Evolution of a Scientist

Darwin's greater, and more radical, achievement was to suggest a plausible mechanism for evolution. To a world taught to see the hand of God in every part of Nature, he suggested a different creative force altogether, an undirected, morally neutral process he called natural selection. Others characterized it as "survival of the fittest," although the phrase has taken on connotations of social and economic competition that Darwin never intended. But he was very much influenced by Thomas Malthus, and his idea that predators, disease and a finite food supply place a limit on populations that would otherwise multiply indefinitely. Animals are in a continuous struggle to survive and reproduce, and it was Darwin's insight that the winners, on average, must have some small advantage over those who fall behind. His crucial insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapt-ed to their environment--a faster wolf, or deer--have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation. (In modern terms, we would say pass on their genes, but Darwin wrote long before the mechanisms of heredity were understood.) Of course, it's not as simple as a one-dimensional contest to outrun the competition. If the climate changes, a heavier coat might represent the winning edge. For a certain species, intelligence has been a useful trait. Evolution is driven by the accumulation of many such small changes, culminating in the emergence of an entirely new species. "[F]rom the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows," Darwin wrote.

And there was an even more troubling implication to his theory. To a species that believed it was made in the image of God, Darwin's great book addressed only this one cryptic sentence: "Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That would come 12 years later, in "The De-scent of Man," which explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom by way of the apes. "Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale," Darwin wrote, offering a small sop to human vanity before his devastating conclusion: "that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

So it was apparent to many even in 1860--when the Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce debated Darwin's defender Thomas Huxley at Oxford--that Darwin wasn't merely contradicting the literal Biblical account of a six-day creation, which many educated Englishmen of his time were willing to treat as allegory. His ideas, carried to their logical conclusion, appeared to undercut the very basis of Christianity, if not indeed all theistic religion. Was the entire panoply of life stretching back millions of years to its single-celled origins, with its innumerable extinctions and branchings, really just a prelude and backdrop to the events of the Bible? When did Homo sapiens, descended by a series of tiny changes in an unbroken line from earlier species of apes, develop a soul? The British biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken defender of Darwin and a nonbeliever, famously wrote that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Although Darwin struggled with questions of faith his whole life, he ultimately described himself as an "Agnostic." But he reached that conclusion through a different, although well-traveled, route. William Howarth, an environmental historian who teaches a course at Princeton called "Darwin in Our Time," dates Darwin's doubts about Christianity to his encounters with slave-owning Christians--some of them no doubt citing Scripture as justification--which deeply offended Darwin, an ardent abolitionist. More generally, Darwin was troubled by theodicy, the problem of evil: how could a benevolent and omnipotent God permit so much suffering in the world he created? Believers argue that human suffering is ennobling, an agent of "moral improvement," Darwin acknowledged. But with his intimate knowledge of beetles, frogs, snakes and the rest of an omnivorous, amoral creation, Darwin wasn't buying it. Was God indifferent to "the suffering of mil-lions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time"? In any case, it all changed for him after 1851. In that year Darwin's beloved eldest daughter, Annie, died at the age of 10--probably from tuberculosis--an instance of suffering that only led him down darker paths of despair.

A legend has grown up that Darwin experienced a deathbed conversion and repentance for his life's work, but his family has always denied it. He did, how-ever, manage to pass through the needle's eye of Westminster Abbey, where he was entombed with honor in 1882.

So it's not surprising that, down to the present day, fundamentalist Christians have been suspicious of Darwin and his works--or that in the United States, where 80 percent of the population believe God created the universe, less than half believe in evolution. Some believers have managed to square the circle by mapping out separate realms for science and religion. "Science's proper role is to explore natural explanations for the material world," says the biologist Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian. "Science provides no answers to the question 'Why are we here, anyway?' That is the role of philosophy and theology." The late Stephen Jay Gould, a prolific writer on evolution and a religious agnostic, took the same approach. But, as Dawkins tirelessly observes, religion makes specific metaphysical claims that appear to conflict with those of evolution. Dealing with those requires some skill in Biblical interpretation. In mainstream Christian seminaries the dominant view, according to Holmes Rolston III, a philosopher at Colorado State University and author of "Genes, Genesis and God," is that the Biblical creation story is a poetic version of the scientific account, with vegetation and creatures of the sea and land emerging in the same basic order. In this interpretation, God gives his creation a degree of autonomy to develop on its own. Rolston points to Genesis 1:11, where God, after creating the heavens and the Earth, says, "Let the Earth put forth vegetation..." "You needed a good architect at the big bang to get the universe set up right," he says. "But the account describes a God who opens up possibilities in which creatures are generated in an Earth that has these rich capacities."

Collins identifies the soul with the moral law, the uniquely human sense of right and wrong. "The story of Adam and Eve can thus be interpreted as the description of the moment at which this moral law entered the human species," he says. "Perhaps a certain threshold of brain development had to be reached before this became possible--but in my view the moral law itself defies a purely biological explanation."