Darwin by James R Moore

Author:James R Moore [Moore, James R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141935560
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Biology was liberalizing, along with society. Looked at from inside or out, there was real change. Even one man of the cloth, the Revd Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford (and father of the Chief Scout), was sympathetic to evolution. Admittedly, he was an extreme liberal and his argument theological: God is a lawgiver – miracles break the lawful edicts issued at Creation, therefore belief in miracles is atheistic. QED. A clever riposte to miracle-mongering Creationists. He was an idiosyncratic Anglican apologist. ‘These parsons,’ Hooker complained, ‘are so in the habit of dealing with the abstraction of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever… that they gallop over the [science] course… as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit. Witness the self confident style of… Baden Powell.’17

Hooker was coming around. He had not embraced Darwin’s new gospel but, ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he sighed to the botanist Asa Gray at the Harvard Herbarium, ‘my mind is not fully, faithfully, implicitly given to species as created entities ab origine.’ In fact, he could see that ‘Creation’ was empty verbiage. ‘It is very easy to talk of the creation of a species,’ he agreed with Darwin, ‘but the idea is no more tangible than that of the Trinity &… is neither more nor less than a superstition – a believing in what the human mind cannot grasp.’

The problem Hooker still faced was a common one: the origin of life itself. He could follow Darwin ‘back to the vital spark’ – and then what? Surely this involved ‘a vis creatrix or whatever you may call it; which is a fact as inscrutable as a full blown species.’ But unlike the atheists, seeking an alternative to Anglican Creationism in a chemical soup, Darwin kept ultimate origins out of the picture. Life’s initial appearance on the earth was inscrutable, he implied to Hooker. All that should concern the naturalist was its subsequent change. The origin of the first living globule was as irrelevant as the origin of matter was to the ‘laws of chemical attraction.’ At its starkest, he insisted, the only question was ‘whether species of a genus have had a common ancestor.’18

This narrow focus left his project looking more professional, less ideological. It had to, if he was to bring about a coup d’état in science. It distanced his study from the shabbier cosmological works, the sort that left his Church mentors foaming. Rival evolutionists all betrayed their reforming, anti-Anglican intent. Herbert Spencer’s ‘law’ of progress in Social Statics had been generalized in 1852 as ‘the development hypothesis’ in a disreputable rag, The Leader. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges had been relaunched a year later in a slick tenth edition. Robert Grant, now a melancholy sixty-year-old, laughed at by Huxley and Forbes, was still insisting on the ‘direct generation’ of one species from another. Then again, stop on a street corner in 1854, or drop into a newsagent around Fleet Street, and pick up the scurrilous London Investigator for a penny and read its shocking revelations on the ‘origin of man.

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