The Origin of the Species is “myth,” in the way Mircea Eliade uses the word myth – a story that tells how “a reality came into existence.”

Eliade wrote: “To tell how things came into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence? Eliade explains: “The why is always implied in the how — for the simple reason that to tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.”

The Origin of the Species is, in this sense, a religious story. Although Darwin’s intention was to tell a story that did not involve God, it makes us think of God, not just because it reminds us of Genesis, but because its genre is myth.

In the story told in The Origin of the Species, the species have emerged through a long struggle for survival. The struggle theme is also found in the ancient near eastern myths in which the cosmos emerged from a struggle between a god and a great sea monster, the god representing order and the sea monster representing chaos. Through the course of history, that myth became part of the western mosaic of myths and became a paradigm that has guided our attitudes and actions, which is what Eliade said myths do. The Origin of the Species is the latest retelling of that myth, but in the retelling the paradigm has changed.

In the new myth, order is not imposed on chaos by a god, but by the organisms of life themselves. The organisms have fought the battle themselves. This is the paradigm that guides our attitudes and actions in modernity.

The ancient myth explained the existence of an agrarian world ruled by kings and queens and emperors. The myth retold in The Origin of the Species explains an industrial world ruled by democracies and free markets. In the retold myth, we do not fight sea monsters, but each other and the world is not one given to us by a god, but one we have won or made for ourselves.