Consider the following scenario: You are a highly educated gentleman of circa 1810, well ensconced in your middle years and middle England. You are a child of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Like most gentlemen of 'independent means', you have no need to work and can dabble in the sciences or arts as you see fit. Although you consider yourself a man of science, you have received a liberal arts education embracing literature, theology and philosophy, and you are fluent in the dead language, Latin. You were brought up as a Christian, in particular, the Church of England. Both parents were devout and pious. From an early age, you found the Bible disquieting. Some passages disturbed you on the moral level. Clearly, the God of the Old Testament was more akin to an evil demon than the supposed loving, just, and righteous God as preached by the Reverend Mugumbo from the pulpit every Sunday. The sermons were deceptively selective, and unlike the majority of parishioners, our man had actually read the bible. With the march of science, the Bible's cosmology and other matters bearing on nature and natural processes he found to be contradictory to solid, testable science. And he could go on...
Earlier, as a young man, he began to lose his faith and started to attend lectures given by the local 'Humanist Society'. Lectures on 'Non-Belief' were frequent visitors to the agenda. It made so much sense. In the past, religion was seen as the only answer to questions about forces, actions, and occurrences that have now been found to have naturalistic explanations. Mr Newton and others have uncovered mysteries that were ascribed to the hand of God. God does not seem to play a role in this world; science has shown us that all natural phenomena have scientific mechanisms of action. If this is the case, why need God?
Surely there was nothing left to explain that could not be explained by science, or was there? There was one question that seemed impossible for science to answer. The theist could state, and with some conviction and intellectual plausability- "O clever scientist, pray provide an answer to this conundrum: How can we explain the manifest complexity of the natural world of which we are a part? Even the simplest bacterial organisms are highly complex arrays of specialised organelles, biochemical processes and intricate protein structures. How can complexity arise from simplicity if not by the hand of God?" This was the question that kept our incipient atheist awake at night and from full commitment, even though he knew that the so-called 'God Hypothesis' was tantamount to no answer at all. There must be a rational solution that is not reliant on supernatural deities. There must be a natural mechanism that relies on observable, rational scientific processes. But here was the rub: What was that rational, naturalistic process that could produce such mind-boggling complexity? The problem seemed insurmountable.
Sadly, our puzzled scientific hero was born too early and did not live long enough to see the scientific paradigm shift of 1859. With the publication of 'On the Origin of Species', his question had been answered. Not only had the problem been solved, but the proposed mechanism, on casual inspection at least, seemed remarkably simple. This raised the obvious question: Why had it not been deduced by the greatest minds of yesteryear? The shades of Aristotle, Archimedes, Galileo and Newton come forth and shake their collective head. There are many others in the shadows. They stand agape, contemplating the simple majesty of the evolutionary process, pondering a lost opportunity.
The fact is, the time was right. Remember poor Alfred Wallace, who had independently come to the same conclusion about the Great Question at the same time as Darwin? We all remember Charles Darwin, but Wallace has somehow been lost in the annals of time. This screams redress, and I have commissioned a post of rehabilitation and justice. Watch this space.
Mayhap, we should give the greatest intellects that have ever existed a break. They were not privy to the groundwork of scientific endeavour preceding the ultimate theory. The 18th and 19th centuries were a time of wonder and scientific exploration unprecedented in history. Scientific discoveries of this time provided the knowledge basis for the encouragement of evolutionary thought. In particular, theories proposed by the evolutionary thinker Lamarck (1744-1829), with his idea of 'Acquired Characteristics', were particularly important. In addition, the work of the economist Malthus (1766-1834), whose toil on population dynamics in a world of limited resources was particularly influential. Ultimately, nature is prodigiously wasteful and cruel. It was he who penned the epithet: 'Survival of the Fittest'. Good man that Malthus.
Today, evolutionary theory is very much solid mainstream science. However, when first proposed, there were many detractors. And not all objections were based on irrational fundamentalist theological thinking. For instance, for such a theory to work, vast aeons of time were required for adaptive change to occur. At the time, estimates of the Earth's age based on geological evidence ranged from 1 million to 100 million years. How could evolution have carved the biological complexity we see today from simplicity in but a few million years? Religious adherents were still convinced that the world was but a meagre 6,000 years based on biblical calculations. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century, using sophisticated techniques, that the true age of the Earth (4.5 billion years) was determined. Further objections were based on the genetic mechanism itself. At the time Darwin's seminal book was published, the genetic mechanism of heredity was unknown. The prevailing theory of the time envisaged a blending of hereditary components from both parents, analogous to blending dissimilar-coloured fluids. But this would dilute hereditary components, rendering evolution as proposed by Darwin impossible. Darwin countered with a hypothesis where heredity was particulate (gemmules), but it was unnecessarily complex and implausible. It would take the rediscovery of Mendel's work on heredity in the early 20th century to finally provide a sound genetic mechanism in accord with Darwinism.
Perhaps, the most difficult objection to Darwin's theory was not scientific but existential. The painful implication was obvious: humans were not 'special'. It knocked us off the biological pedestal. We were just another animal, the smartest, yes, but really just another and latest iteration of the simian species. Furthermore, we had evolved from 'lesser species'; slimemold was our kin. This was a revelation that hit the hardest and was perhaps the most difficult concept for mankind to process and assimilate. Our central, superior, and unique place in the world was deeply ingrained over countless generations. To think otherwise was unthinkable and would never have been contemplated by Aristotle or Newton alike. Man was but a beast, a smart one for sure, but still a beast. In hindsight, it should have been obvious. Man has always been an animalistic brute; evolution made us so.
Evolutionary theory provokes controversy even today. Quixotically, it seems that, at least in the Western world, the US is unique in posing challenges to theory, and certain folk and fundamentalist organisations in that country are keen to promote an alternative based on Divine Intervention, whatever that means. And let us be clear, this viewpoint is not confined to a few cranks. This crowd has clout with influential friends that weild politicol power. Woe is the day that 'Creation Science' is taught in conjunction with Evolutionary theory, as a matter of law, in science classes. When this day comes, and rationalists fail in their efforts to stymie such ridiculous legislation, the death knell of rational thought and belief will be the herald that precedes the end of Western Civilisation. When a civilisation falls, history is our guide on the consequences. And those consequences are invariably barbarism.
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