"A Selection Sublimely Natural"

“A Selection Sublimely Natural”
Evolution Sunday
on the occasion of the 150th anniversary on November 24
of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species

Reflections by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 22, 2009

An Amazing Story – I

Just months ago we observed in Sunday morning worship the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809. As a congregation, we participated in Evolution Sunday; and no, it’s not just Unitarian Universalist congregations that celebrate the ties that bind religion and science. We joined with over a thousand congregations of all sorts from every state and 15 countries. Today we’re an early bird congregation in celebrating these ties. Most participants are waiting until February to do so, with Darwin’s birthday as the benchmark. So far, 550 congregations from 49 states and nine countries will participate in “Evolution Weekend 2010.” New congregations are still signing on for this next observance. But there’s an interim anniversary that I believe is cause for celebration now—that is, the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. November 24, 1859 marked a life changing event about life changing.

I knew as I sorted my thoughts for our earlier celebration that I must read it, so I made a foolish promise. I vowed that with summer’s arrival, I would take The Origin to the beach with me and complete it there—silly me! If Darwin had his reasons for delaying publication of his seminal theory of natural selection, I suppose I’m permitted to follow in the same spirit—that is, putting off the actual packing the book into my beach bag, hoping it wouldn’t drown in sunscreen or saltwater, and settling in for a good long and not easy read.

July passed. August passed. In the early days of September, Darwin accompanied me to the beach, and I dived in—to the waves, yes, but also into the pages of this remarkable work that is aptly read in a setting that breathes eternal change, a setting where land and ocean and the creatures of both are in the constant throes of what we might call a selection sublimely natural.

Let’s work backward from the publication of Darwin’s epiphany. Epiphany…a term commonly used to convey a religious revelation, yet so adaptable to an event that conveyed a revelation of nature. Epiphanies often hold hard truths to which we often respond with doubt, denial, even hostility and rage. So it was when The Origin of Species moved from Darwin’s desk to the shelves of British booksellers.

In Darwin’s diary, he posts in the autumn of 1859:

“Finished proofs (thirteen months and ten days) of Abstract on Origin of Species; 1250 copies printed. The first edition was published on November 24th, and all copies sold first day.”

A second edition, of 3,000 copies, was issued on January 7, 1860, less than two months after the first. Four editions would follow.

Why did it take Charles Darwin so long—20 years to be exact—to formulate his findings in a volume that he could share with the larger public? The short and sermon-friendly answer is that he was concerned about the response of religious leaders, and he was concerned about the response of his dear wife. The prevailing theory of Creation was—and still is in many quarters—that species were created distinctly and separately by God and that humankind is one of these species. The term Creationism applies in current rhetoric. Darwin wrote in The Origin:

“On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character…” (113)

It was his practice throughout the manuscript of The Origin of Species to explain himself, to give all possible evidence for the theory of natural selection over distinct acts of creation, and to serve up the harvest of observation that he had gleaned on his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, that extended from late December 1831 to early October, 1836.

“The voyage of the Beagle,” wrote Darwin decades later, “has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career…” (Autobiography, 31)

Just a few short years after returning to Britain, he began to distill his theory of natural selection. Yet eight of his published works would precede publication of The Origin. If one can procrastinate productively, Darwin did it, aided and abetted by a strong dose of anxiety. In the reflections that he wrote in his final years, he explained how in the common struggle for existence that he observed in the habits of animals and plants, it struck him that

“…under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formations of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.” (Autobiography, 48)

All the while he was writing about other, related matters of science. His published works totaled 19, again, eight of them issued before The Origin.

The concerns of his wife, Emma, also figured in Darwin’s reticence to publish his theory early on. I trust that the recent PBS film, “Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” cites a historic conversation between Charles Darwin and his physician father, Dr. Robert Waring Darwin. The two are astride a coach bumping across the English countryside, and young Charles confides to his father his hope to marry Emma Wedgewood, who happened also to be his cousin. (Surely not enough was known, even by Charles Darwin, about the possible consequences of marrying one’s cousin.)

“Well,” remarks the elder Darwin, “there’s only one drawback I can see—religion! …she’s pious, like all the other Wedgewood women.”

To which Charles responded,

“Emma’s Unitarian, Father. You know how grandfather described Unitarianism.”

With a burst of laughter, his father spoke:

“A featherbed for falling Christians! Unitarianism,” he explained, “may be a wishy-washy sort of Christianity compared with the fire-branding Evangelicals, but make no mistake, Emma believes in things—in the after-life and hellfire and soul, but I assume you don’t.”

“Well,” answered Charles, “I’m less certain than I used to be.”

“Well, I don’t believe in them,” retorted his father, “and your grandfather didn’t, but to women of Emma’s [mind], they are matters of vital importance. ….the way around it is to pay lip service, go to church and that sort of thing, if possible avoid discussions, and above all, never, under any circumstances, reveal your true opinions.”

This conversation aside, Charles and Emma married in 1839 and remained happily married. Through the birthing of ten children, the grievous deaths of two of them in infancy, and Charles’ increasing ill health, they were devoted to each other and to their children. Nonetheless, Charles’ love of Emma and his respect for her beliefs was a factor in his reticence to publish a theory that flew in the face of established religion—alas, even Unitarianism!

The deciding event that propelled Darwin into distilling his theory for publication was a letter received from the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin had already set to work on an extensive narrative of his views, when the letter from Wallace arrived in the summer of 1858. It bore an essay that contained, in Darwin’s words, “exactly the same theory as mine.” And it came with a request that if Darwin found favor with this essay, he might send it off to his close friend and advocate Charles Lyell, the eminent British geologist. What followed was an interim publication that included a segment of Darwin’s manuscript and Wallace’s full essay. Neither aroused much public attention. As Darwin reflected in his later autobiographical sketch:

“This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention.” (Autobiography, 49)

Urged on by his close friends Charles Lyell and J.D. Hooker, the esteemed British botanist, Darwin set to work in September of 1858.

“I abstracted the MS. begun on a much larger scale in 1856,”

he wrote years later,

“…and [I] completed the volume on the same reduced scale. It cost me thirteen months and ten days’ hard labour. It was published under the title of the Origin of Species, in November 1859. Though considerably added to and corrected in the later editions, it has remained substantially the same book.”

Had Charles Darwin given full vent to his inclination to write his theory comprehensively—that is, with what for him would have been a far more satisfying host of observations and explanations, we might wonder if it would have been accessible to the larger public. I find it remarkable that the not quite 400-page edition that I’m still reading is the “short story” of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t find it remarkable at all that the larger work of Charles Darwin’s lifetime held a level of detail fitting the complexity of its subject—the very origin of species. It’s a story of which you and I are a part, as the myriad forces of nature continue to sort and select over time measured in eras that encompass life’s beginning into this very morning. Thank you, dear Charles Darwin, for paying such close attention, for recording what you found, and for at long last publishing this amazing story in which we each and all partake.



An Amazing Story – II

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

he wrote in The Origin. Darwin was not simply informed by what he observed; he was moved, he was inspired.

While Charles Darwin was not what we call a Creationist, while he didn’t believe in a micro-managing God, while he didn’t understand we who are human kind to be the final act of life on this planet, he held what I recognize as three core stances of a deeply religious person—that is, humility, awe, and gratitude. And by religious, I mean tending to what matters most and asking the big questions, such as how life came to be as it is on this planet on which we find ourselves. The question rises from the life work of Darwin and grounds the observations and conclusions that led to his publication of The Origin of Species.

Many times he was asked about his views on religion, and he thought often on the matters linked with religion, most especially aboard the HMS Beagle as he circled the world and noticed and noticed and noticed. In the autobiographical sketch penned for his children at the age of 67, just six years before he died, he again broached the question about the source of belief in the existence of God. He cited the common difficulty “of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.” It’s a stance that suggests theism and a stance that he held as he wrote The Origin. It’s a stance that with the passing years grew weaker, as Darwin’s acknowledgement of non-knowing grew stronger.

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic,” he wrote. (Autobiography, 75)

Interesting, I suppose, that the term agnostic was presumably coined in 1860 by Darwin’s close friend and advocate, the British naturalist Thomas Huxley.

Charles Darwin readily acknowledged the friendship and scholarship and thoughtfulness of others. Without calling himself humble, which would have rendered him otherwise, he simply was. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his acknowledgement that natural selection does not assume any “advancement of life.” In the first edition of The Origin, he wrote:

“Although extremely few of the most ancient species may now have living and modified descendants, yet at the most remote geological period, the earth may have been as well peopled with many species of many genera, families, orders, and classes, as at the present day.” (The Origin, 111)

In the third edition, he appended a section in which he stated:

“…natural selection includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life.”

We as humankind do not necessarily advance as time does. Such a view of what we loosely refer to as homo sapiens is humble to the core.

As for awe, how could one with a lifetime of observing and theorizing natural phenomena and posing the image of “the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications,” harbor anything other than awe? Wonder and awe are hand in hand religious stances, though by no means stances of religiosity, which tends so quickly to ascribe a cause.

As for gratitude, it was manifest in caring for the well-being of others and considering the very real discernment of a peer who had arrived at the exact same theory as his and whom Darwin affirmed and acknowledged, even as he moved quickly into a 15-month marathon of distilling his own. It was manifest in his love of his wife, Emma, his children, and his understanding that the world was far larger than he and his family and friends and associates, far larger. Gratitude is a giving of thanks through day to day behavior, a not taking for granted the givens of life, and a deep commitment to sharing what one witnesses in a precious and fleeting lifetime.

Darwin’s faith may have faded in conventional terms, but his humility and awe and gratitude only increased. It is telling that when Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, surrounded by his dear family, neighbors and notables from religion and science gathered a week later in Westminster Abbey to pay final tribute. It is even more telling that one of the pall-bearers was a Mr. A. R. Wallace, that is Alfred Russel Wallace.

May Charles Robert Darwin rest not in peace, but with sufficient restlessness to counter all possible boredom that might accompany eternal tranquility. Amen.


Sources:

“Agnosticism,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism.

“The Clergy Letter Project,” Michael Zimmerman, http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Backgd_info.htm.

“The Clergy Letter – from Unitarian Universalist Clergy – An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science,” http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Unitarian_Universalists/UnivUnitarianClergyLtr.htm.

“Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” a PBS Production, Directed by John Bradshaw, Teleplay by John Goldsmith, Produced by Michael Mahoney, http://video.pbs.org/video/1286437550/.

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Introduction by Brian Regal, originally published in 1887, The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, New York, 2005.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, with an Introduction and Notes by George Levine, originally published in 1859, Barnes & Noble, Inc., New York, 2004.

Richard Milner, “Darwin’s Universe: Home of Darwinian Scholarship, Music, Art, and Entertainment,” http://www.darwinlive.com/