Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

His theory of the variety of life was elegant: as members of a species reproduce themselves over an immense period of time, random variations occur, generating a bigger beak, a longer toe, or some new, fluffy ear hair. These can be passed on to offspring. If the variation works well in their environment, those individuals thrive and go on to produce more such offspring. If it does not work, they often die without issue. This is how, as he concluded the book, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” It is a vision of majesty, but also of horror, since Darwin admits that it all depends on cycles of failure and suffering. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” Not only does this tell us that life comes from death but also that we might be those “higher animals,” and thus results of such a process, too. At this stage, he says nothing more overt about us than that.