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In a review of Loren Eiseley’s book, The Unexpected Universe, W. H. Auden wrote, “I must openly state my own bias and say that I do not believe in Chance; I believe in Providence and Miracles.”
When Auden wrote those words, he was writing about Natural Selection and the role that Chance plays in life through that process. His expression places Chance and Natural Selection in opposition to Providence and Miracles. Auden wrote with grace about this opposition by referring to his own bias.
Albert Einstein stated the opposition elegantly, but with less grace: “God does not play dice with the universe.”
George Gaylord Simpson, who sided with Chance rather than Providence, stated the opposition more forcefully and without grace: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
Thomas Huxley referred to this opposition as the great gulf between science and religion – whether Chance or Providence, indifference or benevolence, rules the universe.
The opposition matters. If the outcomes in the game of life are governed by Chance, then the intelligent strategy for life is to cheat when we can, and to hedge when we cannot cheat. If life is ruled by Providence, then the intelligent strategy is to negotiate with Providence, and, when we cannot negotiate, to pray for mercy.
Although reflexively I agree with Auden, I find it hard to sustain his bias. My mind wants to concede some benevolence to Natural Selection and its partner Chance.
I think Simpson’s expression exaggerates the purposelessness of Natural Selection, of Nature, of the role of Chance in Nature. Darwin did not assert what Simpson asserted, and Darwin, like Auden, wrote with grace. Darwin observed that Natural Selection works to the benefit of each specie. In The Origin of the Species, Chapter 4, he wrote that Nature selects “for the good of the being which she tends.”
Darwin’s expression leaves room for negotiation with Providence. It leaves room for prayer.
When, in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin thought about humanity’s capability to look back into the past and ahead into the future, he found it difficult to believe that the universe is the result of chance and necessity and he wrote, in his autobiography, “I deserve to be called a theist.” This is what theologians call a confession of faith or a statement about a person’s belief.
When, in the twentieth century, Loren Eiseley thought about humanity’s capability to see the past and future, he found it difficult to not feel lonely because humanity is the only animal that evolution has given this capability. In an essay, The Long Loneliness, he wrote “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.”
Eiseley wrote, “Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend.” He observed that they do not know their past or their future. We were shaped by the same natural forces, but we do know the past and future. We know our history, he wrote, “until the day of our death.” We are alone with that knowledge. We are alone with the knowledge that natural selection, a natural law built on chance and necessity, is the creator of our species and theirs. That is the confession of Loren Eiseley and it is ours.
In Darwin’s century it was still possible to think of God in connection with life and humanity, even for the man who discovered that natural selection, not creation, accounts for the origin of the species, even though belief in God had begun to wane. In Eiseley’s century it was more difficult to think of God in that connection.
After reading Darwin humanity learned to look to the tree of life to understand itself, rather than to the heavens. It was our relationship with Nature, not with God, that we sought to understand. It was with animals, not angels, that we began to compare ourselves.
Humanity could once confess, “In life and death we belong to God.” We were alienated from God by sin, but we were not alone. Now we confess, “In life and death we belong to Nature.” Although we find our origin in Nature, which like God is greater than ourselves, we are alienated from Nature as we were from God and the alienation is deeper and more complete than it ever was from God. In Eiseley’s version of our confession, knowledge of the past and future separates us from the other creatures in the tree of life. We know what they do not know. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge and our eyes are opened. Now we know: we are alone.
In Origin of the Species, Chapter 3, Darwin wrote: “A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase.” The expression, “struggle for existence,” means death. He explains that if a specie did not suffer high rates of death, soon the planet would be overwhelmed with that specie.
Darwin wrote, “The causes that check the natural tendency of each species to increase in number are most obscure.” Among the “obscure causes” he identified is climate change. He wrote, “Climate plays an important part in determining the average numbers of a species, and periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought, I believe to be the most effective of all checks.” The expression, “check,” means killer.
Climate change will check the number of many species, including humanity. Consider the future, in Darwin’s words: “… in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals, whether of the same or of distinct species, which subsist on the same kind of food. Even when climate, for instance extreme cold, acts directly, it will be the least vigorous, or those which have got least food through the advancing winter, which will suffer most.”
High rates of death are part of natural selection, but what might happen if humanity elects to intervene through human selection? If we could stop or slow the climate change or if we could protect the “least vigorous” from destruction, would the result be better? Is it really possible for humanity to avoid the pattern of death upon which natural selection depends? Is it not inevitable that humanity will be checked by the “obscure causes?”
The modern mind does not believe in obscure causes.
Darwin did not write about genetic engineering, nor even about genes. He lived before their time. Nevertheless, genetic engineering is a form of human selection (e.g., breeding domestic animals and plants to have certain traits) that began before anyone spoke of genes and Darwin did say this (in Origin of the Species, Chapter 4) comparing human selection with natural selection: “Man selects for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
I don’t believe humanity really knows how to select for its own good. Darwin thought we do not. He ridiculed human selection, saying: “Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him….How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.”
It seems that from Darwin’s perspective, human selection is not only anthropocentric, it is foolish, and so genetic engineering is foolish. The wiser path for humanity is to leave selection to nature because species and varieties of species selected by the long, slow process of nature “should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship.”
Proponents of genetic engineering, and other forms of human selection, it seems, may believe that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species as Darwin wrote, but they do not appear to see the risk that Darwin saw. It seems: they agree with Darwin on the role of natural selection in the origin of the species, but not on its value for the future of the species; they do not agree that our our wishes and efforts are fleeting or that the products of human selection are poor; they implicitly hold that humanity is ready and able to assume control of selection, of life.
Human selection is not new, of course. It began at least with herding and agriculture. Maybe it began before that. One might argue its long history shows that human selection is safe. But is that history really long? No. The years in which human selection has been practiced are short when measured by geological time and by the long periods of time over which natural selection produced its species. Darwin is probably as right about our future as he is about our past.
It seems incongruent to believe that natural selection explains the origin of the species and to believe that human selection holds any hope for the future of any species.
According to Darwin’s argument in Origin of the Species, the traits that enable species to survive and have offspring are passed to succeeding generations. The result is, more or less, that each specie adapts by evolution to the condition of the world finding for itself a comfortable niche. The comfortable niche lasts a long time: until conditions in the world change and the specie becomes extinct. That long lasting comfort, which has been attained through the struggle of a specie to survive, may be the reason that to many of us the natural world seems benevolent. If so, then the apparent benevolence of nature, of the cosmos, is reducible to adaptation and benevolence is like a mask covering the indifferent face of natural selection.
The struggle to survive often involves cruelty. According to Darwin, natural selection does not operate on scruples. Cruelty and kindness are the same in the operation of natural selection – the selfish expression of an overriding concern: survival.
The indifferent ethic of natural selection is not admirable to people who value kindness and abhor cruelty. An ethic that is indifferent to cruelty and kindness is a dark ethic.
I suppose that indifference to cruelty for the sake of survival is not as bad as malevolence, but it disturbs me to think that life, my life, was born of such indifference. It frightens and depresses me to think that benevolence is a mask covering the indifferent face of the process of life. If benevolence is an illusion, and the indifferent expression on the true face signifies a selfish urge, I fear that it means that we, the species of planet earth, are hideous. I fear that it means that I am hideous and that the angel that gave birth to me is hideous and I hate that thought with all my heart.
Darwin and Thoreau are the preeminent naturalists. I return to their writings again and again to check my bearings. Their words have influenced our thinking, my thinking, so much about nature and life – what they are and what they mean – and about humanity – who we are and how to live.
Darwin perhaps started out to find out what nature is and who we are, but inevitably his findings bear heavily on what nature means and how we live. Thoreau started out perhaps in the opposite direction to find out what nature means and how to live, but his findings are likewise important to what nature is and who we are.
In the chapter of Walden titled, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau wrote that he went to the woods to find out whether life is “mean” or “sublime,” whether this world and life are “of the Devil or of God.” In writing Walden he seemed to have found that life is sublime and of God. Darwin’s findings are harder to assess, but I think not dissimilar. Natural selection depends on so much cruelty, and yet, by ultimately favoring variations that promote the life of a species, it seems more sublime than mean.
At the very end of Walden, Thoreau recounts a story he had heard, a parable, about a strong and beautiful bug that hatched from an egg deposited long ago in a living apple tree that had since been cut and made into a farmer’s table. He wrote that the bug was “heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn.” Thoreau asked, “Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?”
Thoreau went into the woods to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Thoreau went into the woods to be born anew and to gnaw his way to life like the bug that was born embedded in the wood of the farmers table and gnawed his way to the surface. It is the same urge to live that drives natural selection.
Neither Darwin nor Thoreau had a conventional faith. Darwin was an agnostic who believed prayer had no meaning. Still, he wondered whether the “immense and wonderful universe” was the work of God. Thoreau wrote that most people have “somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” and yet he felt his faith in resurrection strengthened by nature and by hearing the story of the bug that emerged so improbably from the farmer’s table.
The writings of Darwin and Thoreau help me keep my bearings. When I feel most lost, though, it is not the writings of Darwin or Thoreau that I read. When I feel most lost I read ancient words that speak to the meaning of nature and life. I often read Psalm 104, the nature psalm. The words are different there than in Darwin and Thoreau, but I think the sentiment is the same. I hear in the psalm, as in the writings of Darwin and Thoreau, praise for the immense wonder and beauty of life. Psalm 104, verse 24: “O Lord, how manifold are thou works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.” Somehow, in these words, I find my way again.
So beautiful they are: chollas facing the sun. Their posture, their arms lifted towards the sky, and their shimmering spines and the way they seem to walk together on a hillside towards the sun suggest that there is an importance to life apart from humanity just as there is importance to the sun beyond the earth. This is the wisdom of chollas and other desert Copernicans.
This place is a high desert meadow. It bears the name Indian Potrero because cattle have grazed here and it was not hard to seal the ends of the meadow to form a corral.
The meadow is a fine place to spend a day imagining wilderness. Until just a hundred and fifty years ago it had not been grazed.
The potrero, which is such an unfortunate name for this meadow, for any meadow, is a place where one can imagine life before agriculture, before industry, when a man or woman or clan or small tribe could graze for food in the meadow and drink from the creek and bathe in the stone pools at the edge.
This former Eden is preserved now by wealthy casino owners, descendants of the small tribe that once lived here. Actually, it is not really preserved; it is, rather, on display for the admiration of hikers who pay the admission price to see it and the rest of the land of which it is part. No one grazes here now. The landscape, as beautiful as it is, has changed from the way it was before cattle grazed here, before the fires were suppressed, before it was placed on display.
On display here are cactus and other flowering plants, sand and rocks, the high peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains, boulders, waterfalls, and stone pools. Admission is $8.
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