TIMELINE
Biologist T.H. Huxley immediately became an ardent acolyte of the new theory and, foreseeing that Darwin would face ‘considerable abuse & misrepresentation’, wrote to offer his services: ‘as to the curs which will bark and yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead ... I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.’
OPENING PANDORA’S BOX: THE REACTION TO DARWIN
Darwin had been incubating his theory of evolution through natural selection for decades before he was finally pushed into publication by Alfred Russel Wallace’s (see pages 186–191) independent arrival at a similar theory. One reason he had held off for so long was because he knew it would open a Pandora’s box of reaction. In the event, the best he could do was marshal his arguments and evidence with minute care, and admit that there were a few gaps where he must trust to the future emergence of more evidence.
Wilberforce was one of the first to attack Darwin. His critique was powerful, pointing out flaws in Darwin’s science – the lack of fossil evidence of transitional forms, for instance – and highlighting the disturbing social and moral implications of the theory. This line of attack is still pursued by religious critics of Darwinism today. In 2009, for instance, Christoph Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, argued: ‘The question of evolutionism and the economic crisis are very closely linked. What we can call the ideological Darwinist concept that the stronger survives has led to the economic situation we’re in today.’
The religious response to Darwin’s theory has been diverse and complex since it first emerged. The Catholic Church made little fuss about accepting the theory, partly because in Catholicism religious authority does not stem solely from scriptural sources. Many stripes of Protestant religion have also sought to accommodate Darwinism and there are many who argue that there is no contradiction between being a religious believer and a scientist, for instance. But there are also many at the extremes of religion, particularly in fundamentalist Christianity but increasingly in the Islamic world too, who loudly protest that any conception of evolution is at odds with religious belief, and it is these strident voices who have dragged Darwin into what is often referred to as the ‘culture wars’.
‘That man wants to claim my pedigree,’ complains the Defrauded Gorilla to animal rights campaigner Henry Bergh in a satirical cartoon of 1871. ‘He says he is one of my descendants.’ ‘Now, Mr Darwin,’ replies Mr Bergh, ‘How could you insult him so?’
The barking and yelping soon began. Among Darwin’s many detractors was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Son of the famous anti-slavery campaigner, Wilberforce was a high-profile public figure, a clergyman not afraid to weigh in to scientific debates. He published a dismissive review of Origin in June 1860, arguing that ‘man’s power of articulate speech; man’s gift of reason; man’s free will and responsibility ... all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin [of humankind].’ ‘The principle of natural selection,’ he concluded, was ‘a dishonouring view of nature ... absolutely incompatible with the word of God.’
‘A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.’
ONE VERSION OF T.H. HUXLEY’S LEGENDARY REJOINDER TO BISHOP WILBERFORCE, 30 JUNE 1860.
Monkey business
Just two weeks later, on Saturday, 30 June, Wilberforce was scheduled to give a paper at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Oxford. Here was a chance for Darwinists to challenge him in public. Darwin, stricken with the chronic illness that plagued him for life and reticent of public battles, declined to attend. Huxley was urged to go in his place, and so he took up the gauntlet. Hundreds flocked to witness the showdown, with many more turned away at the door.
Wilberforce, coached by the anti-Darwinian biologist Richard Owen (coiner of the term ‘dinosaur’), delivered a fluent paper outlining many stinging criticisms of Darwin’s theory. It was at the end of this speech, according to accounts, that he upped the stakes with a thinly veiled insult to Huxley. No precise transcript of the meeting exists, but one particularly popular account was that of Isabel Sidgwick, presented in MacMillan’s Magazine nearly 40 years later: ‘turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?’ This was rough stuff for a Victorian audience, but the crowd was reportedly already raucous, with undergraduates chanting ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ provocatively.
HOPEFUL MONSTERS: THE PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM DEBATE
There have been – and are – ongoing significant debates within the science of evolutionary biology. One of the most high profile has been the clash between the traditional view that evolution is a gradual, constant phenomenon, with species engaged in a slow but continuous process of evolution, and alternative models, of which ‘punctuated equilibrium’ is the best known. Briefly stated, this model suggests that speciation (the evolution of new species) occurs in rapid bursts lasting just a few millennia, making them almost invisible in geological terms, punctuating long periods when species are well adapted to their environments and change little if at all (i.e. in a state of ‘equilibrium’).
Huxley was among the first to propose a form of this theory, writing to Darwin just before the publication of Origin to warn: ‘You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum [Nature does not make leaps] so unreservedly.’ In 1940, émigré biologist Richard Goldschmidt proposed in his book The Material Basis of Evolution that most mutants thrown up by evolution would not survive, but that once in a while an extreme mutation would occur that would cause a ‘leap’ in adaptive fitness. Perhaps unwisely he labelled these leaps ‘hopeful monsters’.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described how Goldschmidt’s theory was regarded as ‘anathema’, while Goldschmidt himself ‘became the whipping boy of [modern Darwinism]’. Together with the American palaeontologist Niles Eldredge, Gould revived the ideas of both Huxley and Goldschmidt in modified form, proposing the punctuated equilibrium model, partly in response to the troubling absence in the fossil record of the ‘transitional forms’ that had worried Darwin. Instead Gould had discovered fossil evidence of very rapid ‘explosions’ of speciation.
The debate between Gould and some of his opponents, most notably evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has been portrayed as a latter-day continuation of the 19th-century geological debate between catastrophists and uniformitarians, but Dawkins himself argues that this is simply a crude misrepresentation of the arguments. He has dismissed Gould’s theory as ‘a minor gloss on Darwinism’, which ‘does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity ... the theory has been ... oversold by some journalists.’ Dawkins claims that in fact there is no opposition between punctuated equilibrium and Darwin’s gradualism, and that ‘The theory of punctuated equilibrium will come to be seen in proportion, as an interesting but minor wrinkle on the surface of neo-Darwinian theory.’