When
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the Bishop of
Worcester's wife was most distressed. 'Let us hope it is not true', she is said
to have remarked. 'But if it is, let us pray that it does not become generally
known!'
—R.
D. Keynes
In
the days before pocket calculators, few people who used the arithmetical procedure
for extracting square roots could justify that procedure, though they got the
right answers. But the procedure for extracting square roots does not affect
the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the world; the theory of
evolution by natural selection does. Yet, although Darwin's theory is believed by
a substantial majority of educated people in the western world, it is doubtful whether
more than a small fraction of those who do believe could, if asked, produce
much evidence to justify their belief.
That would not matter
if the theory were not being continually questioned, or if it were less
influential on our thinking. Indeed, Freud thought that the three most severe
blows that scientific research had inflicted on 'man's craving for grandiosity'
were those associated with the work of Copernicus (which displaced the earth
from the centre of the universe), the work of Darwin (which displaced humans
from the privileged position conferred by the first two chapters of Genesis),
and his own work. Not many people now would agree with Freud's assumption of
the third place in the trio, but there can be no doubt about the claims of
Copernicus and Darwin. And though, unlike Copernicus's “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”, Darwin's writings were never
placed on the Index, and Darwin himself was to be buried in Westminster Abbey
with a brace of dukes and an earl among his pall bearers, it is his work that
necessitated the more profound readjustments of orthodox religious beliefs.
(From "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind" by Ian Glynn)