apocalyptic The Future of Life, we delude ourselves to pretend we can survive without our natural habitat.
This is why, for me, the locality has now become the primary focus of my concern. Ecology has replaced theology as the source of my spirituality and object of my contemplation. The need to repair our relations with the natural world is the most urgent challenge facing humanity. Our present alienation creates a difference which becomes indifference, of no intimacy which becomes no fulfilment, of addictive substitutional consumption which simply fuels an endless cycle of destruction. As the geographer Barry Lopez wrote of the American way of life, ‘The more superficial a society’s knowledge of the real dimensions of the land it occupies becomes, the more vulnerable the land is to exploitation, to manipulation for short-term gain.’ The malaise of our entire urbanised way of modern life lies in this alienation from nature.
It is a malaise which traditional beliefs have largely ignored. In fact they are a large part of the problem.
Monotheistic religious traditions, in particular, relativise the importance of nature by their supernaturalist orientation which generally denigrates – even demonises – nature, in favour of some illusory trans-worldly fantasy. In turn this becomes a distraction from the true reality of the world as a spiritual place, our ‘sacred’ destiny and of all creatures as ‘sacred’ beings worthy of respect. To me, now, both the religious and humanist elements of Western culture have distorted our view of reality through their anthropocentric preoccupations – the focus that places the human drama and human need at the centre of concern.
To this view Darwin provides a salutary alternative.
His writings challenge us to a profound reversal of our perspective of ourselves and the world we inhabit. They prompt a new mode of consciousness, different from any that has occurred since Neolithic times. Darwin spent a lifetime struggling to understand the natural world. We must do the same. If we fail to do so we will have no future: the origin of our species will become lost in the trauma of our extinction.
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SOF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).
Some of the pigeon types studied by Darwin 17 sofia 91 March 2009 Confronting theThokoloshe Michael Senior looks at two religious practices in South Africa.