Darwin During the Pandemic

When the pandemic first hit two years ago, we were told to go into lockdown. On the last afternoon of freedom, I went to the local library and checked out 15 books. I figured I would have lots of time to do some reading. One of the books was “On the Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. I am in my early 70s and had somehow managed to avoid reading it for the preceding decades. The version I picked up was illustrated with sketches of the Galapagos landscape.

 Darwin delayed publishing his findings for decades. He did not want to upset his wife’s family with his heterodox conclusions: that Creation was not a six-day affair circa 5000 years ago — as the Bible describes in the first chapter of Genesis – but instead was a 500-million-year long process that proceeded through fits and starts. Darwin finally published his opus only because another naturalist had come up with the same conclusion and was about to one-up him. 

The publication and publicity surrounding his book did cause an uproar among the religious fundamentalists and literalists of polite society. The conclusions of the book still cause them pain, as evidenced by the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925. Even in 2006, my daughter wasn’t allowed to learn evolution in a comparative anatomy class in the Kentucky Public Schools.

Darwin and other naturalists of the mid-1800s  were trying to make sense of the newly-discovered dinosaur fossils being dug out out rocky cliffsides.  The dinosaurs were a deep mystery. Scientists didn’t know how to account for these giant and extinct creatures. Of course, dinosaurs are never mentioned in the Biblical story of Creation.

Charles Darwin took the fossil record to mean that life evolved through epochs. He and his colleagues hypothesized that early forms either went extinct or flourished and gave rise to novel forms. For example, primitive fish gave rise to amphibians, amphibians gave rise to reptiles, and monkeys gave rise to people. 

The first fish made an appearance 500 million years ago. Amphibians popped up around 400 million years ago, followed by reptiles approximately 300 million years ago and finally mammals around 100 million years ago. Note how primates such as apes and humans make a relatively late appearance. Humans don’t appear in the fossil record until 250,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is a mere blink of the eye, compared to the millions of years that went before.

For some reason, during the lockdown and the further months of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I found this long view of life and of evolution somehow comforting. 

To quote Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view of life…having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; from so simple a beginning endless forms beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”