Charles Darwin 7(notably including Herbert Spencer) was to be converted to evolution by Lyell’s
exposition of Lamarck. They read the positive side and ignored the critique.
Darwin did not become an evolutionist on becoming a deist, but the deism
primed him. He was looking for laws and their consequences as evidence of God’s
power. In 1835, having finished in South America, theBeagleset out across the
Pacific, intending to return home by circling the globe. It put into the Galapagos
Archipelago, that group of volcanic islands on the equator (now belonging to
Ecuador). As always, Darwin was making collections, especially of the little birds
he found there — mockingbirds and finches, of different species and similar to
specimens he had found on the South American mainland. He did not realize that
the differences were significant until he dined with the governor of the islands.
Famously the Galapagos has giant tortoises and the governor told Darwin that
one can distinguish the specimens from one island to another. Darwin realized
that the same is true also of the birds he had been catching.
This discovery caused a massive problem in natural theology, if nothing else.
At Cambridge, Darwin had been much exposed to the argument from design – the
argument that God’s existence and nature can be inferred from the organization
of the world, especially the organic world. The move to deism changed his belief
in this not one wit. But think about the Galapagos animals, birds and tortoises.
The islands are only a few miles apart, and yet they carry different forms. Darwin
had seen cases in South America where the same species of birds might be found
in the jungles of Brazil and the snowy deserts of Patagonia. Did God so love the
Galapagos that he made different kinds for each island? And why did he make
the denizens like South America rather than like Africa, say?
Darwin held fire until he returned to England. Then he showed his bird spec-
imens to John Gould, England’s leading ornithologist. (This shows how fast and
how far Darwin, thanks to his Cambridge mentors, was rising up the scientific
scale.) Gould declared the birds unambiguously to be members of different species.
There was only one answer to a young man who saw unbroken law as the key to
science and theology: evolution. In the early spring of 1838, Darwin moved across
to the belief that species are formed by natural processes, by a long connected
chain of development.
Why was the human question never the barrier for Darwin that it was for Lyell?
The reason seems to lie in one of those accidents of history. On an earlier voyage,
theBeaglehad picked up three of the natives who live at the bottom of South
America, in Tierra del Fuego. The captain (Robert Fitzroy) had taken them back
to England, where they were an overnight sensation. Suitably civilized, they were
now being returned on Darwin’s trip, together with a missionary, to start a process
of civilizing their kinfolk and converting them to Christianity. The project was an
absolute disaster. The England-returning natives reverted almost overnight to the
most abject savage state, and the poor missionary had to be rescued. The ship’s
naturalist learnt a lesson he never forgot. We are just a fine suit of clothesaway
from gross animality. Never let us pretend that we are not part of the organic
world.