08.06.09
Archive: Darwin (Erasmus), discovery of evolution
Archive: December 11, 2005
From an older biography of Erasmus Darwin: the founder of evolutionary theory, along with Lamarck. It is actually quite nice to think that the origins of anything lie in poetry, and so it is with evolution, Darwin’s (Erasmus) composing the discovery of evolution into verse.
To conclude this lengthy chapter [From Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin, Scribner's, 1963] it would perhaps be as well to recapitulate. We first traced the history of the idea of evolution, which was formulated by the Greeks yet remained only a hypothesis till the end of the eighteenth century. Erasmus Darwin showed the reality of evolution by many examples, and specified the essential mechanisms needed to initiate and control the process: first, the fact that some variations in species are inherited (those caused by gene mutations, as we should now put it); and, second, the crucial role of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Lamarck, a few years later, developed the theory further, but in the wrong direction, implying that creatures changed to meet new needs, and passed on those changes to their descendants. Charles Darwin, fifty years later, redeveloped the theory, taking a slightly more Lamarckian position than Erasmus; and convinced the world that it was true by his mass of evidence. Although in several ways Charles did not come so near the modern version of the theory as Erasmus, their contributions are closely linked. Erasmus’s views were
impressed on Charles by his father, and Charles admired Zoonomia in his teens: so it would be natural for him unconsciously to use the same arguments when redeveloping the same theory; and that is just what happened. The link between Erasmus and Charles emerges most strikingly in Charles’s books, all but one being foreshadowed by Erasmus.
Erasmus was far more aware than his successors of the philosophical and religious implications of evolution, and used the theory as the basis for his philosophy of organic happiness. We are all descended, he thought, from a common microscopic ancestor-
Imperious man. . .
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!
So we should look on even the humblest creatures as our cousins, and promote the general happiness of organic life. This community of feeling is unlikely to catch on, because it hits at man’s self-esteem by implying that he is almost com- parable with a corps of worms or a crop of wheat; but the philosophy is unshakeably logical and illuminates subjects as diverse as geology and sexual love. From microscopic ens arose sound philosophic sense.