How the orchid held the key to our origins

ANOTHER LIFE: ‘MY THEOLOGY IS a simple muddle,” Charles Darwin wrote to a close friend towards the end of his life. And the man who so nearly became just another Victorian parson-naturalist provides the modern atheist with the rationale of being – evolution by natural selection. It seems possible, on the witness of a good many scientists, personally to hold Darwinian science and religious belief in separate mental pockets – Darwin certainly tried it. But as a fairly typical non-believer, I thank Darwin for making sense of my existence, along with all the other species on the planet.

Next month’s big anniversary of his birth (February 17th, 1809) has been given special import by the extraordinary new war on evolutionary biology led by US evangelical creationists and proponents of “intelligent design”. This has met with an appalled and militant response from mainstream western science, and a one-man counter-attack on all religion led by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

There was a lot of Dawkins’ pugnacity, if not the same rejection of faith, in one of the most significant defences of Darwin presented in the 19th century – this in Belfast in 1874 by the leading Anglo-Irish scientist of the time, John Tyndall.

Born in Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow in 1820, the gifted son of a local constable, Tyndall’s career in atmospheric physics has its own topical legacy in the UK-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a global leader in its field. But it was as president of the august British Association for the Advancement of Science that Tyndall addressed a packed audience in the Ulster Hall, rich in Presbyterian and other clergy.

Satisfying the religious sentiment inherent in man’s nature was, he said, “the problem of problems at the present hour. And grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of the religions of the world have been and are . . . it will be wise to recognise them as the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it has no command, but capable of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper and elevated sphere.

“All religious theories, schemes and systems which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.”

His long address, tracing the advance of rational science from the atomic theories of ancient Greek philosophy to Darwin’s Origin of Species, can be read in full at www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html.

Its deliberate confrontation, in such a stronghold of religion, duly prompted outrage in sermons, pamphlets and pastorals across Ireland and Britain. It does need a bit of context.

Tyndall, with TH Huxley, had led a young guard of poorly rewarded science lecturers and researchers in a field dominated by conservative clergymen-naturalists paid £1,000 a year at Cambridge University. Darwin and his evolutionary theory were weapons in a bitterly fought reform, both of biological science and its professional standards. Huxley coined “agnostic” for his own position on religion, and most scientists today ask nothing more than that science and religion are kept to their separate ways – above all, in education of the young.

What has the lovely orchid to do with all this? Darwin was fascinated by the co-evolution of flowers and insects – in particular, the development in orchid blossom of extraordinary “contrivances” to attract and manipulate pollinating insects. This exemplified, for him, the slow progress of evolution, “for natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations: she can never take a great and sudden leap . . .”

The ingenious, intricate ways of orchids are still a matter of botanical fascination, to say nothing of their beauty, and Irish fans have now been provided with the ultimate in field-guides to the island’s wild species. Four years ago, the National Botanic Gardens’ orchid expert, Brendan Sayers, and the brilliant artist Susan Sex produced what I described as one of the most beautiful books in the history of Irish botany.

Part of its beauty, certainly, lay in its munificent format and production: a leather-bound collectors’ volume in a limited edition that rapidly sold out at €245 a copy. At some later stage, I hoped, Sayers and Sex would provide something more affordable. This has now arrived, in two forms: an anorak-pocket-sized field guide at €35 and a collectors’ “library” edition, signed and numbered, at €170. They can both be bought on the web at www.orchidireland.ie.

As a field-guide, Ireland’s Wild Orchids is graced with a whole new range of paintings, to go with photographs and distribution maps, all on rainproof pages that lie flat on the grass as you’re kneeling, with a little ruler tucked into the back cover to check important measurements. No aid to the amateur orchid-seeker has more exquisitely evolved.

• Ireland's Ocean: A Natural History by Michael and Ethna Viney is published by the Collins Press, Cork