——
The Huxley/Wilberforce debate is the grand climactic scene in the 1930s Hollywood movie version that might be imagined of Darwin’s life:
A small item on the front page of The Daily Oxonian: “Annual Meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science to Be Held Tomorrow.” The dateline reads June 29, 1860. Front page begins to spin like a roulette wheel.
Dissolve to reveal that we are following the highly imaginative, although slightly shady Robert Chambers (played by Joseph Cotten) as he makes his way down an Oxford street. He is jostled by another man and just as he turns in annoyance, he realizes that it is none other than the pugnacious Thomas Henry Huxley (Spencer Tracy), whose conviction with regard to the truth of his friend Darwin’s controversial theory is so fierce it will one day earn him the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
Rascal that he is, Chambers can’t resist asking Huxley if he’ll he attending Drapers reading at the British Association meeting. The title is to be “The Intellectual Development of Europe with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.” Huxley claims he’s too busy.
Knowingly, Chambers allows that “ ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce is sure to be there.”
Huxley, growing more defensive, insists that it would be a waste of time.
Chambers says slyly, “Deserting the cause, Huxley?”
Piqued, Huxley makes his excuses and walks off.
The following day. The doors to the great hall are thrown open. The place is packed but only one voice is heard. We pan in for a tight close-up of the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (George Arliss). Fingers in lapels, he turns pointedly to Huxley (who is of course there, despite his protestations of scheduling conflicts) and with arch courtesy begs to know “whether it is through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim your descent from a monkey?” Grasping the smarmy nuance of “grandmother,” the crowd utters low “ooh’s” and turns its attention to Huxley.
Still seated, Huxley turns to the man next to him and, almost winking, murmurs, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.” Rising and looking Wilberforce squarely in the eye, he says: “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.”
The crowd has never seen a bishop insulted to his face before. Stunned reaction. Ladies faint. Men shake their fists. Chambers in the crowd, positively gleeful. But wait. There’s someone else standing up. Why, it’s Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy (Ronald Reagan), back in England after his term as Governor of New Zealand. “I was arguing with Charles Darwin and his crazy ideas thirty years ago on the Beagle.” And then, brandishing his Bible: “This and this alone is the source of all truth.” More clamor.
Now it’s Hookers turn (Henry Fonda). Sincerely, “I knew this theory fifteen years ago. I was then entirely opposed to it; I argued against it again and again; but since then I have devoted myself unremittingly to natural history; in its pursuit I have traveled around the world. Facts in this science which before were inexplicable to me became one by one explained by this theory, and conviction has been thus gradually forced upon an unwilling convert.”
The camera pulls out of the great hall. Dissolve to a close-up of a finch perched on the branch of a tree. A bearded man (Ronald Colman), kindly, dressed in rural gentleman’s hat and cape, but with a muffler despite the June weather, is staring lovingly up at the bird. He hardly seems to hear the voice of his wife (Billie Burke), high-pitched, affectionate, calling from the great house, off-camera: “Charles … CHARLES … Trevor is here with news from that meeting at Oxford.” He casts one appreciative look back at the finch before finally walking off to the house …28
* “[G]irls have been educated either to be drudges or toys, beneath men; or a sort of angels above him The possibility that women are meant to be men’s comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar on that equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls.” The first step to a better world, he said, was “Emancipate girls” Their hair “will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within”29
Chapter 5
LIFE IS JUST A THREE-LETTER WORD
Who first drives life to begin its journey?
The Kena Upanishad
(8th to 7th centuries B.C., India)1
Who’s aware of mutability?
Not even Buddhas.
DAITETSU
(1333–1408, Japan)2
In a shaft of sunlight, even when the air is still, you can sometimes see a tribe of dust motes dancing. They move in zigzag paths as if animated, motivated, propelled by some small but earnest purpose. Some of the followers of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher, thought that each mote had its own immaterial soul that told it what to do, just as they thought that each human has a soul that gives us direction and tells us what to do. Indeed, the Latin word for soul is anima—it is something similar in many modern languages—from which come such English words as “animate” and “animal.”
In fact, those motes of dust make no decisions, have no volition. They are instead the passive agents of invisible forces. They’re so tiny that they’re battered about by the random motion of molecules of air, which have a slight preponderance of collisions first on one side of the mote and then on the other, propelling them, with what looks to us as some mix of intention and indecision, through the air. Heavier objects—threads, say, or feathers—cannot much be jostled by molecular collisions; if not wafted by a current of air, they simply fall.
The Pythagoreans deceived themselves. They did not understand how matter works on the level of the very small, and so—from a specious and oversimple argument—they deduced a ghostly spirit that pulls the strings. When we look around us at the living world, we see a profusion of plants and animals, all seemingly designed for specific ends and single-mindedly devoted to their own and their offspring’s survival—intricate adaptations, an exquisite match of form to function. It is natural to assume that some immaterial force, something like the soul of a dust mote, but far grander, is responsible for the beauty, elegance, and variety of life on Earth, and that each organism is propelled by its own, appropriately configured, spirit. Many cultures all over the world have drawn just such a conclusion. But might we here, as did the ancient Pythagoreans, be overlooking what actually goes on in the world of the very small?
We can believe in animal or human souls without holding to evolution, and vice versa. But if we examined life more closely, might we be able to understand at least a little of how it works and how it came to be, purely in terms of its constituent atoms? Is something “immaterial” present? If so, is it in every beast and vegetable, or just in humans? Or is life no more than a subtle consequence of physics and chemistry?
——