DARWIN ON DARWIN
By: Jerry Alper
Tags: Atheism, Natural Selection, Evolution, Sean Carroll, Darwin

“One day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind which I could not bear to lose, so that, I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas, it ejected some intensely acid fluid, which burned my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one”.

This is Darwin commenting on his unquenchable thirst for deepening the laws of nature.

THE ONSET OF DOUBT

“I had gradually come by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc, etc; and from attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian… the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported — that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become — that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us — — that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events — that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye witnesses… I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation… Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct” (Charles Darwin Autobiography 1887, page 85).

John Van Wyhe, historian of science at the National University of Singapore, writes this about Darwin’s masterwork — on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection:

“One would never know it from the modest way he spoke of it in his letters, but the book would change the world forever. Its important for our understanding of life on Earth is difficult to exaggerate. Between the covers of a single book, Darwin managed to demonstrate the most fundamental pattern of past and present life on earth and at the stroke all of the hundreds of families, genera, and countless thousands of species were connected in one single and beautifully simple system. All of life is related, genealogically, on a great branching tree, the tree of life. He called it the theory of descent from a common stock, with modification through natural selection”.

ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL

Here’s how Darwin ends his masterwork:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally been breathed into a few forms, or into one; and that whilst the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from a simple beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

“In the century, and more, since Darwin’s death,” writes historian of science, Dr. John Van Wyhe, “an amount of knowledge about the workings of living things and the history of the Earth has been uncovered, which is without parallel in human history. Yet all of this work has confirmed and corroborated Darwin’s essential points to a degree he could never have imagined. Further discoveries in the fossil record, the discovery of genetics and DNA and a host of other findings have made Darwin’s theory of evolution as solid today as the theory of gravity. Darwin’s theory makes sense of the whole natural world.

“For example, DNA demonstrates with the greatest possible detail and precision the fact of genealogical relationship of all living species. Plate tectonics has made sense of much of the once mysterious distribution of plants and animals, such as the marsupials living only in American and Australia.

“Countless transitional forms have been found in the fossil record which fill in some of the blanks between ancient ancestral groups and modern groups such as Ichthyostega, an intermediate between fish and amphibians found first in Greenland in 1931. Such early tetrapods are the ancestors of all land-living vertebrates, in particular one with five finger-like bones in its fins (which is why we all have five fingers and toes). The recently discovered Ambulocetus the “walking whale” connects modern whales with mammalian crocodile-like animals. There are literally thousands of further examples of transitional forms connecting fish to amphibians, amphibians to early reptiles, reptiles to early mammals, reptiles to birds and non-human apes to humans. In one sense all species and fossils are transitional. Each is a single point on a long and continuous line of generations, halted only by complete extinction.”

The American botanist Asa Gray (as quoted by John Van Wyhe) praised Darwin in 1874 for providing “the explanation of all these and other extraordinary structures, as well as of the arrangement of blossoms in general, and even the very meaning and need of sexual propagation…”

“… The aphorism ‘Nature abhors close fertilisation’ and the demonstration of the principle belong to our age, and to Mr. Darwin. To have originated this, and also the principle of Natural Selection — the truthfulness and importance of which are evident the moment it is apprehended — — and to have applied these principles to the system of nature in such a manner as to make, within a dozen years, a deeper impression upon natural history than has been made since Linnaeus, are ample title for one man’s fame.”

A REVOLUTION IN HUMAN THOUGHT

And here (again as quoted by John Van Wyhe) is co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace’s tribute to the legacy of Charles Darwin:

“The philosopher who has wrought a greater revolution in human thought within a quarter of a century than any man of our time — — or perhaps of any time — he has given us new conception of the world of life, and a theory which is itself a powerful instrument of research; has shown us how to combine into one consistent whole, the facts accumulated all by the separate classes of workers and has thereby revolutionized the whole study of nature.”

THE VIEW FROM BEHIND THE COUCH

Because his world-shaking discovery — that all life on earth is related genealogically, on a great branching tree, the tree of life: the theory of descent with modification through natural selection — was “blindingly simple” — Darwin’s intelligence (even by someone such as Richard Dawkins) tends to be underestimated.

One way to understand this is that Darwin’s discovery is erroneously considered as not just the final piece of the discovery, but the only piece. Disregarded are the thousands and thousands of steps leading up to the great unifying discovery. Disregarded are the thousands of discarded hypotheses, errant thought experiments, blind alleys he first had to traverse. Disregarded is the fact Darwin was not endeavoring to solve a single phenomena — — he was proposing a principle of nature meant to apply with no exceptions to every living thing in nature. And that meant he had to investigate tens of thousands of specimens. Any one of which was capable of falsifying his great principle. None did. He wasn’t always right, but his record of far-reaching predictions may be unmatched in the history of science. His famous prediction at the end of the Origin of Species — that every living thing is a descendent of basically one ancestor primordial cell has been spectacularly validated almost one hundred years later with the discovery of DNA.

So who is this book — (Darwin by John Van Wyhe) — or any outstanding book by or about Darwin for?

It’s for anyone who has ever pondered, The Big Picture who has ever wondered how the natural world could arise without a designer?

Gerald Alper

Is the author of

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient

Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality

His latest book is

God and Therapy

What We Believe When No One is Watching