- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
Lamarck was not the first to suggest it, and Darwin wrote about sim-
ilar processes). Lamarck believed that if an animal used a particular
faculty to change itself, the effect would be passed on to its offspring.
So a giraffe that spent its life stretching to the highest branches would
have calves with slightly longer necks; a blacksmith who worked hard
and developed huge muscles would pass on the effects to his children.
These two theories provide very different visions of evolution and its
future. On Lamarck’s scheme, evolution is directional and progressive,
with species inevitably improving over time. On Darwin’s scheme
there is no guarantee of progress and no inbuilt direction. The process
produces a vast tree or straggly bush of species and subspecies, with
branches appearing all over the place, change always starting from
whatever is available, and species going extinct when conditions dic-
tate. Darwin’s scheme has no special place for humans, who are just
one chance product of a long and complex process, rather than its
inevitable outcome or highest creation.
Not surprisingly, Lamarck’s vision proved more acceptable than Dar-
win’s and is still popular today. Darwin’s faced massive resistance from
religion, and was met with ridicule and contempt. At a famous debate
in Oxford in 1860, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, asked
Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s main protagonist, whether he was
descended from the apes on his grandmother’s side or his grandfa-
ther’s side, to great popular amusement. Even today there is religious
opposition to Darwinism in some countries, including the United
States of America, where the idea of directed evolution underlies
both creationism and its successor ‘intelligent design’, with God as the
supreme director who creates human beings ‘in His image’.
The ‘Great Chain of Being’ is another alluring idea, with simple organisms
at one end and conscious, intelligent human beings at the other. So is
the image of an evolutionary ladder with humans striving to climb from
lowly creatures at the bottom to angels at the top. Such schemes seem
to justify our struggles and imply that progress is directed by our efforts. Lamarck’s
views have often been interpreted as meaning that those efforts involve consciously
willed striving. This is not what Lamarck said, even though he gave much thought to
how physiological processing gives rise to ‘inner feeling’, or conscious experience. But
since then, many theories have given a more explicitly central role to consciousness.
For example, the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959) proposed that all life is
striving towards higher consciousness, or the ‘Omega Point’. For the Indian visionary
Sri Aurobindo, life is evolving into the ‘life divine’, and biologist Julian Huxley believed
that evolution has become truly purposeful and ‘is pulled on consciously from in front
as well as being impelled blindly from behind’ (in Pickering and Skinner, 1990, p. 83).
Some modern ‘spiritual’ theories also invoke conscious direction, such as Ken Wil-
ber’s ‘integral theory of consciousness’. This theory is explicitly based on the great
chain of being, and on the idea of inevitable progress from insentient matter to
superconsciousness or transcendence (Wilber, 1997).
Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind
to soul to spirit, each [. . .] with a greater depth and greater consciousnessFIGURE 10.3 • Victorians were scandalised by
Darwin’s suggestion that civilised
human beings might be related
to the apes. He was mocked and
lampooned, as in this cartoon
from the London Sketch Book
of 1874.