Charles
Darwin’s theory of Descent with Modification through Mutation, Adaptation,
Natural Selection and Speciation in his November 1859 book On the Origin of Species was not a revolution in and of
itself, but rather the keystone to a scientific revolution that had begun
nearly four centuries earlier. The Scientific Revolution was not a ‘revolution’
as that term is commonly colloquially conceptualized. Whenever the
overwhelmingly vast majority of the lay public hears and reads the term
‘revolution’, what immediately springs to one’s mind are the American
Revolution of 1765, the French Revolution of 1789, the German and Italian
Revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution
of 1936. The one thing that all of these sociopolitical revolutions shared amongst
them is that they all took place on a time scale of days to years. The
Scientific Revolution, by contrast, is more comparable to the Neolithic Revolution
of the 11th millennium BCE, which took place on a time scale of centuries—not
years, but hundreds of years.
Third
President of the United States Thomas Jefferson enumerated the ideological and
philosophical impetus behind the American and French Revolutions of the late
18th century in the Declaration of Independence in June 1776:
“We
hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their creator with inherent
and certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new
government, laying it's foundation on such principles and organizing it's
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness.”[1]
The
philosophical underpinnings of the scientific revolution were perhaps best
articulated by the late great Cornell cosmologist Carl Sagan in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human
Future in Space:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth
might not seem of any particular interest…The Earth is a very small stage in a
vast cosmic arena…Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion
that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this
point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping
cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help
will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves…There is perhaps no better
demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our
tiny world.”[2]
The
process of challenging the conceit that humans have a privileged place in the
universe began with late Fifteenth Century Renaissance Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated a heliocentric model of the known cosmos,
now known as the solar system, which placed the sun as the center of it around
which everything else orbits rather than the Earth. The geocentric model
Copernicus was challenging is not only featured in the Judeo-Christian Bible,
but dates back to the 7th century BCE Ancient Greek philosopher Anaximandros
and, perhaps most famously, the Fourth Century BCE Greek scientist Aristotle.
One reason why the Aristotelian geocentric cosmos was featured in the Christian
Bible, written in the late Fourth Century CE, even after the heliocentric model
was first proposed by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus in the Third Century
BCE, was due in no small part to the Christian church’s interpretation, evident
in the Bible, that it fit in with their belief that the Judeo-Christian god of
the Bible would create his favored race, humans, on a planet placed at the
center of his creation. This, in turn, fed into what Sagan calls “the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the universe”.
Another
delusion of human exceptionalism that was to be dispelled in the Scientific
Revolution was established by 16th century Irish Archbishop James
Ussher, and ironically enough by 17th century German astronomer
Johannes Kepler and English physicist Sir Isaac Newton. In his ‘Annales Veteris Testamenti, A Prima Mundi
Origine Deducti’ [Latin: ‘Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced From
the First Origins of the World’], Ussher wrote that Verse 1 of Chapter 1 of
the Book of Genesis [“In the beginning,
God created the universe.”] took place in the year 4004 BCE, writing:
“I
deduce that the time from the creation until midnight, January 1, 1 AD was 4003
years, seventy days and six hours.[3] [Six
hours before midnight would be 6:00 PM] … In
the beginning God created heaven and Earth, Gen. 1, v. 1. Which beginning of
time, according to our Chronology, fell upon the entrance of the night
preceding the twenty-third day of October in the year of the Julian Period 710.
The year before Christ 4004.”[4]
Kepler
calculated the date of Genesis 1:1 to not October 23, 4004 BCE but April 27,
4977 BCE. Newton was obsessed with Biblical numerology, having calculated in
1704 that the world-ending apocalyptic battle of Armageddon depicted in Verse
16 of Chapter 16 of the Book of Revelation [“And he shall gather them to the place called in Hebrew ‘Megiddo’.”[5]] would
take place in 2060. Newton also calculated the year of the creation account in
the Book of Genesis: 4000 BCE.
Once
again it is not difficult to conceptualize the reason why these dates would
have appealed to those who believed in the Judeo-Christian Biblical account of
humans as god’s chosen species, as they coincide closely with the beginning of
known recorded history. The earliest writing system in Europe, the Vinca-Turdas
script [from the Turdas-Vinca culture, discovered in Turdas, Romania by
Hungarian anthropologist and archaeologist Zsofia Torma in 1875 and at
Vinca-Belo Brdo in Vinca, Belgrade, Serbia by Serbian archaeologist Miloje
Vasic of the University of Belgrade in 1908] has been carbon dated to between
4500 BCE and 4000 BCE.[6] The
earliest evidence of the Harappan script of the Indus Valley civilization dates
to 3500 BCE[7]
as does that of the Cuneiform writing system of Sumeria in Mesopotamia[8].
The desire to imagine behaviorally modern humans as being the focus of the
creation of the universe makes placing the date for the beginning of the
universe at or near to the date of the beginning of human history naturally
enticing.
Ironically,
the process of unraveling this comfortable delusion was begun by a man whom the
Christian Church would later beatify and canonize as a Saint: Vacariate
Apostolic of Northern Germany Nicolaus Stenonius, Titular Bishop of Titiopolis,
Isauria, Asia Minor. A 17th century Danish scientist, born Niels
Steensen in Copenhagen in 1638, he was the first to propose, in his 1669 ‘De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter
Contento Dissertationis Prodromus’ [‘Preliminary Discourse to a
Dissertation on a Solid Body Naturally Contained Within a Solid’], the
concept of ‘deep time’ that 18th
century Scottish geologist James Hutton and British geologist Charles
Lyell would later formulate into the theory of uniformitarianism. Stenonius
established the field of stratigraphy with his Principle of Superposition,
which states that, within a series of stratigraphic sequences, the upper units
of stratification are younger and the oldest strata will be at the bottom of
the sequence. He also established the Law of Lateral Continuity, which states
that rocks that are otherwise similar but are now separated by a feature can be
assumed to be originally continuous, or as Stenonius wrote “Material forming any stratum were continuous
over the surface of the Earth unless some other bodies stood in the way.” This latter law led late 18th
century English geologist William Smith to the conclusion, dubbed the law of
faunal succession in his 1815 geological map of Great Britain, that if layers
of rock at differing locations contained similar fossils, then the layers were
the same age.[9]
This, in turn, led Smith’s nephew and student, English geologist John Phillips,
to calculate in 1860 that the Earth must be at least 96 million years old.[10]
In
1864, Scottish-Irish physicist William Thomson, 1st Right Honorable
Lord Kelvin, who formulated the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics,
calculated the age of the Earth based on the Earth’s internal temperature to
between 20 and 400 million years, writing “This
Earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot
globe” too hot to support life.[11] In
his book On the Origin of Species
in 1859, English geologist Charles Darwin calculated, based on the erosion rate
[assumed to be around 1 inch every hundred years] of the chalk escarpments of
the North and South Downs and the sandstone High Weald and clay Low Weald of
Southeast England, that the Earth must be at least 300 million years old. [It
should be noted for the record that Darwin was off on his calculation of the
ages of the Southeastern England Wealds by a factor of ten times, as more
modern methods showed them to be between twenty and thirty million years old;
and that, in response to criticism from Thompson, Darwin removed all reference
to the Wealds from his 1861 third edition of Origin of Species].[12]
However,
in Origin of Species Darwin
used this calculation as the time frame for his Law of Natural Selection, part
of the theory of evolution that would provide the final proverbial nail in the
coffin of the Judeo-Christian dogmatic doctrine of human exceptionalism.
Verse
7 of Chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis states that humans were the first
creature created. Verses 19 and 20 go on to say that thereafter as each
creature was created, humans gave to them their names. However, the man
responsible for giving the species of animals and plants the names that
scientists know them by played a pivotal role in the paradigm shift by which
Darwinian Natural Selection would topple the delusion of human exceptionalism
once and for all. Eighteenth Century Swedish zoologist Carolus Linnaeus, the
father of modern taxonomy, in his 1735 ‘Systema
Naturae Per Regna Tria Naturae, Secundum Classes, Ordines, Genera, Species, Cum
Characteribus, Differentiis, Synonymis, Locis’ [Latin: ‘System of
Nature Through the Three Kingdoms of Nature, According to Classes, Orders,
Genera and Species, with Characters, Differences, Synonyms, Places’],
developed the concept of binomial nomenclature cladistic classification.
Linnaeus was the first to classify humans by their scientific species name, “Homo Sapiens”, and classify them as a
species of Hominid, members of the phylogenetic Family “Hominidae”, commonly colloquially called ‘Great Apes’. Along with
our fellow Hominids “Pan Paniscus”
[Bonobos], “Pan Troglodytes” [Chimpanzees],
Gorillas and Orangutans, Linnaeus further classified humans as members of the
larger ‘Superfamily’ called “Hominoids”,
or ‘Apes’. As controversial as Linnaeus’s classification of Humans as a species
of Apes was and still is to this day, however, the true paradigm-shifting
revolution of Linnaean classification lay further still down what he envisioned
as a branching bush-like taxonomic tree. Humans, as apes, belong to the Order
of Primates. Linnaeus classified Primates as part of the Class “Mammalia”.[13]
Mammals Linnaeus classified as a subcategory of the larger Kingdom “Animalia”. With this, the distinction so
long drawn between ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, for all practical intents and
purposes, effectively ceased to exist.
Linnaeus
also contributed to one other factor of Darwin’s undermining of human
exceptionalism by becoming one of the first-ever scientists to publicly
question the immutability and fixity of species in his 1751 ‘Plantae Hybridae’, writing, “It is impossible to doubt that there are new
species produced by hybrid generation”. In his 1753 ‘Species Plantarum’ [‘The Species of Plants’],
Linnaeus referred to species as “temporis
filia” [“children of time”], writing in the posthumously published 1792 ‘Praelectiones On Ordines Naturales
Plantarum’ [‘Lectures in the Natural Order of Plants’] that “there will arise species that should be
referred to the mother’s genus as her daughters”. After his death, Carolus Linnaeus’s son Carl
von Linne wrote of his father that “He
believed, no doubt, that species animalium et plantarum and that genera were
the works of time.” Indeed, even while he was still alive, in the 1766 12th
edition of his ‘Systema Naturae’,
Linnaeus himself wrote “Species are the
product of time”.[14]
The
most famous proponent of transmutation of the first half of the Eighteenth
Century was French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Antoine, Chevalier Lamarck. Lamarck
differed from Linnaeus in proposing that speciation occurred not by
hybridization between species, but by characteristics inherited generationally,
or what Darwin would later come to call his principle of ‘Descent with
Modification’, one of the fundamental foundations of his theory of evolution. This
is founded upon what might seem to be an extremely simplistic and remarkably
readily apparent principle: Offspring do not identically resemble either of
their parents.
In
a 1796 paper to the French Institute, French zoologist Jean Cuvier proposed
that not only could species change, but also they could disappear, a concept
Cuvier coined “extinction”.
Combining
the time scale of Charles Lyell and the transmutability of species of Lamarck,
in his February 1871 book The Descent
of Man, Charles Darwin deduced that not only were Humans a species of
hominid as Linnaeus had classified them a century earlier, but they were
descended, by way of Descent with Modification, from other, extinct species of
hominid. Indeed, one such extinct human-related hominid species was discovered
during Darwin’s lifetime, and the most recent hominid species from which humans
descend was discovered only years after Darwin’s death.
In
1829, Dutch geologist Phillip-Charles Schmerling, the founder of paleontology,
discovered a two to three-year-old child’s calvaria [cranium] at Awirs Cave in Engis, Belgium. His find, known as “Engis
2”, included animal bones and stone tools and an upper jaw [maxilla] and upper incisor and lower jaw.
After a second discovery of two femora, three right arm bones and two left arm
bones by German anatomists and anthropologists Hermann Schaaffhausen and Johann
Fuhlrott, the founders of paleoanthropology, at the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte
cave in Gesteins, the Neander Valley southwest of Dusseldorf in Westphalia in August
1856, both specimens were jointly named “Neanderthal” [Species “Homo Neanderthalensis”, or Subspecies “Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis”] by Irish
geologist William King in 1864.[15] Then,
in 1891, 9 years after Darwin’s death in 1882, Dutch geologist Eugene Francois
Dubois discovered a calvaria [skullcap],
a tooth and a thighbone, which Dubois dubbed “Java Man”, at Trinil, East Java, Indonesia. After a second
discovery of 15 calvariae [crania],
11 lower jaws [mandibles] and many
teeth, dubbed “Peking Man” by Swedish
archeologist and geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson and Canadian
paleoanthropologist Davidson Black at Chou K’out-tien cave in Beijing, China,
both specimens were named “Homo Erectus”
by German evolutionary taxonomist Ernst Walter Mayer in 1950.[16]
Cuvier
had initially formulated his theory of extinction in order to explain the
discoveries in 1739 in Big Bone, Boon County, Kentucky of the extinct elephants
he called “Mastodons” in 1806[17]
and his discoveries in 1808 at Mount Saint Peter near Maastricht, Netherlands
of extinct marine reptiles he called ‘Mosasaurus’
[Latin: ‘Lizard of the Maas River’] in 1822[18],
as well as the discovery in 1822 by English geologist and paleontologist Gideon
Algernon Mantel of an extinct reptile Mantel named “Iguanodon” in 1825[19],
a member of what English anatomist and paleontologist Sir Richard Owen named ‘Dinosauria’ [Latin: ‘Fearfully Great
Reptiles’] in 1842[20].
The discovery of the extinct hominid ancestors of humans that Darwin predicted
in Descent of Man dispelled
decisively the delusion that humans held any privileged place outside of or
exempted from the evolution and extinction to which every other species is
subject.
Thus
was the keystone of the scientific revolution that had begun four centuries before
with Copernicus finally laid. The analogy to the metaphor of a keystone is
especially fitting, since it is the keystone, set last, that gives an archway
its strength and stability. As can be seen in Ancient Roman architecture such
as the Flavian Amphitheatre Coliseum and the Ancient Roman aqueducts, this then
permits still more structures to be built on top of the arch. As the
most-tested and most-proven theory in the history of all of scientific thought
more than a century and a half after it was first proposed in On the Origin of Species, Charles
Darwin’s theory of Descent with Modification through Mutation, Adaptation,
Natural Selection and Speciation has extraordinarily remarkable stability, and
at the same time allows for other disciplines and fields of scientific study,
such as genetics, undreamt of in the mid-Nineteenth Century in which Darwin
himself lived. These sciences, in turn, cross-reconfirm Darwin’s original
theory by fulfilling the predictions that the theory of evolution makes.
By
pushing humans permanently and irreversibly off of whatever high pedestal of
privilege we in our delusions of ego placed ourselves upon, Darwin finally
brought to full fruition the process that Copernicus began centuries before: That
of displacing first our planet and then ourselves from the center of the
cosmos. As has been shown here, very nearly each and every discipline and field
of science, from anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology and cosmology to
paleontology, phylogenetics and even physics has had its part to play in
replacing the geocentric and self-centered universe of ancient mythologies such
as the Judeo-Christian Bible with the more humbling and objective cosmic
perspective of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.
Like an archway assembled stone by stone until the keystone is set, so too was
our proverbial gateway out of our dogmatic bubble universe the result of the
lifelong study and work of dozens of the most brilliant scientific minds ever
to walk this Earth; albeit only a handful of whom have had their names
mentioned here; leading us to the mindset whereat the Darwinian worldview was
able to see its time come.
The
change in governments that we call the American, French and Russian revolutions
may very well have taken place on a scale of years, but the concepts enumerated
in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “self-evident” truths, “inalienable
rights” and the “consent of the
governed” did not become the dominant principles forming the foundation of
western civilized society overnight. Nor did the paradigm shift in worldview
from the geocentric conceptualization of humans as the ‘chosen’ race of the
creator god of the cosmos to the humbling view of humans as the product of
billions of years of evolution and natural selection and of the planet Earth as
Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot occur
either with the birth of Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire on February
12, 1809 nor with his publication of his ‘abstract’
on the Origin of Species. The
revolution in question, therefore, does not belong to Darwin in and of himself
alone as an individual. As his theory proved is true of all of us, Charles
Darwin was a part of something much, much, much larger, and longer than the lifetime
of one habitually sickly Nineteenth Century English naturalist.
The
aforementioned invention of writing permitted the transmission of knowledge
across vast distances of space and down through time; and thanks not only to
Darwin but to the generations on whose shoulders he was able to stand, we know
now what we refused to believe before: That we live in what Sagan called in Chapter
4 of his 1994 book A Pale Blue Dot:
“A Universe Not Made For Us”.
3,675
Words
[1]
Jefferson, Thomas. Transcript of
Declaration of Independence [Rough Draft]. Thomas Jefferson
Foundation. June 1776: https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/transcript-declaration-independence-rough-draft
[2]
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision
of the Human Future In Space, Random House, New York, 1994. Chapter 1:
“You Are Here”, page 21.
[3]
Ussher, James. Annals of the Old
Testament (1650) “Epistle to the
Reader”, page 5.
[4]
Ussher, James. Annals of the Old
Testament (1650). “The First Age
of the World”, Page 129.
[5]
Bauscher, Dave. “The Original Aramaic
New Testament in Plain English”. Lulu Press Publishing, Raleigh, North
Carolina, November 2007.
[6]
Lazarovici, G. and Merlini, M. “Settling
Discovery Circumstances, Dating and Utilization of the Tartaria Tablets”. ‘Acta
Terrae Septemcastrensis’: Proceedings of
the International Colloquium: The Carpathian Basis and Its Role in the
Neolithisation of the Balkan Peninsula, Institute for the Study and
Valorification of the Transylvanian Patrimony in European Context, Lucian Blaga
University of Sibiu. Band: VII, 2008. 11-195: http://arheologie.ulbsibiu.ro/publicatii/ats/ats8%201/merlinian%20inquri.pdf
[7]
Whitehouse, David. “Earliest Writing
Found”. BBC News. Tuesday May 4, 1999: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/334517.stm
[8]
Woods, Christopher. “The Earliest
Mesopotamian Writing”, in Woods, Christopher. Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East
and Beyond. University of Chicago Oriental Institute Museum. Number 32,
September 28, 2010. Pages 33-50: http://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/oimp32.pdf
[9]
Winchester, Simon. The Map That
Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New
York. July 5, 2001.
[10]
Burchfield, Joe. “The Age of the Earth
and the Invention of Geological Time”. The Geological Society of London,
Volume 143, 1998. Pages 137-143
[11]
Stacy, Frank. “Kelvin’s Age of the Earth
Paradox Revisited”. Journal of
Geophysical Research, Volume 105, Issue B6, June 10, 2000. Pages
13155-13158.
[12]
Dorit, Robert. “Rereading Darwin”. American Scientist, Volume 100,
Issue 1, January 2012. Page 20: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/rereading-darwin/99999
[13]
Reeder, DeeAnn and Wilson, Don. “Mammal
Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference”. Johns
Hopkins University Press. November 2005: http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/biology/resources/msw3/browse.asp?id=12100001
[14]
Bartelt, Karen. “Changing the Public’s
Perception of Evolution”. Reports
of the National Center for Science Education, Volume 18, Issue 1,
January 1998. Pages 12-18: https://ncse.com/library-resource/changing-publics-perception-evolution
[15]
King, William. “The Reputed Fossil Man of
the Neanderthal”. Quarterly
Journal of Science, Volume 1. 1864. Pages 88-97.
[16]
Mayer, Ernst. “Taxonomic Categories in
Fossil Hominids”. Cold Springs Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology,
1950. In Mayer, Ernst. Evolution and
the Diversity of Life. Harvard University Press, 1997. Pages 530-545.
[17]
Conniff, Richard. “Mammoths and
Mastodons: All American Monsters” Smithsonian
Magazine. April 2010: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mammoths-and-mastodons-all-american-monsters-8898672/
[18]
Cuvier, Georges. ‘Sur Le Grand Animal
Fossile Des Carrieres De Maestricht’ [‘On the Large Fossil Animal of the
Quarries of Maestricht’]. ‘Annales Du
Museum National D’Histoire Naturelle’ [‘Annals of the National
Museum of Natural History’]. 1808. Pages 145-176.
[19]
Mantell, Gideon. “Notice on the
Iguanodon, a Newly Discovered Fossil Reptile, from the Sandstone of Tilgate
Forest, in Sussex”. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Volume 115. January 1,
1825. Pages 179-186: http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/115/179
[20]
Owen, Richard. “Report on British Fossil
Reptiles”. Report of the Eleventh
Meeting of the British Association For the Advancement of Science. July
1841. Pages 59-204.
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