Ian Bell
According to a survey conducted recently, 75% of British people don't get Charles Darwin. Astounding. That's three from four. That's most of the two-legged beings you are liable to meet. That's almost everyone at the check-out. That's most of your blood relatives.
It should come as no surprise, however. Reportedly, these folk harbour "doubts" as to natural selection. They incline instead towards myths with a comforting whiff of refutation and brimstone. They are otherwise persuaded, despite a ton of evidence. People, as ever, believe what they want to believe.
Perhaps, though, they also demonstrate, at a monkey-never-typing-Hamlet stroke, that there might be less to this evolution business than the brochures claimed. Chimps will be chimps.
Speaking as a monkey's uncle's less popular nephew, I don't mind. If I have read Darwin half-way right, employing both opposable thumbs to prop up the book, natural selection depends on a majority always missing the point. Then we kill and eat them.
Metaphorically speaking, obviously. I have no wish to chew your leg. But consider things from my evolutionary point of view. Here I am on a planet upon which, reportedly, two billion beings profess a Christian outlook. By my count, thumbs included, that's two thousand million mammals who are mildly mentally ill. Or blessed.
They concede, some of them, that Darwin had a point as to the viability of species. They admit that the poetry of a six-day Big Bang tends more to the spiritual than the scientific. They are not against science, as such, and have not burned anyone alive for ages and ages.
But they tell me, while approving miracles, canonising the extra-holy, opposing stem cell research, and abortion, and birth control, and gay people, and bad words, and the simple ability to think independently, that natural selection is only a theory. Only.
God bless the Jesuitical, for no one else would dare. A theory? Only? It makes the progress of all existence sound like Some Bloke's Best Guess. It renders Darwin's insights as the equal and opposite to your local witch doctor's story about women torn from the ribs of men. It demands intellectual equivalence, the suspending of faculties, and respect for "belief". Always respect.
But that's OK. Two hundred years and a day or so after Darwin's birth, I raise no secular deities. I can't stick Richard Dawkins, for one thing, any more than I can the cassocked types who are "hurt" by my non-belief.
All of the Arguments for God (we capitalised them, in my day) are nonsensical. So - and these two words might well comprise the only philosophical statement worth making - what?
Here's Darwin and a few interesting budgies. Here's a man so cowed by his times that he waits 20 years to publish a heartfelt statement of his accumulated research. He does so finally because the scientific record, to which he has contributed copiously, says that the pre-existing God-shaped reality is wobbling.
Then he loses his taste for the supernatural, once and for all. This was always the most moving part of the Darwin parable. He could cope with fundamental change, and with the need for living things to adapt, alter, adapt to alteration, and change the process of adaptation. What Darwin could not abide, as a thinking microbe, was the notion of a presiding holy force oblivious to hellish suffering.
He noticed. Things kill and eat other things. Some of those things out there just want a good lunch, with or without a decent Chianti. They select, naturally, from a menu. Ripping the head or the guts from a fellow being, or planting a ravenous offspring in its flesh, has no moral resonance in that world. Life is not an M&S advert. It's not, as Darwin understood, scripture, either.
Hence the continuing religious campaign against On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Hence the great human mass still clinging to superstition, the insistence that creationism is an "alternative" to natural selection worthy of consideration in a science class. Hence, indeed, the specious claim that natural selection does not preclude a Creator.
That was not Darwin's thinking when he stopped attending church. He could grasp how life worked, more or less. What he ceased to accept was the notion that a god could take credit for the relentless cruelty involved and call it glorious. Darwin revealed the staggering complexity and beauty of the natural world, but his real offence - let's be blunt - was to encourage blasphemy.
Did an originating force allow throats to be ripped, or lend licence to man's recreational feeding habits? Is God so good that he allows children to die because their God-given equipment is substandard? Things evolve, but the process is slow, painful, and never pretty. As Darwin did not write: if this was God's best shot, questions are in order.
Darwin dispensed with the gift of faith and left the rest of us with the after-dinner speeches of the faithful. These days some still peddle the creation myth. Others attempt to restore the omnipotent intelligent designer (why just one, and why the fixation with appalling diseases?). What does George W Bush truly believe about the nature of reality? What does Barack Obama, fresh from a "prayer breakfast" with the devout Tony Blair, actually believe? This is not yet a secular world, God help us.
The recent bicentenary celebrations for Darwin's birth have tended to demonstrate two things. First, he is not forgiven, even now, for the destruction of the old fairy tales. Darwinism has a habit of putting the religious on the spot, and of inciting rebellion towards creation myths. So the godly see the Darwin story, above all, as a test of their power.
You doubt me? Even in the 21st century, even with the continually accumulating evidence that natural selection nails it, the men - always the men - in the funny costumes are displeased. Good. Darwin retains a certain provocative utility. We should teach him in schools, surely? But not if some have their way. Creationism, intelligent design and the rest are real and continuing threats to reason and scientific method.
Science, and the arguments therein, holds sway in one arena. Darwin did not anticipate genetics, they say, as though Leonardo failed to grasp laser printers. The authentic eccentrics, meanwhile, continue to pull up the partial dinosaur record to confirm faith in a deity whipping up humanity in a holy blender on a slow Monday morning. They are wrong about the dinosaurs, just as they are wrong about supernatural intervention.
Things die: discuss. Or explain, perhaps, why the "theory" of natural selection describes how life has worked slowly and brutally towards a species capable of contemplating its own slow and brutal nature. Was this the plan? We live, we die, and in between, amid the unending cruelty, we pray?
Mr Darwin's very merry unbirthday seems to have provoked a redoubling of effort from those he dismays. The Vatican, no less, is celebrating (not my word) On the Origin of Species. Men who will not reproduce will speak, I presume, of creation's reproductive urge. Priests and ministers, meanwhile, compete on TV, radio and in the press, to demonstrate their grasp of evolutionary science while denying its import.
Meanwhile, Christian English high-school "academies", with their creationist thought police, are allowing "the theory" to be heard as merely one account among many. It is as though Einstein is being asked to compete with the Tooth Fairy.
Yet Darwin is confirmed, triumphantly, by genetic research. That's a fact. Species, even the praying variety, evolve. Secondly, by implication and inference, there is no God. The non-fact is exhausted whenever someone takes a peek at the human genome.
Personally, I'm not much cheered by that. Unlike Dawkins and his fans, I do not revel in the wonders of a godless universe. Nature is hellish, as often as not, with or without a deity. But I prefer to see things as they are. The credit for that privilege, singular in human history, goes to Charles Darwin.
