After his voyage on the Beagle – his reflections on Galapagos turtles and finches famously guiding him to understanding the evolutionary mechanism – Darwin had effectively rejected the prevailing Christian-influenced view. This held that organisms were perfectly adapted to their environment through God’s agency. Instead, Darwin suggested a conception of the natural world as an arena of incessant struggle between competing individuals with different degrees of fitness for survival. His reading in 1838 of Malthus on population helped him clinch the formulation of the theory. Malthus had highlighted the tension between the “arithmetic” increase in food supply and the “geometric” rate of population growth, so that population increase was always checked by a limited food supply. Darwin saw that, under similar conditions in the natural world, favourable variations would be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed. He became convinced that, over vast periods of time in response to changes in the environment, that mechanism provided the basis for the transmutation of species.

The result of these ideas was revealed many years later in Darwin’s bestseller, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). To the chagrin and indignation of many in Darwin’s social circle, the arguments in the Origin seemed to challenge many aspects of Victorian Christianity: the historical accuracy of the Creation narratives; the persuasive force of the argument from design; the meaning of humankind’s supposed contrivance in the image of God; the ultimate grounds of religious and moral values. There was certainly no room for God or miracles in this evolutionary explanation of the development of forms of life. Darwin’s identification of 'natural selection' as the mechanism of evolutionary change insisted that the apparent design in nature was not the result of God’s creative mind, but – alarmingly for respectable and devout Victorians – of random variation and struggle.

A longer-term perspective helps dramatise Darwin’s revolutionary accomplishment, for he effectively completed the project embarked upon by Copernicus when he dethroned the earth from its special place at the heart of God’s universe. After Darwin, not even man was special or the most favoured species in the eyes of God. Darwin’s fundamental scientific idea connected all life together; all life to nature – above all, linking humanity to nature. We, too, have evolved, just like other creatures and could no longer be viewed as separate from or above nature by divine dispensation. No wonder that Darwin memorably acknowledged that coming up with the theory of evolution was “like confessing a murder”.

It is worth reflecting on the extraordinary personal dilemma faced by this Victorian gentleman with a burdensome secret. Here was a man from a pious upper middle class family whose father, a well-to-do physician, wanted him to become an Anglican clergyman! After giving up on the idea of becoming a doctor, largely because of his horror at the dissection table and his dread of witnessing pain and suffering at the bedside, Charles moved south from radical Edinburgh to Tory-Anglican Cambridge, where he was encouraged by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology, and the Reverend John Henslow, Professor of Botany. Of course, in this period, Oxbridge dons were clergymen by definition. These were men who stood steadfastly for God’s laws and for whom the very idea of transmutation was an abomination. Darwin’s recurrent illness, often attributed to psychosomatic causes, has been seen as a symptom of his pervasive fear over his dangerous secret. Indeed, Darwin had sat on his theory for nearly 20 years and was impelled to publish only when he realised that A. R. Wallace had independently arrived at an almost identical theory, threatening to pre-empt Darwin’s life’s work. Still another irony in the saga is the fact that the reader of Origin will find only one sentence that even mentions mankind – to the effect that “light may yet be shed” on human origins by the evolutionary theory outlined in the book.

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Content last updated: 29/07/2004

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