Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Evolution in no way implies atheism, although it is consistent with atheism. But evolution is clearly inconsistent with the literal truth of certain revered books. If we believe the Bible was written by people, and not dictated word-for-word to a flawless stenographer by the Creator of the Universe, or if we believe God might on occasion resort to metaphor for clarity, then evolution should pose no theological problem. But whether it poses a problem or not, the evidence for evolution—that it has happened, apart from the debate on whether uniformitarian natural selection fully explains how it happened—is overwhelming.

The Darwinian perspective is central to all of modern biology, from investigations of the molecular structure of DNA to studies of the behavior of apes and men.²⁰ It connects us with our long-forgotten ancestors and our swarm of relatives, the millions of other species with whom we share the Earth. But the price exacted has been high, and there are still—especially in the United States—those who refuse to pay, and for very human and fathomable reasons. Evolution suggests that if God exists, God is fond of secondary causes and factotum processes: getting the Universe going, establishing the laws of Nature, and then retiring from the scene. A hands-on Executive seems to be absent; power has been delegated. Evolution suggests that God will not intervene, whether beseeched or not, to save us from ourselves. Evolution suggests we’re on our own—that if there is a God, that God must be very far away. This is enough to explain much of the emotional anguish and alienation that evolution has worked. We long to believe that there’s someone at the helm.

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Darwin’s transcendantly democratic insight that all humans are descended from the same non-human ancestors, that we are all members of one family, is inevitably distorted when viewed with the impaired vision of a civilization permeated by racism. White supremacists seized on the notion that people with high abundances of melanin in their skin must be closer to our primate relatives than bleached people. Opponents of bigotry, perhaps fearing that there might be a grain of truth in this nonsense, were just as happy not to dwell on our relatedness to the apes. But both points of view are located on the same continuum: the selective application of the primate connection to the veldt and the ghetto, but never, ever, perish the thought, to the boardroom or the military academy or, God forbid, to the Senate chamber or the House of Lords, to Buckingham Palace or Pennsylvania Avenue. This is where the racism comes in, not in the inescapable recognition that, for better or worse, we humans are just a small twig on the vast and many-branched tree of life.

Natural selection has been misused by capitalists and communists, whites and blacks, Nazis and many others to grind this or that self-serving ideological axe. It’s not surprising that feminists feared that a Darwinian perspective would provide yet another cudgel for male seientists to hit women over the head with—about alleged inferiorities in mathematics or statecraft. But for all we know, such a perspective might reveal, that the raging hormonal imbalances that propel men to violence make them less than optimal for leadership of a modern state. If we believe sexism to be a prejudicial error, that fact will emerge from scientific examination, and we should favor its rigorous scrutiny by the methods of science.

Much of the recent controversy over the application of Darwinian ideas to human behavior has been motivated by the fear of such misuse by racists, sexists, and other bigots—as indeed happened with ghoulish and tragic consequences in World War II. However, the cure for a misuse of science is not censorship, but clearer explanation, more vigorous debate, and making science accessible to everyone. If some of our proclivities are inborn, as surely must be the case, it hardly follows that we cannot learn to modify, mitigate, enhance, or redirect the resulting behavior.

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Vice-Admiral FitzRoy had been the British Board of Trade’s weatherman for more than a decade when his 1865 long-range forecast proved to be wildly, calamitously wrong. The proud, choleric FitzRoy took a terrible beating in the newspapers. When he could no longer bear the ridicule, he slit his throat, an early martyr to the predictive failures of meteorology. Although FitzRoy had spoken publicly against Darwin in the “creationism” controversy and despite the fact that the two men had not been face-to-face in eight years, Darwin took the news of FitzRoy’s suicide badly. What images from the youthful adventure they shared must have come to Darwin’s mind? “What a melancholy career he has run,” he observed to Hooker, “with all his splendid qualities.”²¹