When one is aware of the fact that life is the result of the evolutionary process it is only natural to think about the implications for how we live
our lives—how we try to find a moral compass ….without having one handed down
from On High.
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| Charles Darwin; drawn by Anne Buchanan |
In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species
shook the world. His discovery, that all
life had evolved by a natural historical process from a common origin,
overturned the widely accepted view that species were separately created by
God. With legendary evasiveness, all Darwin
said then about humans was that
“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
During his 5-year world voyage as naturalist on the Beagle in the 1830s, Darwin noticed that
the plant and animal species in a given place included groups that were more
similar to each other than they were to somewhat similar species in other parts
of the world. Fossils also resembled the
living animals in the area where they were found, and similar species have
similar body structures, embryology, and even behavior. Darwin realized that this resemblance is due
to descent from common ancestry, and it is of course that fact that enables us
to say that species are ‘related’.
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| Humpback whale; Public Domain |
Darwin was also struck by the adaptations of species to their particular environment; mammals are
land animals but whales can swim, hummingbirds have long beaks to reach nectar,
cacti thrive in arid deserts, birds are reptile descendants but they can fly. How could such adaptations have arisen, if
not by divine Creation? Darwin had an
answer, and it was based on the cold cruelty of life and death:
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, nor more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. . . .We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, [but] we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.”
Darwin also studied the exceedingly
slow change in geological formations, which revealed the vast age of the
earth. Among other things, he found
shells inland at high elevations, and he studied the slow formation of coral
atolls. Synthesizing these various facts
and with deep and incisive insight, he reasoned that over countless thousands
of generations, the ‘fittest’ individuals—those carrying genetically determined
traits that gave them even a very slight
competitive advantage, survived and reproduced.
Eventually, their descendants evolved into new species—thus the ‘origin
of species’—while extinction was the
fate that awaited the less ‘fit’. Darwin
called this process “natural selection,” and he thought that it was a universal
law of life, in the same way as Newton’s law of gravitation is a universal law
of physics.
Struggling with the implications of his view, Darwin rationalized
(with, we think, more than a bit of wishful thinking) that
“When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”
Painless? No
fear? Well, in any case, to Darwin, a
law of universal cruelty generated what he famously called the ‘grandeur’ of
life.
Thirteen years after writing the Origin, Darwin finally did deal with human evolution. In The
Descent of Man, he showed in convincing physical and behavioral detail that
we, too, have evolved as part of the living world. He did acknowledge that in the Origin
“I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest….[but]… I may be permitted to say …. that I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.”
In fact, some recognition of the too-old-for-Genesis earth
and the succession of species had been seeping into cultural awareness for some
time even before down. Leading intellectuals of the day were understandably shaken
by this new view of life, as well as its challenge to their faith. They included novelists like Thomas Hardy,
and George Eliot whose troubled reactions show up in her novel Middlemarch, and poets like Matthew
Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson who gave us the phrase “Nature red in tooth and
claw.”
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| First edition title page of Middlemarch; Wikipedia |
Though he is much less well known, the naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace discovered evolution independently, and at the same time as
Darwin. The two became friends, but
Wallace struggled to accept that evolution could apply to humans: he felt that things
like our mathematical and musical abilities could not have evolved by natural
selection. After all, hunter gatherers
didn’t compose piano sonatas or work out integrals. When in 1869 Wallace wrote that such
abilities were evidence for the guiding intervention of God, Darwin famously replied
in frustration,
“I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”
We now have wholly plausible general explanations for traits
evolving in one way and being used in another at some later time. But it was a very logical question for
Wallace to have raised.
Always a modest man, in a letter explaining his theory to the
American botanist, Asa Gray, Darwin quipped,
“This sketch is most imperfect . . .[and] . . .your imagination must fill up many wide blanks. Without some reflection, it will appear all rubbish; perhaps it will appear so after reflection.”
Natural selection is still today widely taken as law-like dogma,
but while Darwin’s theory was deeply
insightful, some of it is, in a sense,
a sort of rubbish, at least because the truth is not so simple!
The ability of natural
selection to generate adaptive variation, and the glacial slowness of the
process in what was by then recognized to be a very old earth, together removed
the need to explain the diversity of life by sudden events of divine creation. But that same snail-like pace means that competitive
advantages at any given time must themselves usually be very slight.
That’s important to
our point here, because it means that relative success in life is mostly the
result of chance, or luck, or happenstance, and not inherent genetic superiority. Harmful traits might be selected
against if their bearers do not survive or reproduce. Even clearly genetic
traits are typically affected by variation in many different genes, so that the
‘same’ trait will be genetically different in each person to a considerable
extent. Species are adapting simultaneously
in many different ways, and so there are usually many ways to be ‘fit’.
As a result, in general, at any given time and place,
the main criterion for what is ‘better’ is what happens to be luckier. An oak
tree makes hundreds of thousands of acorns during its lifetime, but in a stable
environment only one, on average, lives to become a mature oak itself—at least,
we cannot say that the genetically very best acorn—whatever that could actually
mean!—is that very one in a hundred thousand.
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| Acorns; Wikipedia |
Even individuals with otherwise
slightly more advantageous genes that could otherwise make them, say, better hunters
or gatherers, or bankers, violinists, athletes, nurses—or even professors or
drug dealers!--may instead be the victims of accident or childhood disease, fail
to find a mate, and so on. This quite obvious fact undermines the yen of a
strict believer in natural selection for a single, precise law-like natural
underpinning of life. Life is just much more
nuanced than that.
There are many religious questions about the implications of
evolution. For example, there were religious
skeptics and atheists long before Darwin.
In a rather passive sense, these
people simply did not see convincing evidence for the truth of sacred texts or of
a personal God. But evolution is
different: it shows in an active
sense not stories about where we might
have come from, but facts about where we have
come from. This insight removes the need for an external Creator who is also
the provider of an absolute moral compass, a True North, by which to live, or
claim to live, or try to live, our lives.
Instead, evolution is an impersonal process, with no mission nor set of values. But this need not be entirely distressing,
because the fact of evolution liberates us to explore a moral compass for
ourselves.
It is certainly true that some people find that compass in Darwinian
evolution itself, taking relentless natural selection as the True North of existence, at last revealed by science—Nature red
in tooth and claw, in your face, whether you like it or not!
That Darwinian dogma has been used as justification for all
sorts of real rubbish, including a
cornucopia of discrimination, racism, and violence of humans against each other.
This rationale—perhaps better called an excuse—is
still reflexively and routinely extended to justify competition among
societies, organizations, businesses, and even universities (beyond just their
football teams)! At the extreme, leading scientists used evolutionary dogma to
justify sterilizing the impaired, and providing cover for Hitler’s racist
horrors on the grounds of preserving the supposed genetic superiority of the Aryan
race.
Cathedrals of unutterable evil have been constructed by
people who, we must acknowledge, have in their own minds, and sometimes in Darwin’s
name, as clear a moral compass as have saints. But so have cathedrals of incredible beauty
been constructed on Darwinian grounds. In
fact, if you try hard enough, you can find credible ways within Darwinian theory
to account not just for mass murder, strident atheism, or nihilistic
existentialism, but also for any of a smorgasbord of more ‘positive’ values,
including sustainability, vegetarianism, social kindness, polygamy, even self-sacrifice
and celibacy.
In that sense evolution is a Rorschach test. It’s most basic truth is successful descent
with modification from a common ancestor.
Beyond that, you see in the theory what you bring to it. If almost any behavior, even direct
opposites, can be shown to be consistent with evolutionary theory, as they can,
then to that extent the theory of evolution is no more useful for developing a
moral compass than a creationist’s just saying “God said so”.
So, then, what about
God? Darwin recognized that evolution neither
requires, nor precludes, a God—at least one who, as deists (probably including
Darwin) might say, started everything and (given the state of the world) has
been on an extended coffee break ever since.
Evolution makes it possible for us, as beings, to conceive
of and believe in a God, or many gods, or a world of spirits, or of none. Whether
such beliefs are factual or not, it is perfectly consistent with evolution to
believe in a Heaven paved in gold, if it comforts, because we evolved to seek
comfort and safety.
The point is that evolution itself doesn’t dictate the
answer. Despite the impression one might
get from the daily news media’s hot new stories about genes for this and
genetic cures for that, not everything we do or think, or that happens to us,
is determined by our genes. The very notion of right and wrong is culturally constructed, and changes over
time and place. As existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said:
“Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie.”
A moral compass is a choice we must make for ourselves.
Sometimes we invent our own, sometimes, consciously or not, we adopt one, but
it is always based on our individual experiences.
Of course, the fact that there is no easy answer ‘out there’
can be a challenging burden to accept. Darwin himself faced this challenge, as do we all;
his writings portray a complex man continually revisiting his own moral
compass.
Three of his 10 children died young, one severely
disabled. As he wrote of his favorite
daughter Annie, the joy of his life, who died painfully at age 10:
“We have lost the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age:— she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.”
Darwin had been
studying theology as a student at Cambridge, preparing to become a vicar, when he
was offered the trip aboard the Beagle.
As he viewed the natural world, his orthodox belief faded, and Annie’s death is
said to have extinguished any remaining faith he may have had in a personal,
intervening God.
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| Annie Dawrin's grave, Malvern, England; photo by A Buchanan |
But he didn’t just
brush her death off as the normal consequences of evolution, as a good and natural thing
because it reflected natural selection.
Instead, Darwin had all the human inconsistencies that any of us do. And
he had as much sympathy and empathy as well.
He wrote of the horrors of slavery that he had witnessed in his travels,
and became a fierce abolitionist, yet he held a rather hierarchical view of
human populations (with the ‘civilized’ ones like imperial Britain on top,
naturally). He was a humanitarian, yet he
was comfortable with his status in the wealthy leisured class.
And if unlike his personal life, his theory stressed Nature’s
harsh realities, Darwin also knew of the softer wonders of life, even if this
appreciation may have come to him later in life: as he wrote wistfully in his
autobiography
“… if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
So Darwin was not a one-dimensional man, and his Origin
of Species is not a sacred text, not The Word from on high. Instead, it’s the
fact of evolution in itself that provides
an external kind of ‘authority’ that forces a recognition that there may be no external personal authority, and that
we have to decide individually what to believe about what is right or wrong.
If evolution’s impersonal nature seems a lonely view of life,
evolution has also produced the almost mystical collective wholeness of life: everyone here, and every butterfly, mouse, tree,
and blade of grass—yes, even every cockroach!—shares a single 3.5 billion year unbroken chain of
successful ancestors.
This magnificent cosmic unity will not remove the challenge
of individual isolation, nor the pain of loss.
But it can lead to a greater
appreciation of friends, family, colleagues, and social fellowships.
It is at the very least more than a small comfort to know even
if facing the sorrows of life is a challenge, when you are trying to find your own
moral compass these softer truths provide the joy of being able to live in ways that
have been chosen by you, rather than for you. This isn't written in evolutionary theory, but it is a direct consequence of knowing the evolutionary facts of life.
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