The Darwinian perspective is central to all of modern biology, from investigations of the molecular structure of DNA to studies of the behavior of apes and men.20 It connects us with our long-forgotten ancestors and our swarm of relatives, the millions of other species with whom we share the Earth. But the price exacted has been high, and there are still—especially in the United States—those who refuse to pay, and for very human and fathomable reasons. Evolution suggests that if God exists, God is fond of secondary causes and factotum processes: getting the Universe going, establishing the laws of Nature, and then retiring from the scene. A hands-on Executive seems to be absent; power has been delegated. Evolution suggests that God will not intervene, whether beseeched or not, to save us from ourselves. Evolution suggests we’re on our own—that if there is a God, that God must be very far away. This is enough to explain much of the emotional anguish and alienation that evolution has worked. We long to believe that there’s someone at the helm.
——
Darwin’s transcendantly democratic insight that all humans are descended from the same non-human ancestors, that we are all members of one family, is inevitably distorted when viewed with the impaired vision of a civilization permeated by racism. White supremacists seized on the notion that people with high abundances of melanin in their skin must be closer to our primate relatives than bleached people. Opponents of bigotry, perhaps fearing that there might be a grain of truth in this nonsense, were just as happy not to dwell on our relatedness to the apes. But both points of view are located on the same continuum: the selective application of the primate connection to the veldt and the ghetto, but never, ever, perish the thought, to the boardroom or the military academy or, God forbid, to the Senate chamber or the House of Lords, to Buckingham Palace or Pennsylvania Avenue. This is where the racism comes in, not in the inescapable recognition that, for better or worse, we humans are just a small twig on the vast and many-branched tree of life.
Natural selection has been misused by capitalists and communists, whites and blacks, Nazis and many others to grind this or that self-serving ideological axe. It’s not surprising that feminists feared that a Darwinian perspective would provide yet another cudgel for male seientists to hit women over the head with—about alleged inferiorities in mathematics or statecraft. But for all we know, such a perspective might reveal, that the raging hormonal imbalances that propel men to violence make them less than optimal for leadership of a modern state. If we believe sexism to be a prejudicial error, that fact will emerge from scientific examination, and we should favor its rigorous scrutiny by the methods of science.
Much of the recent controversy over the application of Darwinian ideas to human behavior has been motivated by the fear of such misuse by racists, sexists, and other bigots—as indeed happened with ghoulish and tragic consequences in World War II. However, the cure for a misuse of science is not censorship, but clearer explanation, more vigorous debate, and making science accessible to everyone. If some of our proclivities are inborn, as surely must be the case, it hardly follows that we cannot learn to modify, mitigate, enhance, or redirect the resulting behavior.
——
Vice-Admiral FitzRoy had been the British Board of Trade’s weatherman for more than a decade when his 1865 long-range forecast proved to be wildly, calamitously wrong. The proud, choleric FitzRoy took a terrible beating in the newspapers. When he could no longer bear the ridicule, he slit his throat, an early martyr to the predictive failures of meteorology. Although FitzRoy had spoken publicly against Darwin in the “creationism” controversy and despite the fact that the two men had not been face-to-face in eight years, Darwin took the news of FitzRoy’s suicide badly. What images from the youthful adventure they shared must have come to Darwin’s mind? “What a melancholy career he has run,” he observed to Hooker, “with all his splendid qualities.”21
On melancholia, too, Darwin was something of an expert. These years he was depressed, exhausted, and sick most of the time. Throughout this miserable period he was consistently productive and his relationships with Emma, the survivors among their ten children, and a great number of friends seemed none the worse for it. If anything, the letters they exchanged and their written recollections testify to an openness, an emphasis on the importance of feelings, a respect for children, a harmonious family life. His daughter remembered him saying that he hoped none of his children would ever believe something just because it was he who told it to them. “He kept up his delightful, affectionate manner towards us all his life,” his son Francis wrote. “I sometimes wonder that he could, with such an undemonstrative race as we are; but I hope he knew how much we delighted in his loving words and manner … He allowed his grown-up children to laugh with and at him, and was generally speaking on terms of perfect equality with us.”22
There were many who comforted themselves with the thought that in his last moments Darwin would renounce his evolutionary heresies and repent. There are still people today who piously believe that’s just what happened. Instead, Darwin faced death calmly and apparently without regret, saying on his deathbed “I am not the least afraid to die.”23
The family wished to bury him on their estate at Down, but twenty Members of Parliament, with the support of the Anglican Church, appealed to them to allow him to be interred at Westminster Abbey, a few feet away from Isaac Newton. You’ve got to hand it to the Church of England. It was an act of consummate grace. For you, they seemed to be saying, who have done the most to raise doubts about the truth of what we say, we reserve the highest honor—a respect for the correction of error that is, incidentally, characteristic of science when it is faithful to its ideals.
HUXLEY AND THE GREAT DEBATE
Thomas Henry Huxley was born to a large, struggling, dysfunctional family in the England of 1825, where class was destiny for almost everyone. His formal education consisted of two years of elementary school. But he had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and legendary self-discipline. At age seventeen, on an impulse, Huxley entered an open competition given by a local college, and was awarded the Silver Medal of the Pharmaceutical Society and a scholarship to study medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. Forty years later he was President of the Royal Society, then the foremost scientific organization in the world. He made fundamental contributions to comparative anatomy and many other fields, and was, along the way, inventor of the words “protoplasm” and “agnostic.” Through his whole life he was committed to teaching science to the public. (More than one member of the upper classes was known to don shabby clothes in order to gain admittance to his lectures for working people.) He taught that a fair scientific examination of the facts demolished European claims of racial superiority.24 At the end of the American Civil War, he wrote that while the slaves might now be free, half of the human species—women—had yet to be emancipated.*
One of Huxley’s interests had been the idea that all animals, including us, were “automata,” carbon-based robots, whose “states of consciousness … are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance.”25 Darwin closed his last letter to him with these words: “Once again, accept my cordial thanks, my dear old friend. I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you.”26
“If I am to be remembered at all,” Huxley confided late in life, “I would rather it should be as ‘a man who did his best to help the people’ than by any other title.”27 What he is actually best remembered for is delivering the punch line in the decisive debate that gained acceptance for Darwin’s ideas.