Charles Robert Darwin

From Philosopedia

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 - 1882)

Charles Darwin

A bas-relief representing Charles Darwin in Moscow's V. I. Lenin State

Library of the USSR but re-named in 1992 as the Russian State Library,

the second largest library in the world.

One of the greatest rationalists of all time, Darwin established the theory of organic evolution known as Darwinism. He also is one of the most misunderstood authors. His father, a 350-pound jolly gentleman, once said of his son that he “cared for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,” and his school records show that as a child Darwin was lazy and a poor student.

While studying theology at Cambridge University, he changed his field of interest to something more interesting: beetles. Later, and not divulging his heart palpitations, Darwin was accepted as an unpaid naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle, which was bound for South America and from which he recorded data over a five-year period (1831—1836) that resulted in the formulating of his concept of evolution.

His views were defended by Huxley in England, Haeckel in Germany, Vladimir Kovalevski in Russia, and Asa Gray in America. Although accused of believing that man descended from apes, Darwin held, as defined by Webster,

• that natural selection favors the survival of some variations over others, that new species have arisen and may continue to arise by these processes, and that widely divergent groups of plants and animals have arisen from the same ancestors.

The Descent of Man (1871) supplemented and elaborated upon the structure of his theory of what he termed The Origin of Species. (For an earlier theorist about evolution, see entry for Anaximandros.)

Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who was descended as he was from the pottery patriarch Josiah Wedgwood. After his five years exploring South America and being seasick during many of his travels, Darwin lived sixteen miles from London at Down House in Kent, where in a wheeled armchair in his study there he wrote Origin of Species. The place also was something of a refuge from London’s dirt and violence, an ideal place for the semi-invalid he became. As to what his physical problem was, physicians even today are unsure. He may have suffered from a blood parasite, or maybe some strong psychosomatic component was his problem.

Concerning religion, Darwin wrote,

• The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

• I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

• The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.

Unitarians have claimed him as one of their group, but upon his death it was Francis Galton, his cousin, who helped arrange Darwin’s burial in Westminster Abbey. The Canon of St. Paul’s, with some “discomfort and misgiving,” allowed the burial, mainly because of pressure from Huxley, the Canon of Westminster, the Dean of Westminster, the president of the Royal Society, journalists, scientists, and any number of preachers who at this point, according to Adrian Desmond and James Moore in Darwin, vied with each other for the honor of praising the “agnostic in the abbey.” They also state that it was Lyell’s newly published Principles of Geology that convinced Darwin of evolutionary naturalism and led him slowly but inexorably away from Christianity.

Darwin, according to a Herman Hausheer, a theologian of the 1940s, “proposed to reconcile evolution with traditional ethics through the concept of adaptation. He never could bring himself to regard natural selection as a means in the hands of Providence. First a theist and later an agnostic, Darwin rejected religion when he assumed that religion depended upon a definite scientific view. Those who see in Darwinism the final destruction of religion fail to realize that religion does not rest upon a hypothesis concerning the origin of living beings any more than that it rests upon an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. Organized religion undermines its own existence by affiliating itself with and demanding of its members a blind subscription to any scientific system. Living religion has no biology and cosmology. It does not rest upon unexplainable natural events, but upon the experience of the heart.”

Numerous other apologists continue to try to explain the profound challenge Darwin’s concepts brought to theism. Darwin’s Autobiography (published 1887) describes his change from having a naive acceptance of Christianity to becoming a reluctant agnostic to the point in which he “gradually came to disbelieve Christianity” and wondered why everyone else had not, also. He adds, “I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

To a German student in 1879, Darwin wrote, “Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation.” In his Life and Letters, he relates that between 1836 and 1842 he had come to see “that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos.” He rejected design and said, “I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

The essence of Darwin’s philosophy was that organized complexity has arisen from primeval simplicity, entirely without the help of any designer or pre-existing cause. Others can deny this, and do, but the theory of natural selection remains the major theory for explaining fully the wonders of nature. We humans are a bundle of design compromises, The Economist (29 July 1995) wrote in appreciation of Darwin’s views, “engaged in an endless arms race between parasites and their host. Our bodies - evolved in the African savannah - are poorly adapted to the modern world. We are tyrannised by the side-effects of genes selected for benefits we have yet to discover.”

The continued evolution of his theories, as evidenced by numbers of current books on the subject, show Darwinism is a unifying theory that is being used to look at old problems in new ways. Physicians, for example, should be cautious about routinely treating symptoms; they should know that using aspirin will bring down the fever in chickenpox and comfort the sufferer, but that will seriously prolong the infection. Looking at human beings and their illnesses as the products of a long evolutionary history is in itself a salutary exercise. Darwin, the failed doctor, is wisely being consulted by contemporary doctors, among others, who understand the significance of his ideas.

Chided by individuals who misunderstood his theory, Darwin fought back: “For my part, I would as soon be descended from a baboon as from a savage who mistreats his enemies, treats his wives like slaves, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.” “For myself,” he wrote, “I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” He professed himself an agnostic, regarding the problem of the universe as beyond our solution. Robert Lewins, M.D., knew Darwin personally, and had discussed this question with him. Darwin was much less reticent to Lewins than he had shown himself in a letter to Haeckel. In answer to a direct question “as to the bearing of his researches on the existence of an anima, or soul in man, he distinctly stated that, in his opinion, a vital or spiritual principle, apart from inherent somatic (bodily) energy, had no more locus standing in the human than in the other races of the animal kingdom.”

In reviewing Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (1998), Frank J. Sulloway in The New York Review of Books, 9 April 1998) commented about ongoing controversies over the Darwinian perspectives which Ridley’s work brings up:

• In this often heated debate, it does not really help for adversaries to argue about whether human behavior is genetically or culturally determined (it is both); about whether human consciousness invalidates the effects of natural selection (consciousness is natural selection’s most remarkable product, not its antithesis); about whether Darwinian theory robs us of our free will (it clearly does not); or about whether Darwinians can be usefully divided into narrow-minded “ultras,” who attribute everything to natural selection, and open-minded “pluralists” (they cannot be so divided). Critical empiricism, not debating skills on either side, will ultimately resolve these controversies. As Charles Darwin taught us more than a century ago, openness to diverse lines of evidence and a dogged dedication to hypothesis testing are the enduring Darwinian virtues.

In The Darwin Legend (1995), James Moore wrote that the reports of Darwin’s deathbed conversion, although often repeated, are without substance. Francis Darwin told T. H. Huxley in 1887 that any such allegations were “false and without any kind of foundation,” calling such stories “a work of imagination.” He affirmed that his father died an agnostic. Of his sons, Sir Francis became a leading botanist, Sir George Howard a distinguished astronomer at Cambridge, and two others became successful engineers. All, stated Joseph McCabe, were agnostics.

His eldest son, Francis, wrote the following concerning his father’s death:

• No special change occurred during the beginning of April, but on Saturday 15th he was seized with giddiness while sitting at dinner in the evening, and fainted in an attempt to reach his sofa. On the 17th he was again better, and in my temporary absence recorded for me the progress of an experiment in which I was engaged. During the night of April 18th, about a quarter to twelve, he had a severe attack and passed into a faint, from which he was brought back to consciousness with great difficulty. He seemed to recognize the approach of death, and said, ‘I am not the least afraid to die.’ All the next morning he suffered from terrible nausea and faintness, and hardly rallied before the end came.”

Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, London. The gravestone is a floor slab with name and vital dates. As recently as 1916, Sir Francis had to refute a lying story about his father’s agonizing deathbed, and the story cropped up again, with embellishments, in The Churchman’s Magazine (1925).

(See entry for Erasmus Darwin, above. A recent work on Darwinism is Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (1995), in which Darwinism is favorably seen as a corrosive acid that is capable of dissolving many of our earlier beliefs in sociology and philosophy. A major biography, reviewed in The New York Review of Books (4 April 1996) by Stephen Jay Gould, is Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging [1996]).

In 2009, Adrian Desmond and James Moore's published Darwin's Sacred Cause, How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Hudson Evolution. Their thesis is that Darwin, yes, was a tough-minded scientist whose empirical research led to the theory of evolution. But they claim, "Darwin's starting point was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a 'common' " descent of human beings. His celebrated voyage on the Beagle gave him an eyewitness view of the horrors of slavery

(Wesley Hromatko, a Unitarian scholar, wrote to fellow Unitarians in 2007, the following:

Darwin's mother was a Unitarian Wedgewood. He attended a Shrewsbury academy that had a Unitarian master and attended chapel.

His grandfather Darwin who had his own sort of evolutionary theory was a Deist. Darwins had Anglican rather than dissenting connections as did the Wedgewoods. His Wedgewood grandfather took him to the Unitarian congregation as a child.

Charles had to subscribe to the 39 articles to be able to attend college. He was uncomfortable with them but finally signed. When medicine didn't work out, the path to science lead through Anglican orders. Most scientists were Anglicans with light duties in the countryside.

Darwin's wife was also a Unitarian Wedgewood. His children were reared under her influence with Unitarian lessons.

Darwin had contact with the F.R.A. paper The Index, to which I think he subscribed. While Darwin's wife was a more traditional Unitarian, after the death of one child that he adored, he was unhappy with religion. He ended as agnostic although he wavered back and forth on the question of God and design.)

{BDF; CE; Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages; FFRF; HNS2; JM; JMRH; PUT; RAT; TRI; TYD}