Week Four
Charles Darwin
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1809. The decisive event of his life was a five-year circumnavigation of the world on H.M.S. Beagle (1831-1836). He was reading the work of geologist Charles Lyell, who opened up the vista of evolutionary geology, with its timescales far exceeding that provided by a literalist reading of the Bible. After the voyage, he began suffering from a chronic illness and moved to Down House in Kent, where he spent the rest of his life, dying in 1882.
“A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others.”
Darwin did not create the thought of evolution, that current species derive from predecessor species. His accomplishment was to propose an actual mechanism for evolutionary change, supported by empirical data. After his voyage, Darwin derived the idea for the evolutionary mechanism from Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that human reproduction proceeds geometrically, while food production proceeds only arithmetically. This constraint by the environment would operate to cull the species. So, the how, the evolutionary mechanism, proposed by Darwin was natural selection of adaptive, heritable, minor individual variations under the pressure of environmental constraint on reproduction—creating population-level shifts. The Origin of Species came out in 1859, one of the most significant books in history. His theory sets individuals, and groups of individuals, in an eco-systematic and diachronic context: over time, “life” is pressed into branching speciation, the luxury of variation and complexity we see around us. In Origin, he does not explicate what his theory entails for human origins, the most contentious aspect of evolution, reserving that for his 1871 The Descent of Man—a work much less empirically buttressed. In Descent, he also proposes sexual selection to account for non-survival adaptations.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
As a young man, Darwin had gone to Cambridge to study to be an Anglican clergyman, and believed then in the literal truth of the Bible. Moved by cruel spectacles in the natural world, his religion slipped. Christianity was slowly draining from the European soul in the nineteenth century, and Darwin demolished the rationalist theology of his time which pursued Christian apologetics in the Leibnizian mode of showing this to be the best of all possible worlds. Darwin presents a worldview in which “success” is what matters, as with Hegel—though now we have ends without intentionality, the spontaneous order of capitalism (generated by Machiavellian competition) returning with a vengeance, mechanism triumphing over humanism. Nature was transformed from bucolic to savage. Human animality and unconscious instincts became unavoidable. Not just Christianity but rationalist metaphysics too was falling to the rise of scientism—a kind of rationalism without philosophical orientation. How to live in a world with no fixed species, no solid truths, perhaps no divine providence?