Darwin demands action

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

By Brooke Williams

Darwin has been a hero of mine since I first learned about his adventures on the HMS Beagle when I was in high school. To my young imagination, his book, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” seemed like Tom Sawyer meets Jules Verne. The sense that Darwin made out of what he saw and discovered continues to amaze me today.

Last week, the New York Times announced the launching of the Darwin Project (www.darwinproject.ac.uk/), a database of over 5,000 letters from Charles Darwin to over 2,000 different people.

The timing for releasing this database could not be better. Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of his classic, “The Origin of Species,” will take place in 2009. Besides offering insights into how his important ideas developed, there is another reason these letters are important. They remind me of a question I’ve been grappling with for the past few years: Beyond the fact that Darwin has become an important historical figure, how is what he knew and thought useful to us living today?

Darwin was a cautious man and as a result delayed publishing his work on natural selection for fear of how his theories might be seen by the religious community. Although “The Origin” didn’t make any reference to human evolution, Darwin’s chief critics accused him of theorizing the direct biological connection between monkeys and man. It wasn’t until his book “The Descent of Man” that he documented his ideas about how I, one of a billion human organisms, might be part of the same biological system that controls all life on Earth.

Darwin has become famous for his finches. His theory of natural selection is based on discovering that different species of finches living on different islands he visited in the Galapagos Islands meant that while they all had a common ancestor, natural selection made it possible for them to survive by differentiating into different species after dispersing to different islands.

For Darwin, however, the most important realization from the Beagle voyage had nothing to do with finches, but with humans. In “Voyaging,” the first of her two-part biography on Darwin, Janet Browne refers to the moment when the Beagle pulled into a bay off Tierra del Fuego.

Darwin saw a lone figure of a man on a ridge above the water. The man was naked except for the guanaco skin he had wrapped around his shoulders. His face was painted and he was jumping up and down making threatening gestures with his spear. According to Browne, it was at that moment when Darwin realized how closely he, a young naturalist from Victorian England, and this threatening “savage” were related, that civilization is “but a thin film.”

Recently it has been impossible to escape the debate over whether evolution is responsible for life on Earth as we know it or Intelligent Design – the idea that all life is the result of a plan set in motion by a higher power, by God. These are two different systems of belief. If, somehow, someone of the side of either one of these arguments miraculously discovered some significant, physical proof, all discussion would end. This is not likely to happen anytime soon.

All I know is that something miraculous is going on that has gotten us this far. I used to think that it doesn’t matter much what we believe. I’ve changed my mind. Believing in Intelligent Design gives us an out. If our current situation (global warming, poverty, decimation of biodiversity) is a part of some higher plan, then we don’t need to act. If we believe in evolution – in the ability of all species to adapt to changing conditions – then we can also believe in our place as one of those species, and in our personal ability to transform.

I have to trust what Darwin saw during his five-year journey and how he made deeper and deeper sense of it over the course of his life, until the day he died. And now I have to believe that, regardless of how modern we are and how much of our lives we can now control with our technology, we are still subject to those same deep life forces that Darwin described. Darwin reminds me that those forces exist, which makes me wonder how to encourage them and how best to open up to them.

Brooke Williams is the executive director of the Murie Center in Moose.
Check out its new Web site at www.muriecenter.org.

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