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
