Darwin insisted that evolution is a purely automatic process that excludes all “apparent” design. He believed that complex life appears to be intentionally designed, but it is only the result of selected random mutations.

This overreach of biology into metaphysics has profound moral consequences that even troubled Darwin. Not exactly the poster boy for the relentless survival of the fittest, Darwin was so sick for most of his life that he could barely work.

Yet this same Charles Darwin, a devout father of sickly children, argued that the human unfit-the sick, the weak, the physically or morally deformed-were a drag on the upward drive of human evolution.

You probably picture Charles Darwin in the way that he has been popularly portrayed: as a serene, Moses-like, bearded sage of science who, unruffled by merely human worries, brings to humanity the great truths of its humble origins. As with all great men, he seems to be above the ordinary worries and cares of mere mortals.

That's not the real Charles Darwin. The real Charles Darwin was plagued with headaches, spent a good part of his life nauseous and vomiting, and was covered with eczema. He reminds one of the biblical Job, except that for Darwin, the test was whether in his great suffering (which included the death of three of his children), he would give up his belief in an entirely God-less account of evolution. He did not. With the patience of Job, he held out until the end.

Darwin didn't start out with bad health. In fact, he enjoyed rather robust health, unlike his sickly and effete brother, Erasmus. Charles was an avid outdoorsman from earliest years, preferring to roam the fields in search of beetles, interesting rocks, and exotic plants, rather than spend his time studying Latin and Greek. As with all good English country gentleman, he had a passion for dogs, riding horses, and most of all, hunting. He loved guns, and he was a crack shot.

His love of the outdoors, and his scientific mind, made him a perfect fit to sail on the HMS Beagle. He left England's shores on December 27, 1831 to travel around the world as a naturalist on this now-famous ninety-foot boat. His adventures, set down in his first major work Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H. M. S. Beagle, made him a famous man before he was even thirty. The Journal launched his scientific career, which would culminate in his even more famous, Origin of Species.

Here's the strange thing, a deeply ironic thing. Darwin was no sailor, to say the least. He wasn't very far from England's shores, when he became violently seasick. Headaches, nausea, and vomiting. And he never really recovered. Ever.

He was sick nearly the whole time he was at sea during the Beagle's five-year voyage. But violent nausea wouldn't end when he finally stepped off ship. The voyage of the Beagle marked the beginning of Darwin's life-long struggle against his head and stomach. Whatever the cause of his perpetual bouts of retching later on—a strange "bug" picked up on his odyssey, frail nerves, his addiction to taking snuff, a diet rich in sweets, a hereditary malady—he spent nearly his entire life as if he'd never gotten off the Beagle, suffering long periods of debilitating nausea and vomiting, accompanied by headaches, interrupted only occasionally by bouts of good health. Whatever our romantic notions of Darwin the scientist, his work during and after the Beagle was nearly always carried on as a stumbling man on a wambling ship deck. And to his credit, he suffered it all with surprisingly good spirits.

Here is where the irony becomes acute. In the twenty years that followed, in which Darwin was working assiduously on his theory of evolution, he was a classic evolutionary misfit. At the heart of Darwin's evolutionary theory is the destruction of the unfit, and the survival and successful breeding of the fit. That's what makes evolution work. If the unfit survive, then evolution regresses, because the weak, the sickly, and the malformed breed just as much as the strong, the healthy, and the well-formed. To make evolution go forward—and this obviously includes human evolution—the unfit have got to be ruthlessly picked off.

How many times did Darwin have to put down his pen because he was too sick even to think, let alone sit up? It wasn't just nausea and continual retching. He began to develop a litany of other maladies: eczema, boils so painful he couldn't sit down and work, constipation, and most embarrassing of all, chronic flatulence that ensured he could spend very little time in polite company.

Even more ironic, Darwin's own children inherited his physical frailty. His third child, Mary Eleanor Darwin, born in 1842, lived only a few weeks. His favorite daughter, Anne, would die in 1851, at the age of ten. His last child, named Charles, would die in the summer of 1858, just before his joint paper (with Alfred Wallace) announced to the world the theory of evolution through natural selection.

Darwin knew he was frail. He fretted continually about being the hereditary source of his own children's frail health. Yet, he embraced a theory that worked precisely by killing off people like him and his children.

He even wrote another book called The Descent of Man in which he warned of the grave dangers to society of allowing the sick to live and breed. We end with his chilling words from the Descent, adding on his behalf, only that he didn't call for the direct extermination of the weak. He chose the soft eugenic line: just don't let the unfit breed.

Savages obey the laws of natural selection, Darwin asserted, because they don't have the modern means to fight off the ravages of illness. As a consequence, "the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health."

"We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Et tu, Darwin?

In the early 1800s Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposed that acquired characteristics deliberately cultivated by the parent, such as a giraffe stretching its neck to better reach foliage, may pass to offspring. Darwin would have none of this intentionality; all variations are purely random. It appears now that Lamarck may be right.

For too long, scientists have assumed that there isn’t anything “above” the gene. That is, anything that appeared to be above the gene—the cell, and more importantly, the larger multi-celled organism and everything it is, does, and ever will do—they declared to be reducible to the gene. If we map the entire genome—the entire genetic sequence—then human nature will be an open book. Having cracked the code, we’ll be able to read our form and fate.

Such was the doctrine of necessity, but “it ain’t necessarily so.” According to science writer Ethan Watters, the recent work of epigeneticists “has made it increasingly clear that for all the popular attention devoted to genome-sequencing projects, the epigenome is just as critical as DNA to the healthy development of organisms. Researchers found that affectionate mother rats actually had a positive effect on their offspring after they were born.

The nurturing activity (licking their young) actually caused the hippocampus in the brain of offspring to develop more fully and to release less of a particular stress hormone, cortisol. The result: calmer, less skittish rats. The rats with cold and distant mothers, by contrast, were nervous and timid, and developed smaller hippocampi.

Why? The mother’s motherly licking released serotonin in her little pups’ brains, which nudges the hippocampus to send a protein message to turn on genes that inhibit stress. A little motherly love, and DNA is no longer destiny.

From mice (and rats) to men? What does it mean?

To begin with, this crack in reductionism cannot help but become bigger and bigger. If mere diet changes and a little motherly love can have such dramatic effects, what else might change our DNA expression from a pre-written script, to a story we help write, both for ourselves and our offspring?

Epigenetics therefore represents a major shift…back to common sense. Predestinarian DNA-ism denies the common sense notion that what we choose to do and not to do has a real effect on our lives and the lives of others. But if such small changes makes such large differences in mice and rats, what we human beings choose to do and not to do could make a world of difference. Free will is not only real; to a yet undetermined extent, it can override DNA.

But these latest scientific discoveries also spell the end of the reductionist paradigm of neo-Darwinism. As with Darwinism, neo-Darwinism wanted to keep everything simple. The chant that DNA is destiny was a way to make life, including human life, so simple that it needed no other explanation than that provided by brute materialism.

Neo-Darwinians therefore claimed that they could explain all of human life in all its complexity in terms of genes—bodies, minds, romance, art, literature, passions, pursuits, politics, religion, music. All could be put down to which genes won out in the struggle for survival, and some occasional happy mutations.

Now it seems like the reverse. The greatest effect on our genes might be epigenetic. Beautiful music, deep romance, and great art could yield just as significantly beneficial results as motherly and fatherly affection. Suddenly, epigenetically caused gene expression is as much if not more important than the genes themselves.

This presents a serious difficulty to neo-Darwinism.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Epigenetics: Genome, Meet Your Environment

As the evidence accumulates for epigenetics, researchers reacquire a taste for Lamarckism.

"The environmental lability of epigenetic inheritance may not necessarily bring to mind Lamarckian images of giraffes stretching their necks to reach the treetops (and then giving birth to progeny with similarly stretched necks), but it does give researchers reason to reconsider long-refuted notions about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck proposed that environmental cues could cause phenotypic changes transmittable to offspring. 'He had basically good idea but a bad example,' says Rohl Oflsson, Uppsala University, Sweden."

The Scientist

https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/b360905554fdb7d985256ec5006a7755?OpenDocument

Dr. Benjamin Wiker responds to a reader's letter

The Original Letter:
This is interesting but I think completely mis-represents Darwin, who at one point studied to become an anglican parson and considered himself a christian. He wasn't interested in removing God from moral or natural life. In fact he saw nature studies as natural theology. At Cambridge Darwin enjoyed the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity. Darwin studied Paley's Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He graduated in January 1831 from Cambridge and 4 weeks later left for a 4+ year voyage on the HMS Beagle. He was dismayed by how others later used his theory to promote social darwinianism, which he saw as taking it much too far, beyond empirical implications. But he also considered himself a scientist and believed that truth could overcome such misinterpretation. (My own opinion is that many people will be surprised to see him in heaven because so many Christians have vilified him.) Later Darwin joined a group of social scientists who thought God was the orchestrator of natural laws and by studying them we gain insight into Him. Darwin did think that morality was present in humanity through natural selection, but I think would have said that God set it up so moral virtues increase species' survivability. I think he would have argued that that natural selection was the mechanism God used to bring us to His higher moral standard.

I do not think that Wilberforce knew Darwin. He died in 1833 when Darwin had just graduated from college and was on his first voyage on the Beagle and before Origin of the Species was thought of or published. When it came out there was a storm of discussion and anger which surprised Darwin.

I think Dr. Wilker should get the money back that he spent on his PhD and he should check his facts.

Well, I think it’s too late to get the money back for my Ph.D., but I try to be very careful about the checking the facts. In the case of Darwin, I’ve had to be doubly careful because of what I call “the Darwin Myth,” the glowing but confused portrait of Charles Darwin that has controlled our understanding of the man and his legacy for well over a century. I can tell by the objections of the letter-writer that she is relying on older scholarship, and directly or indirectly, Charles Darwin’s own Autobiography.

A different, much more ambiguous, and much more human portrait of Darwin has emerged from the sustained scholarship on his life over the last twenty years. Here, I cannot recommend too highly Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and Janet Browne’s two volume Charles Darwin. They are both excellent, but I think have not gone far enough in correcting the myths surrounding Darwin’s life, so I have written The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.

So, on to the facts. First the easy ones. You are confusing William Wilberforce (1759-1833) with Samuel Wilberforce, his son (1805-1873). Darwin took his final exams at Cambridge in January 1831, officially graduated in the Spring of 1831, but the HMS Beagle didn’t leave Plymouth England until December 27, 1831. Finally, Darwin was not surprised at all by the “storm” that broke when he published the Origin of Species in 1859. Indeed, it was fear of the storm that caused him to delay publishing anything on evolution for about twenty years. He had the basics of his argument by the early 1840s, and knew the radical implications for morality and religion would not go down well in conservative English society.

And now the difficult ones. Darwin was studying to become an Anglican parson, but not out of any devotion to the Anglican Church. The Darwins were several generation Whig freethinkers. The grandfather Erasmus Darwin was at best a very thin theist, and Charles father, Robert Darwin, was almost assuredly an atheist. Both Erasmus and Robert Darwin were famous physicians. Robert had originally sent Charles to medical school at Edinburgh, but Charles more or less flunked out because (in Charles own self-deprecating words) he was “an idle sporting man.” As Robert said to him, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Sending him to Cambridge was an act of desperation on his father’s part, a way to find a living for his “idle sporting” son. Charles accepted the idea, not out of any piety on his part, but because a country parsonage would allow him to continue shooting, running dogs, collecting beetles, and generally enjoying life in the life of a country gentleman.

Darwin gives the impression in his Autobiography that, at this time, he believed in the Anglican Creed and the literal truth of the Bible, but this is surely disingenuous on his part. The Darwins were liberal Whigs, three-generation religious skeptics, and heirs to the Enlightenment acid critique of scriptural literalism and dogmatic belief. That Charles would suddenly have become a devout Anglican and biblical literalist, against his entire upbringing, is quite difficult to believe. Charles did, I believe, have a kind of blush of theism while at Cambridge, given his friendship with the Anglican parson-scientists John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick, and that is when Paley was most attractive to him. But this did not last. By the time he was about to marry Emma Wedgwood at the beginning of 1839, he had to confess to her that, like his own father and her father, he was an unbeliever. This nearly broke Emma’s heart.

Darwin did in fact eliminate God from his account of evolution; that is, he devised a systematic way, natural selection, that made divine intervention impossible. He knew what he was doing. Much to his discredit, he later offered theological-sounding sops to readers to blunt criticism of his theory, and make it more acceptable. He even added a line about the “Creator” to his Origin of Species, about which he later quite candidly admitted to his friend Hooker, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used [a] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process.” Anyone who still holds to the myth that Darwin allowed, even invited God, into his account of evolution or that he in some way remained a Christian must read the biographies by Desmond and Moore, Browne, and yours truly.

Now for morality. Here, if I may be perhaps too blunt, you couldn’t be more wrong. During the two decades between the time he stepped off the Beagle and when he published the Origin Darwin carefully worked out the implications of his evolutionary theory for human beings, but he left them out of the Origin because they were so shocking. A little more than a decade later, he was ready to publish what he really thought, and everyone should read Darwin’s Descent of Man. He wrote it precisely because some of his staunchest allies—Charles Lyell, William Wallace, and Asa Gray—insisted on a theistic account of evolution that allowed God to guide human evolution and define human morality. Darwin would have no part of it, and wrote the Descent to convince them, and everyone else, that evolution, not God, was the sole cause of morality and religion. The results are not pretty. In the Descent Darwin makes clear that he is indeed the father of social Darwinism, the modern eugenics movement, and “scientific” racism. - Dr. Benjamin Wiker

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