The Notorious Charles Darwin — Scenes from a Scientific Life
Presented by Roger Brewin, Minister, First Unitarian Church of Hobart Indiana
About the Speaker
Rev. Brewin is the editor of Religious Humanism — The Journal of HUUmanists, Minister of First Unitarian Church of Hobart, IN and Minister of Berrien UU Fellowship in Berrien, MI.
About the Event
Summary and Commentary for the 245th meeting since our inception originally as the Freethought Association; our 9th after becoming CFI- Michigan. This meeting was held on January 23, 2008 at the Women’s City Club; 254 E. Fulton Street in Grand Rapids, MI.
It was announced that the next 3 Beer Discussion will be held this Saturday, the 26th, at the Lockwood Street Freethought Commune. This particular gathering will serve as a going away party for actively- involved member, Rob St. Mary. We will deeply miss the director of the documentary film: Separation on State Street, but are happy for him as he moves onward and upward in his career. Come join us to wish Rob well while hoisting a brew in his honor.
One may pre- register for our 2nd annual 3- day Summer Retreat at the Long Lake campground to be held on the weekend of June 22-24. This is great time for the whole family with plenty of varied and fun activities as well as a chance to kick back and relax and talk with fellow freethinkers in a beautiful setting.
There was CFI merchandise on a table in the meeting room and an abundance of fascinating books and magazines on the literature table to purchase. Our three- year fund drive is moving along well but we can still use your help in that last lurch toward meeting our goal amount to fund the member- supported- only work that we do as a growing, dynamic and highly active branch of the international Center for Inquiry.
Our topic for this meeting was: The Notorious Charles Darwin: Scenes from a Scientific Life. It was presented by Roger Brewin, Editor of Religious Humanism Journal and Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Hobart, Indiana. Rev. Brewin has provided us with informative presentations in the past that were delivered in an entertaining manner, as he acted out characters from his repertoire of historical figures whose persona he assumes. Other figures with the initials C.D. that he gives presentations on, besides Charles Darwin, include Clarence Darrow and Charles Dickens. He also becomes the railroad engineer who, as he puts it, taught the Wright Brothers to fly; Octave Chanute.
Before beginning his actual presentation, Brewin spoke reflectively and with great affection about his beloved father, who died last year at Christmas time. His father was a great example of the well- rounded, thoughtful and good-hearted non-believing humanist and he brought Roger up in a completely non-superstitious household in England. His father encouraged him to think critically, doubt unfounded claims and never be shy about asking questions or seeking answers to those questions- wherever that journey might lead him. As the son went on to perform in plays (including Inherit the Wind), his father was a steady presence and he even attended Unitarian Universalist church services that the ordained minister, Roger Brewin, preached at; however, the father referred to this as speaking, rather than preaching. And he witnessed his son developing the characters that he would perform countless times, honing his skills with each performance. His father also went with him to Amherst, New York for the 25th anniversary of CFI. He died as he had lived, without heroics and without any notion of an afterlife, but with the knowledge of having had a life well- lived.
Brewin also spoke of the other characters he had played, giving insights into their lives and anecdotes about their personalities. He had an array of hats laid out on the stage and spoke at some length about them. Each represented a different character. Brewin employs no make-up in his performances but finds the hat to be an essential prop. Some characters, such as Darrow, used the hat with great effectiveness in the courtroom to display various emotions or to emphasize and dramatize a point being made. In the case of Clarence Darrow, the cigar was another useful device for the defense lawyer, since one was still allowed to smoke in a courtroom then. In addition to other comments made about the hat and cigar, Brewin dramatized (using an unlit cigar) one of Darrow’s tricks. He would insert a wire into the end of the cigar and as he smoked, the ash would cling to the wire armature while glowing in a menacing fashion. Darrow would lean over a witness he was cross examining, with the very elongated and precariously hanging fiery end of his cigar suspended directly over the nervous witness. He would ask if the person was really SURE about his statement, or would he, perhaps, like to reconsider?
Charles Darwin wore no hat, or only at the rarest of times upon the insistence of his wife, Emma, on a colder day when Darwin ventured outside, often to think and meditate on his Sand Walk next to Down House where they lived with their several children. He did not smoke and had no other characteristic or particularly distinguishing garb or props. Also, Darwin was not a dramatic figure. He was in fragile health much of his life and did not go out to visit people much. He preferred the comforts of home and family and would receive fellow scientists or other guests in his house. He was not given to oratory and did not like to be conspicuous and one does not think of his using his hands for dramatic flourishes or his voice for impact. He was not really a talker, anyway, but a quiet thinker who thought best in solitude with his specimens, books and papers, and other objects under his keen consideration. He was a copious writer but his journals were filled with little poetry or panache. He was not imbued with any striking sense of humor and not given to witty repartee. Even writing on the subject that would earn him his eternal fame- the mechanisms involved in evolutionary descent that would create a robust theory out of the various facts of nature that had been discovered- he composed in a somewhat dry manner, typically. Besides the larger than life persona of Darrow,and other historical figures in Brewin’s repertoire, even Octave Chanute, an engineer, could wax poetically and eloquently on matters pertaining to flight. While Darwin did receive other thinkers in his home, his preferred form of communication with them, as well as for informal contacts, was through written correspondence, which he maintained prodigiously. So Darwin becomes a tricky person to assume the identity of in an entertaining and dramatic fashion, Brewin explained. He referred to his performance as a reader’s play and said that it was still in its formative stages; a work in progress.
The mythology about Darwin tells of a sudden and dramatic shift in thought after visiting the Galapagos Islands; that this was his eureka moment. In fact, however, the young son of physician, Robert Darwin, was still a creationist upon returning from his voyage aboard the Beagle. Indeed, he was once a candidate for Holy Orders in the Anglican Church and he accepted each of the Articles of Faith without reservation. Young Charles Darwin found Rev. William Paley’s assertion that the question of how complex life arose and developed demands a sentient Creator as an explanation to be a plausible one at the time. Paley is the intellectual progenitor of the modern day Intelligent Design movement; a movement that has not progressed or added anything new or worthwhile to the life sciences since Paley’s day. Paley proffered that if one sees a rock, one may infer that its shape was caused by natural forces. However, if one observed a timepiece on the ground, one would know that an intelligent artificer was behind the creation of such a complex object. Therefore, life itself, being far more complex and intricately pieced together, must have a Creator beyond the blind natural forces as well. For something as magnificent as man, his argument went, this creative force must be God. In Darwin’s day there was some comprehension about geological forces working over great stretches of time to produce what we see around us and, as to evolution, even Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, understood that biological entities change over time. The concept was wanting only a viable mechanism to fit all the pieces together. While Darwin still held to creationist beliefs for a time, his insatiable curiosity led him to follow the evidence where ever it took him, even as it led him away from a supernatural cause for life forms and toward the adaptive modifications that arose to generate speciation by wholly natural means.
Additionally, as has been mentioned in other summaries of previous presentations, Darwin was not called to embark on the Beagle voyage in the capacity of the ship’s naturalist; there was already a person aboard in that role, but instead as the captain’s companion. In Victorian England, class and status was all- consuming and Captain Fitzroy was not allowed by custom to mingle with the crew socially. It was not unknown for captains on long voyages to commit suicide from this societally- imposed solitary confinement. Darwin, who was in a family of the proper station, was deemed a good fit. His father encouraged the son to take this trip, since he believed that his son was wasting his life and bound for no good, since he seemed to only want to peruse the outdoors in, what seemed to Dr. Darwin, an aimless fashion.
Darwin was a dogged and persistent and patient gatherer of data, specimens and insights from various sources. Besides fellow scientists, he spoke with/corresponded with breeders (who employed artificial selection to achieve certain desired phenotypic traits), birders and an assortment of amateur observers of the natural world. He was excellent at cataloging materials and sensing connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information; he was a natural theoretician.
We speak now of Darwin’s Finches, and indeed these birds proved to provide a pivotal shift in thinking for Darwin. As he collected specimens from different islands, he saw such differences in body type that it was believed that they were different birds altogether, rather than species adapted to differences on each island. In more recent times, since Darwin, the Grants- Peter and Rosemary- have followed in Darwin’s footsteps along the same island chain to witness and catalog evolution in observable time. They not only have seen the differences in beak type and body shape of the finches between islands but also within them, as different weather patterns create different sources of food, requiring different beak shapes to best exploit the changing food sources. Just as Darwin asserted in his 1859 book that lays out natural selection- what he referred to as one long argument for this mechanism- the Grants have seen how offspring with a slightly altered morphology to fit better with the environment thrive and outbreed others lacking those changes. These subtle distinctions serve to pass along the successful traits until, over time they accumulate until the entire population has shifted in form. They still retain the genetics for heading back to the earlier form, however, and as the environment reverts back, the Grants have seen them shift along with it. One book length treatment of this that I recommend is: The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, Vintage Books.
The finches helped set Darwin’s mind in motion to write about the transmutation of species by geography and to consider climate and topography as forces shaping the changes and speciation that he observed. In Brewin’s presentation, his Darwin ruminated over these matters and asked further: what about ostriches… and what… what about man? Could he dare to consider that the pinnacle of Creation by God could likewise be formed and change over time by ungoverned natural forces, where selection occurred not from issues of sin or the whims of a deity, but to give an organism better reproductive fitness in changing environments? He wrote cryptically in On the Origin of Species how much light would be shed on man in this regard… but he didn’t pursue it further than that until he wrote The Descent of Man. Nonetheless, people made that leap of logic themselves. It was one thing to say that the so-called lower creatures were influenced by natural forces, but humans!? The special pet of the Almighty? Heaven forfend!
But the more Darwin investigated the matter, the more evidence he accrued to strengthen the idea of descent with modification, as he worded it, coming to be as a result of beings afforded different survival capabilities via mutation providing the raw material for selection to work upon. There was no grand purpose in this scheme; no organisms, including man, who were favored by supernatural agency for survival and nothing about rebellion against God’s will to cause mass extinctions or favored survivors. In this scheme, contingent circumstances from blind natural events drove adaptation and culled the less fit. While there was a dearth of fossil evidence in Darwin’s day, nonetheless, there was a clear connection between the fossils found of one group in a given rock strata and those in another (each stratum indicating a different chunk of time, with higher levels being the more recent ones; lower ones being the more ancient forms). Creationists lamely mumbled something about the deluge of Noah creating this fossil evidence for evolution. Sadly, today’s Young Earth Creationists still use the same rhetoric.
Darwin was also influenced by economics and saw how there is competition for limited resources. Even a slight difference for an individual within a group or population that allows for the slimmest of advantages for the possessors of those differences affords those individuals the edge needed to capitalize on the environment, have more robustness and better breeding opportunities. Predation also pushes the biological arms race of evolutionary change. As the predators evolve better means for capturing and killing their prey, the prey in turn evolve countermeasures to elude capture and death. Darwin called this the struggle for existence. But even here, what traits are favored has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of any small breeding population over others. It is simply a response to resource changes, isolation of pockets of populations via contingent environmental circumstances and other factors. If the environment changes back to an earlier condition, the once less favored beings may have the advantage again. Neither form is superior per se or to be seen as a sign of progress, but rather there are different adaptations that allow for more successful exploitation of an environmental niche at a given time. Some organisms find the same sorts of adaptive solutions to exploit the same resources or environmental niches and come to evolve similar morphologies, even when genetically, they are quite far removed from each other. Others, conversely, adapt to such different environments that even when they are extremely closely related genetically, they may have very different appearances or phenotypic characteristics.
Darwin continued building and accumulating evidence for natural selection, as well as sexual selection, where the female of a given species is attracted to certain traits which allows the males possessing those traits to breed more frequently, passing on more offspring to the next generation with those same traits, which after a time creates changes in the population reflecting those characteristics selected for by the females. These mechanisms explained evolution and tied together all the disparate facts and findings by naturalists into a coherent theory, which today is perhaps the most robust scientific theory there is; this robustness stemming from so many lines of evidence from related and unrelated fields of research all converging on the central insights of Darwinian evolution, while none of the findings of any branch of science have been able to dislodge this theory in any way.
This is why creationists can offer no testable alternatives that connect to anything known and observed in the natural world, so are left with trying to find weaknesses in the theory in order to attempt to undermine it. So far they have come up empty, and by now, it would take the most extraordinary counter- evidence imaginable to overturn our understanding of evolutionary descent. It would be like discovering the our planetary system is actually a geocentric rather than heliocentric one after all and having the evidence to create such a massive paradigm shift. Darwin’s abstract sat for a good many years without being published. He knew full well the implications of his theory and the firestorm that would result from it. Amazingly, he turned his attentions to other naturalistic research of a less Earth- shaking type including his extensive writings on annelids and barnacles. It was never Darwin’s intention to flout the common belief of humanity’s place in the universe; what he discovered arose simply from his tireless investigation into the workings of the biological realm; the facts and findings led him where they may.
The abstract containing one of the most profound discoveries in science may have lain dormant for many more years had it not been for a letter Darwin received from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who, working in South America, wrote a paper: On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, which spelled out Darwin’s insight while not using the phrase natural selection. Instead of sending his paper to a publisher, he sent it to Darwin who realized that he was about to be scooped. This stirred him into action on preparing his abstract into something that both he and Wallace would end up reading together at the 1858 Linnaean Society meeting. In 1859, Darwin had made his work into a publishable form: On the Origin of Species. There was never any jealousy or animosity between the co-discoverers of the mechanism for biological evolution and Wallace was given his fair share of credit during his lifetime. It was Darwin, however, who had amassed the incredible store of data and supporting evidence over a long period of time and who carefully marshaled the information into the powerful tome that has come down to us over time. Also, later on, Wallace, who had always had spiritualistic tendencies, came to believe that humankind was exempt from a naturalistic cause and development. He wrote about how the whole purpose of the universe was the development of mankind, which was just a little lower than the angels.
The intense negative reaction that Darwin anticipated indeed erupted and Darwin was no firebrand; no crusader for a cause. For that, Darwin had his so- called bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, who defended his heresy (as Darwin put it) with potent words and indefatigable energy, in lieu of the gentle and retiring Darwin. The debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel (Soapy Sam) Wilberforce was a memorable one, where the former demolished the latter in cutting turns of phrases and with solid evidence. This summary- writer recommends the book: Apes, Angels and Victorians for a full account of this exchange and the culture of the time. Darwin continued to be ridiculed, however; depicted as a Monkey or Ape Man in papers. His terror of the public persisted throughout this time.
Darwin was a great scientist, but he was also very humane, kindly, gentle and progressive in his thinking. He deplored racism, slavery and cruelty to animals and this Victorian man valued his daughters as highly as his sons. One son, who may have had Down’s syndrome was deeply cherished and admired by Darwin. He encouraged his children, in the age of patriarchy, to question what he said and even to laugh at him, if so moved. His father, Dr. Robert Darwin, wanted his son to become a doctor like him. Darwin dutifully went for medical training and had the requisite intelligence to have indeed followed in his prosperous father’s footsteps. However, he witnessed an operation being performed on a young girl before the advent of anesthesia, where it took more men to pin down the girl in the throes of excruciating pain than it did to perform the surgical tasks. Darwin simply didn’t have the stomach for witnessing such horrors in a professional career.
CFI members, Jo and Allen assisted Brewin in his presentation. Allen read portions of the narrative of Darwin’s life, while Jo assumed the role of Darwin’s wife, Emma Wedgwood Darwin. Collectively, the trio wove a wonderful tale about Darwin’s life in science, as the title of Brewin’s presentation promised, but also of Darwin as a family man who cherished his wife and children immensely. Of his children, his beloved Annie was his favorite. She was precocious and accompanied her father on his Sand Walk rounds where he honed his ideas regarding natural selection and other aspects of biology. There is a book out by Randal Keynes (the great, great grandson of Darwin): Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, published by Riverhead. I have not read this book yet, but have read a review of it by the late Carl Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan, who recounts the moving tale of Darwin’s relationship to Annie.
Many feel that it was the death of his dear Annie at the age of 10 from illness (possibly tuberculosis) that had more to do with Darwin’s doubts on the existence of God than his discovery of a thoroughly naturalistic mechanism to explain how species arise. Charles Darwin dropped everything to travel with Annie in search of a cure while his beloved Emma remained home with their 6 other children; the revolution he would start would simply have to wait. The constant writer, Darwin, recounted every glimmer of hope he felt as well as every terrible setback during this ordeal. Darwin, who has been vilified by generations of the devout, wrote a moving eulogy to his daughter when she finally succumbed to her illness. He wished to preserve, as Druyan noted: the precious details of who she was, her pleasure in looking up words in a dictionary or finding a place on a map, her unflagging courtesy even in the throes of death. Druyan also quotes Darwin where he writes of Annie: She held herself upright and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness. End quote.
Druyan says of Darwin that he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of science but was also a genius at love, a standout husband, father and friend. The non-believing Druyan waxes almost hagiographic when she writes that Darwin was a new kind of saint, one of: consciousness, a man whose respect for truth and humility, his capacity for love and kindness, are both cause and a product of his fearless investigations into the secrets of nature. Not only saint, but prophet, too. Darwin working alone with only a simple microscope made an overarching statement about the origins of life that the entire armamentarium of technology and the Everest of data developed since have affirmed in countless ways. The science of genetics is one vast confirmation that he was right. End quote. I would add that it is interesting to note that Darwin had no knowledge, during his lifetime, of genetics, with all of its confirmatory power regarding his theory.
Visitors to the Darwin home, A. Druyan notes in drawing from Keynes book, considered it an oasis of loving kindness. She continues in her review by writing that: his 43 year marriage to Emma was intensely passionate, tender and mutually respectful. The only recorded tension between them was her fear that his skepticism about God would deprive them of eternal life together. As much as he adored her, he could not pretend to believe. End quote.
She concludes her book review in the Washington Post by writing (in this sentence pulled from the full paragraph): Randel Keynes’ biography skillfully tells the inspiring story of a man whose heart and mind were equally prodigious.
Synthesized by Charles LaRue
