Darwin's Hammer

People have many misconceptions about Darwin and his theory of evolution, possibly the most serious one being that this theory originated with him.

The idea of evolution is actually quite an old one dating back to the ancient Greeks who used the term to provide a teleological view of nature. Aristotle, for instance, had his scala naturae with plants at the bottom rising to humans at the top while Anaximander suggested that humans originated from animals of some sort. The medieval philosophers Erigena and Augustine seemed to employ a similar idea with God as the master designer.

However, the philosophers and scientists from the time of Descartes replaced teleology with mechanics, even dispensing with the master designer eventually! While Descartes kept the master designer around and Leibniz maintained the existence of a supreme intelligence, the modern form of evolution was developed by pioneers such as Herder who produced the idea of continuous development from inorganic to organic: stone to plant to animal to human.

It is important to understand the developing environment Darwin was going to appear in. The attack on the Aristotlean glass fortress had already been under way for a couple of centuries. Copernicus had revealed his heliocentric theory removing the earth from the center of the universe and Gallileo was imprisoned for demonstrating its correctness. Hutton and Lyell developed geology theories which didn't depend on the great flood to explain everything, while various physicists such as Lord Kelvin pushed the age of the earth well beyond the biblical estimate of 7 days (later refined to a few thousand years by Christian theologicians). Lamarck came up with the concept of transmutation of species while Mendel produced the theory of genetics which eventually formed part of the 'engine' for evolution.

However, it remained for Darwin to launch from these foundations, his own meticulous research from his voyage on the HMS Beagle and his experiences on the Galapagos Islands, a devastating theory that struck the already stressed glass like a hammer, shattering it and the old viewpoint forever.

Evolution in essence proposes a mechanism by which complexity arises from simplicity due to pressures of various sorts. The idea was not new by any means and appeared in a variety of scientific and sociological fields. Darwin applied this principle to biological transformations to show that all species have descended from common ancestry through the process of natural selection. Thus he provided a conceptual unification which explained the diversity of life.

In doing so, though he destroyed the status quo, capturing territory that was considered the sole possession of religious dogma and anthropocentricity.

As such he, his theory and supporters were viciously attacked by those who still endeavored to keep man at the center of the universe, a paragon of deity-given dominance over all other life forms.

Though Darwin never claimed humans were descended from monkeys, he was caricaturized as an orangutan. His 'bulldog', Thomas Henry Huxley, was similarly ridiculed by being asked which side of his family had the ape he was descended from by none other than Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, a remarkable individual who fought against slavery and helped to establish the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. However, in this instance, Soapy Sam had overstepped the boundaries of decency and was delightfully reprimanded, as described through Huxley's own words:

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion - I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people - and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention … I believe I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four and twenty hours afterwards.

There are many different attacks on Darwinism, but the one concerning morality presents a most interesting duality. The 'christian' notion maintains the direct creation of man as the image of a deity. As a result, man's morality is divinely established along with dominion over other creatures. These produce opportunities for both responsibility as well as exploitation. What evolutionary theory does, is break the deity connection and place man right in the middle of the natural world. No longer, god-created nor god-like, man just becomes one of the myriad of species produced by natural selection. Evolution casts homo sapiens out of eden before any deity gets the chance to!

Many Christians view this 'expulsion' with horror because they feel man, without the divine connection, had lost all moral foundations. Unfortunately, such notions of falling from grace due to evolutionary theory lack merit because humans had been butchering each other for centuries, well before Darwinian blasphemies ever appeared. So it would seem that morality has no legitimate correlation with deital connections. On the other hand, there are those who see a problem to their lifestyle if the element of dominion disappears as well, because they can no longer receive holy sanction to oppress animals or even humans without it.

Interestingly enough, parallel arguments run in the evolution camp. Oppressors utilize ideas such as 'survival of the fittest' to justify their exploitative efforts, while others (Darwin included), see the opportunity to live with respectfulness towards our 'genetic' ancestors because of our similarities to them:

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties … The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.
(Charles Darwin The Descent of Man)

Gods can be fickle, but science usually isn't. The reality that we are connected through evolutionary continuity to other animals, is not a fleeting fancy. The idea is inescapable and demands both our moral awareness as well as our ethical actions!

Darwin's Origin of the Species has little scientific value because of the enormous amount of work that has been done on evolution since its publication in 1859. However, it has altered the way we view our lives completely.

One of the major appeals of evolutionary ideas is that we can and do progress from the rude to the refined, from the savage to the civilized. Darwinian continuity maintains a link to the past 'incarnations' to which we owe some debt, for we may understand our own progress better when we see our origins.

As such, evolution has infiltrated many areas of study (and not always with ethical consequences).

In physics we have Lee Smolin's theory of Fecund Universes, or the Cosmological Natural Selection Theory. In political and economic areas, there is Economic Social Darwinism. The Americans and afterwards the Nazis utilized evolutionary ideas for their eugenics programs. In philosophy, population thinking and genealogy altered how we contemplate ourselves and other creatures, while psychology was influenced in many ways by approaches such as Darwin's comparative method through which we view our behaviors as well as those of other animals.

Despite its propagation into various fields, some people try to pass it off as being "just a theory" as though, evolution is merely a speculative exercise. A scientific theory is constructed from empirical evidence to provide both explanations and hopefully accurate predictions. When such a level is reached, it may be 'just a theory', but we would be wise to pay serious attention to it.

The biggest concerns to evolution 'taking over' had to do with the removal of man from the center of the universe. As mentioned before, the dark side of this worry was the removal of the 'might is right' authority that oppressors use to inflict horrors on sentient beings of all species including humans. The other element was a genuine fear that human morality would cease to exist.

However, human morality and ethical actions do not need to disappear simply because the universe no longer spins around humankind. Morality and ethics existed amongst primitive cultures well before organized religion got control of the population through fear and chicanery. In fact, 3 decades of cognitive ethology (eg see Marc Bekoff) show that morality and ethics existed even before the arrival of homo sapiens!

What Darwin's hammer did was to liberate thinking from the clutches of dogma and bigotry. Humans found their proper place in nature, not somewhere above it. The new outlook insists we live responsibly and treat fellow creatures respectfully.

As Darwin himself wrote with elegance:

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

It is our choice to stagnate in that lowly swamp from which we came, or follow the evolutionary path forged by Darwin.

Sources:
http://human-nature.com/dm/chap1.html
http://www.iheu.org/impact-darwin-c-grayling
http://www.discovery.org/a/6301
http://www.ricestandard.org/charles-darwin-and-his-impact/
http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/darwin200/pages/index.php?page_id=e2

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