The beauty of Darwin

I found an old Modern Library copy of Charles Darwin’s “Descent of Man” in a bookstore the other day, and it instantly gave me a feeling of delight and elation.

Old books by great thinkers can do that.

I was also reminded of controversy and ignorance and the whole spectrum of the debate about the idea of evolution. But I won’t address that here; quite frankly, I have no interest in the kind of defensiveness and anger that such pointless debates engender.

Rather, I want to address the sheer beauty of the idea itself.

Until Darwin, humanity was cut off from the world ontologically. Superiority and isolation came just from the title of “human being.”

There was an ultimate divide between the experience of being human and the vast continuum of living beings that existed outside of that experience. The connection a person might spontaneously feel to the earth and to the creatures of the earth was unjustifiable.

Imagine walking through the woods and beginning to feel that insistent intuition that everything is in sync and that life is unfolding not only around you, but also within you and with you.

Imagine the power of realizing that such an intuition is historically and scientifically accurate.

Darwin gave us our natural narrative — a narrative that had been obscured by abstract and mythology-laden philosophies.

He gave us a history of what it means to be human and a small way of beginning to understand that history — a way that can complement and even shed light on what we dream up.

In one theory, he handed us an entire universe of inter-connectedness. He gave us a shared heritage, not only with one another, but with the most minute forms of life.  

With Darwin, no child should ever feel lonely. He or she, quite literally, bears within his or her own body, her or his own genes, a connection with the whole of the earth. That is not something that is relevant only for the scientific field of biology.

That is something that could perhaps even cure great ills of discontent and sadness in our society today if it were properly understood. The mind-set of wonder should never be underestimated in its clout for change.

And that is precisely the mind-set that Darwin gives us: wonder. Wonder at the glory of the earth, which we watch in its environmental changes while considering what responsibility is ours.

Wonder at the abilities and the minds of small creatures as we try and determine if those minds are capable of the kind of suffering that prevents us from using humans in their place in labs.

Wonder at the nature of being human as we question whether or not violence is inherent to our way of life.

Connection and wonder are easy things to bypass in daily business as we rush from one thing to the next without stopping.

But what Darwin teaches us is invaluable, in these times and in all times: There is nothing we are not connected with and nothing we should not look at with wonder.


E-mail: cmcglass@indiana.edu