AS CHARLES Darwin completed work on his monumental On the Origin of Species 150 years ago he undersold it with endearing modesty. “Much light,” he wrote, “will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”, that “mystery of mysteries”. Yet, just as Galileo, Copernicus and Newton paved the way for the enlightenment in transforming understanding of the laws of physics, not least its Earth-centrism, so Darwin revolutionised biology, robbing man of his central uniqueness and apartness from the rest of life.
Darwin’s critical contribution was not just to suggest evolution from common ancestors, but, crucially, to explain the mechanism by which natural selection actually operates. He didn’t get it all right. He didn’t know about plate tectonics or DNA and so his perspectives on the distribution of species and inheritance are seriously deficient. But his central concepts of natural selection and sexual selection have stood the test of time and scientific advance.
As he transformed science Darwin also posed fundamental questions about the nature of God, although he himself largely avoided such soul-searching in his writings. But his work responds powerfully to one of the central arguments of theism – that the complexity, variety, and beauty of life is clear evidence of an omnipotent designer at work. Not only was such a designer logically unnecessary once Darwin had demonstrated how simple organic life evolved into the complex, but his explanation also answers the conundrum posed by the apparent cruelty of such a God or the pointlessness of much of his creation. “I cannot persuade myself,” he argued, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
For millions of people, of course, God survived Darwin – though in a form that required profound redefinition and a rereading of the Bible as metaphor. A British poll this month found that half those surveyed – and views here are unlikely to differ much – believe evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life, and that a “designer” must have lent a hand. Fossil evidence of life three billion years ago notwithstanding, one in three believes God created the world in the past 10,000 years.
On his 200th anniversary, that uphill struggle for survival of Darwin’s ideas might be seen as testimony to his idea of the survival of the fittest. “Ignorance,” Darwin argued wryly, “more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”.