Darwin Slept Here by Eric Simons

Author:Eric Simons [Simons, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

When the sailors finished singing and stomped off to work, Darwin and FitzRoy took center stage for a duet about searching for truth (in Darwin’s case) and the work of the Lord (in FitzRoy’s case). The lyrics—Darwin: “I’ll listen to the calling of the Earth,” FitzRoy: “uncover all of nature’s divine perfection and more”—played on two falsehoods, the first being that Darwin had any kind of coherent conception of his theory of evolution by natural selection before, or even really during, the Beagle’s voyage. (Mostly, he had inklings that something wasn’t right with the traditional explanation for the origins of life, which held that all species were created exactly as they were and did not change.) The second untruth was that FitzRoy wanted Darwin along to prove the literal truth of the Bible.

The musical, in fact, continued to hammer that point home, portraying FitzRoy as an overbearing fundamentalist blowhard, unwilling to tolerate dissent on religious matters. It staged Darwin as a tormented evolutionist, torn between his friendship with the captain and the new scientific truths he was discovering. If this theme wasn’t evident from, say, the twenty-foot-tall dancing sloth fossil that sang to Darwin that “you can try to deny what your eyes meet . . . but think you fool, don’t be a mule . . . I am as real as these bones,” the wailing solo that Darwin sang near the end removed any remaining ambiguity:There’s no way to go on

And there’s no turning back

Nowhere to run

Nowhere to hide

I’m torn inside.

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