Saturday, September 29, 2018

BEGIN AGAIN


Today’s sermon is based on the third sentence of the first paragraph of Erika Hayden’s front page review (NY Times Book Review, Aug. 19, 2018) of David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. She writes that Charles Darwin’s “radical idea [was] that, over time, organisms change to give rise to new species.” This is yet another example of how pervasive is the misrepresentation of Darwin and the history of evolutionary thought. This was not Darwin’s idea. It was given to him by previous naturalists. They also gave some evidence for it, and one, Robert Chambers, even proved it was more probable than the traditional view that each species was created separate and apart from the others. Darwin merely continued a well-established idea.

In the year that Darwin was born (1809). French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined how human beings may have evolved from apes. Fifty years later, in On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin still could not bring himself to say anything about this. So much for how daring he was. It was only twelve years after that, in The Descent of Man (1871), that he finally approached this theory of human origins, and he did not have much more to say about it than Lamarck did 62 years earlier.

Even the expression “origin of species” was well in use before Darwin. Robert Chambers used it twice in the second edition of Explanations (1846). In the first edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), he used “origination of new species.” Comparing the birth of new species to the birth of individual organisms was common to all the early evolutionists, including Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who was making this point in his work in the 1790s. Their main point was that creation was not over, it was still going on. That scared a lot of people, but it exhilarated many more.

The reason this is important is because we have lost something valuable by suppressing this history. The first evolutionists were more holistic than Charles Darwin. They looked at the evolution of the whole of nature and they did not elevate the strong or dominant species over the weak and small, as Charles Darwin did. They emphasized the oneness of life on this planet and believed nature made room for all. They had a humanitarian vision that we have forgotten. We have prodded ourselves into forgetting the origins of evolutionary thinking and how it entered the world in a humane way. We need their vision now more than ever.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer