From Atlantis to the Sphinx (25 page)

This great revolution in human thinking came about, as everyone knows, because a young naturalist named Charles Darwin set out, in December 1831, to sail to South America on a ship called the
Beagle.

The main aim of the voyage, oddly enough, was to take three dark-skinned natives of Tierra del Fuego, off the coast of South America back to their home. The
Beagle
’s captain, Robert Fitzroy—a devout Christian and supporter of slavery—had purchased them at low cost (he only paid a pearl button for one of them) and intended to use them in England as unpaid servants. (One of them, a pubescent girl, Fitzroy had purchased because he was disgusted to see her walking around naked.) Unfortunately, an anti-slave law had been passed while he was at sea, and he was indignantly ordered to take them back. And to give the expedition some practical purpose, the minister in charge of the Home Office decreed that a scientist should go along too, to study South American flora and fauna. The man chosen was regarded as something of a failure in life. At 22, Charles Darwin was already a failed medical student and a failed clergyman. Then he found he enjoyed zoology and botany, and his professor at Cambridge recommended him for the post on the
Beagle
.

Darwin also happened to be a good liberal (they were called Whigs in those days), and he entirely agreed that the three natives should be returned. The captain was a lifelong Tory, and told the young scientist that he was being sentimental. In life, the race was won by the fittest and the fastest. The strong survived, the weak died off.

Darwin was not sure he liked this theory. But then, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written a long poem called
The Temple of Nature
(1803) in which he argued that all life had originated in the seas, then moved on to the land, where the fishes developed limbs and turned into animals. So perhaps Captain Fitzroy was right. Perhaps competition was responsible for the slow improvement of species...

The return of the three natives to Tierra del Fuego strengthened his opinion. One of them, a youth they had named York Minster, was strong and dominant, and was soon happily settled with his brother savages. He quickly threw off his civilised ways and went about naked, to the distress of a missionary named Matthews who had been sent to try and convert the natives. So did the pubescent girl, whom Fitzroy had named Fuegia. But the youngest and gentlest of the natives, known as Jemmy Button, was bullied and beaten, and tearfully begged to be allowed to return on the
Beagle
; the captain had to refuse him, and as the
Beagle
sailed away, it was perfectly obvious that, unprotected by the artificial barriers of civilisation, Jemmy Button was going to have a hard life.

The same proved to be true of Fuegia. Ten years later, a ship full of seal hunters stopped off the island, and Fuegia hastened on board to renew her acquaintance with white men. They were unable to believe their luck, and raped her continuously until she collapsed with exhaustion and almost died. When she was next seen by British observers, she looked like an old woman. Darwin never learned of this, but if he had, it would have reinforced his increasing certainty that nature was not designed according to liberal principles.

As Darwin studied the flora and fauna of Patagonia, he found unmistakable signs that Cuvier—who was still alive—was mistaken about catastrophes. He came upon the bones of extinct creatures like megatheria (giant sloths) and toxodonts, yet saw equally ‘prehistoric’ animals like armadillos and anteaters surviving and flourishing. He also observed the bones of extinct llamas, and saw oddly similar llamas—called guanacos—walking around. The extinct llamas were smaller. But surely it was unlikely that God—or nature—had wiped out the ancient llamas then gone to the trouble of creating larger ones? Was it not more likely that the guanacos had evolved from their extinct ancestors?

It was half a dozen years later, back in England, that Darwin came across a book that once again set him thinking about the ruthlessness of nature left to itself. It was called
An Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798), by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, and it took a distinctly gloomy view of history. Society is not ascending towards prosperity and liberalism, for prosperity leads more babies to survive, and the increase in population soon outstrips the increase in prosperity. Society is not headed up but down. If we want to do something about the problem—Malthus argued later—we ourselves have to try to control the population. But in nature, of course, there is no one to control growth. So population explodes, and the weakest die of starvation.

The truth, Darwin recognised, was that if every couple of animals or birds or fishes produce more than two offspring, and those offspring also produce more than two offspring, the resulting population explosion would cover every habitable inch of the earth in a few generations. Death is nature’s way of preventing the earth from being overrun.

He began breeding livestock—dogs, rabbits, chickens, pigeons—and over twenty years studied the variations from generation to generation. There were far more than he had suspected. That settled it. He now had a mechanism that explained evolution. Nature produced variations. The useful ones survived, the useless ones died out. So, just as his grandfather had supposed, there was a steady change and improvement, as the useful variations continued to breed and multiply.

Darwin was in no hurry to publish these revolutionary conclusions. He regarded himself as a good Christian, and was aware that his findings amounted to a decisive rejection of the Book of Genesis. So he plodded on with a vast work that would have been at least 2500 pages long, and which he half-expected to publish after his death. Then, in 1857, came the bombshell—a letter from another zoologist, an ex-schoolmaster named Alfred Russel Wallace, which outlined a theory virtually identical to his own. Darwin was shattered; it looked as if he had wasted a quarter of a century of work. It would be unfair of him to stand in Wallace’s way. He sought the advice of Sir Charles Lyell, the author of
Principles of Geology.
Lyell’s advice was to publish Wallace’s paper, and a brief summary of his own ideas, simultaneously. This was done in the journal of the Linnaean Society. Then Darwin settled down to making a condensation of the vast work he had been writing for years. It took thirteen months, and was entitled
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
.

When it appeared in November 1859, it created the greatest intellectual uproar of the nineteenth century. The book was obviously deeply serious, and its mass of fact was overwhelming. Yet its conclusions flew in the face of every religious principle that man had held since the beginning of time. The diversity of nature was not the handiwork of God—or the gods—but of a simple mechanical principle: the survival of the fittest. There was no mention of man—except a brief comment in the conclusion that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’—but Darwin’s views on that subject emerged clearly in the rest of the book. Man was not ‘made in God’s image’; he had no unique place in nature. He was simply an animal like other animals, and was probably descended from some kind of ape.

The man who was largely responsible for the book’s instant success—it sold out its first edition in one day—was a scientist named Thomas Henry Huxley, who reviewed it for
The Times
and hailed it as a masterpiece. Huxley would go on to become Darwin’s most powerful defender. Evolution’s equivalent of the Battle of Hastings took place in Oxford in June 1860, when Huxley debated Darwin’s thesis against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (known as ‘Soapy Sam’ because of his unctuous manner). Wilberforce gave a satirical account of evolution, and then turned to Huxley and asked whether he was descended from a monkey through his mother or his father. Huxley muttered under his breath: ‘The Lord has delivered him into my hands.’ He then rose to his feet, and quietly and seriously explained Darwin’s theory in simple language. He concluded that he would not be ashamed to be descended from a monkey, but that he
would
be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. The audience burst into roars of applause; one lady fainted. And Wilberforce, knowing he was beaten, declined the opportunity to reply.

It is impossible for us to understand the impact of these views. It is true that Maillet and Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had already outlined theories of evolution. But Darwin’s work did not amount to a theory. It had all the brutal impact of undeniable scientific fact. And he appeared to be telling the world that all its religious creeds were nonsense. There was no need for God to intervene in nature. It was, in effect, a gigantic machine that ground out new species as an adding machine grinds out numbers.

Darwin was himself opposed to this ‘soulless’ interpretation of his ideas. After all, a machine has a maker, and has to be set in motion by human beings. Darwin felt that he had merely discovered how the mechanisms of evolution operate. Anything that had to be discarded as rubbish was not worth keeping anyway.

In a sense he was right. Yet his opponents were also right. Whether he intended it or not, Darwin had brought about the greatest intellectual change in the history of the human race. Man had always taken it for granted that he was the centre of the universe, and that he had been created by the gods. He scanned the revolving heavens for some sign of Divine purpose, and he scanned nature for the obscure hieroglyphics that would reveal the will of the gods. Now Darwin was telling him that the hieroglyphics were an optical illusion. The world was merely what it appeared to be. It consisted of
things
, not hidden meanings. From now on, man had to accept that he was on his own.

And what
was
this ‘origin of man and his history’ upon which Darwin promised to throw some light? Now that most biologists were Darwinians, there was no excuse for being vague and imprecise.

In fact, Darwin was convinced that archaeologists would dig up the bones of a creature who was midway between the ape and man—in 1871 he christened it the ‘Missing Link’. In 1908, 26 years after Darwin’s death, it looked as if his prophecy had been fulfilled when a man named Charles Dawson announced that he had found pieces of an ancient human skull at a place called Piltdown, in East Sussex. With two fellow geologists, he later found a lower jaw that was definitely ape-like, and which fitted the cranium. This was christened ‘Piltdown Man’ or ‘Dawn Man’, and Dawson became famous.

Yet the scientists were puzzled. The development of ‘ancient man’ was basically a development of his brain, and therefore of his skull. Piltdown Man showed considerable skull development. So why was his jaw so apelike?

The answer was: because it
was
an ape’s jaw. In 1953, long after Dawson’s death, fluorine analysis of Piltdown Man revealed that he was a hoax—the skull was a mere 50,000 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan or a chimpanzee; both had been stained with iron sulphate and pigment to make them look alike. It is now believed that, for reasons of his own, Dawson perpetrated the Piltdown hoax.

In fact, as early as 1856, a mere seven years after the publication of
The Origin of Species
, it looked as if the first man had been found. A few miles from Düsseldorf there is a pleasant little valley called the Neander—Neanderthal, in German—named after a composer of hymns.

It has limestone cliffs, and workmen quarrying in these cliffs discovered bones so heavy and coarse that they assumed they had found the skeleton of a bear. But as soon as a local schoolmaster named Johann Fuhlrott saw them, he knew this was no bear, but the remains of an ape-like human being, with a low sloping forehead and almost no chin. Oddly enough, the brain of this creature was larger than that of modern man. But the curvature of the thigh-bones suggested that he had once walked in a crouching posture. Could this undersized gorilla be man’s earliest ancestor?

The learned men said no. Most of them were disciples of Cuvier, and one even suggested that the skeleton was of a Cossack who had pursued Napoleon back from Russia in 1814. And the great Rudolf Virchow, founder of cellular pathology, thought it was the skeleton of an idiot. For a while the schoolmaster Fuhlrott was thoroughly depressed. Then Sir Charles Lyell took a hand, and announced that the ‘idiot’ was indeed a primitive human being. And although Virchow refused to admit he was wrong, more discoveries over the next 25 years left no doubt that Neanderthal Man was indeed an early human being.

So this, it seemed, was the ‘missing link’, or what Darwin’s combative German disciple Haeckel preferred to call
Pithecanthropus
, Ape Man. Or was it? Surely the ape-man would have a much smaller brain than modern man, not a larger one? In which case, Neanderthal ought to be fairly recent—say, over the past hundred thousand years.

The next vital step in the search for ancient man was taken by the French—not by the Parisian professors of geology, who still believed Cuvier’s assertion that man is a recent creation, but by two remarkable amateurs. They uncovered the existence of modern man’s direct ancestor, Cro-Magnon man.

It all started some time in the 1820s, when a French lawyer named Édouard Lartet, who lived in the village of Gers in southern France, was intrigued by a huge tooth brought to him by a local farmer. Lartet looked it up in his Cuvier, and discovered that it was the tooth of a mammoth. According to Cuvier, mammoths had died out long before man arrived on Earth, so what was a mammoth tooth doing near the surface? Lartet began to dig, and in 1837, found some bones and skull fragments of an ape-like creature dating from the mid-Tertiary period—perhaps fifteen million years ago. This was later identified as
Dryopithecus
, which some modern scientists regard as man’s original ancestor.

Lartet now came under the influence of a customs officer and playwright called Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, who lived in Abbeville, on the Somme, and who was convinced that man dated back to the Tertiary era, more than two million years ago. Both Lartet and Boucher de Perthes searched Tertiary deposits without success.