Kindle Notes & Highlights
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December 22 - December 29, 2021
There is nothing, however, in “the present state of things” that offers any hint at the origin of this fuller measure of man, and so Whewell suggests the geologist may close his own volume and “open one which has man’s moral and religious nature for its subject.”69 Darwin takes up Whewell’s challenge by seeking an account of man’s moral nature anchored in science and the present state of things.
His analysis is really about establishing the kinship of moral and social instincts in ape and human.
In effect he derives utility from the instincts that must obtain in order for social animals to survive.
The heart of his analysis is to trace the development of moral sensibilities from the most fundamental qualities of life for social animals.
More than a prompt, Whewell gave Darwin a well-formed direction.
Our study suggests a different set of inferences. While we certainly agree that Darwin was troubled by his experiences in Tierra del Fuego, the difference between civilized humans and the most degraded savages was hardly narrow. Darwin had been stunned, but he did not see the Fuegians of the islands as more animal-like. Rather, he saw their meagerness and ignorance as “accident” and not “essence,” a thesis proved by Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and York Minster.
As such, it guarantees that Fuegian behavior was not a true window into the human character, but rather a window into how wretched the conditions were in that most inhospitable land. Tierra del Fuego was so wretched, it was hard—literally—to be human.
It’s not that the Fuegians were “animal-like”—we are all animal-like.
But the matter of geographical speciation only gained clarity when he met with Gould and the differences between Darwin and Gould highlight that Darwin was already receptive soil to the notion that life had evolved. This suggests that the importance of the Galapagos Islands had more to do with the processes of speciation than as a provocation of his thinking about evolution in the first place. It further suggests that the fact that Darwin has been a closed story has masked how much thought Darwin had given to these issues.
We have proposed here that his family life had been so vital and full of love that it shaped his sense that such was the natural state of things and that for it to be so profoundly otherwise suggests that life there had been cruelly harsh—that is, Bergeret’s lemma.
How ironic that so many have feared Darwin’s work as a godless theory which debases our self-image.
“What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.”84 It turns out Darwin was,
Jemmy Button sensed that in Darwin; he brought him two spear-heads.
“By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. . . . But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest.”
Species will move toward “empty spaces,” with adaptations that enable them to survive. This is the essential lesson of the Galapagos. Further, Darwin underlines that it is a blind motion.
The image challenges us to enter that space and feel our way to Darwin’s “center of fate”—his analytical “nature,” that seedling growing out from his learning and his sense for how things are and ought to be, pushing itself forward, led by the press of a deeply felt problem.
But that, in effect, was what Darwin had done.
Nature had spoken to him as Yahweh had spoken to Abraham of a corrupt humanity, and like Abraham, the young man pushed back. There was good and it must somehow be secured.
