Darwin had made such an error. His book was based on wild assumptions and hardly any evidence. His entire argument hinged on this new idea of natural selection. And yet, Wilberforce wrote, “Has any one such instance ever been discovered? We fearlessly assert not one.”
Instead, Wilberforce argued for a loose mix of Paley and Owen. “All creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the Most High—that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation pervades His works, because it exists as in its centre and highest found-head in Him the Lord of All.”
When Wilberforce ended his speech, he looked to Huxley. He asked him, half-jokingly, whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that he descended from an ape.
Later Huxley would tell Darwin and others that at that moment he turned to a friend seated next to him, struck his hand to his knee, and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.” He stood and lashed back at Wilberforce. He declared that nothing that the bishop had said was at all new, except his question about Huxley’s ancestry. “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”
The audience broke out in laughter, until a man whom Hooker described as “a gray-haired Roman-nosed elderly gentleman” stood in the center of the audience, quaking in rage. It was Captain FitzRoy.
FitzRoy and Darwin had grown cool to each other over the years. The captain thought that Darwin’s book about the Beagle’s voyage was self-serving and ignored all the help Darwin had gotten from FitzRoy and his crew. Although FitzRoy had dabbled in Lyell’s ancient geology, he had returned to a strict reading of the Bible. In his own book about the voyage, FitzRoy tried to account for all that he and Darwin had encountered with Noah’s Flood. He had been appalled to watch Darwin move even further into heresy, not only abandoning the Flood, but even God’s work.
The captain had come to Oxford to give a talk about storms, and he happened to get wind of the talk by Draper. After Huxley finished, FitzRoy stood and spoke of how he had been dismayed that Darwin entertained views that contradicted the Bible. He declared that reading Origin of Species had brought him “acutest pain.” He lifted up both his arms over his head, a Bible clutched in his hands, and asked the audience to believe in God, not man. Whereupon the crowd shouted him down.
Finally it was Joseph Hooker’s turn. He climbed to the podium to attack Wilberforce. Later he wrote to Darwin about his speech. “I proceeded to demonstrate that 1) he could never have read your book, 2) he was absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Botanical Science and the meeting was dissolved forthwith, leaving you master of the field.”
If Darwin was master of the field, he was a missing master. Practically a recluse now at age 50, he stayed away from the Oxford meeting. As Hooker and Huxley defended him, he was spending a few weeks in the village of Richmond, where he was being treated yet again for his chronic illness. There he read the letters of his friends, describing their speeches, with an ailing awe. “I would have soon have died as tried to answer the Bishop in such an assembly,” he wrote to Hooker.
The Oxford meeting quickly became a legend, and as with all legends, what really happened receded behind a fog bank of embellishment. Each of the players in the drama offered his own version, in which he came off best. Wilberforce was convinced that he had won the debate, while Huxley and Hooker each thought they had delivered the fatal blow to the bishop. To this day, it’s not clear what happened, and Darwin himself had a hard time figuring out what took place that warm day in June. Only one thing was certain to him: his 20 years of hiding were over.
In Darwin’s own lifetime, he would become recognized as one of the great masters of science. By the 1870s, almost all serious scientists in Britain had accepted evolution, although they might argue with Darwin about how it unfolded. His statue stands at the Natural History Museum in London, and he lays buried in Westminster Abbey, close by Newton’s grave.
But the great irony of Origin of Species is that only in the twentieth century would its true power be recognized. Only then did paleontologists and geologists work out the chronology of life on Earth. Only then did biologists uncover the molecules that underlie heredity and natural selection. And only then did they begin to truly comprehend how powerfully evolution shapes everything on Earth, from a cold virus to the human brain.
Three
Deep Time Discovered
Geologists have their own mecca, a stretch of the Acasta River deep in the Northwest Territories in Canada. You can get there only by canoeing for days up the river or by flying a float plane north from the town of Yellowknife, over an expanse of half land, half water. The water takes the form of thousands of lakes and ponds, some strung together into blobby rivers, in every shape that Ice Age glaciers could possibly carve. You ski to a landing near a spindly island in the middle of the river. The shore is covered with black spruce, reindeer moss, heather, and lichens. Chirping plovers cut the silence, and blackflies and mosquitoes drill your skin.
A wall of exposed rock tumbles down to the water, and you can clamber down among the boulders. The rocks here are granite, dark gray hunks flecked with bits of feldspar that look pretty much like any other piece of granite you may have encountered. They are exceptional in only one way: some of them are more than 4 billion years old, which makes them the oldest known rocks on Earth. From our planet’s infancy the minerals that made them up have held together, as continents have been torn apart and fused back together.
Their age is so vast that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Think of a year as equaling the length of your outstretched arms. To equal the age of the Acasta rocks, you’d have to hold hands in a line of people circling the Earth 200 times. But as hard as it may be to imagine, it is a picture that would have made Darwin very happy.
When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, he could not have known the great age of the Acasta rocks. The physics required to determine their antiquity was still 50 years away. Darwin suspected that the world was spectacularly old, which certainly would agree well with his theory of gradual, generation-upon-generation evolution. But it was only during the twentieth century that paleontologists and geologists precisely mapped the terra incognita of Earth’s history. They discovered a way to establish not just the order in which new life-forms appeared on Earth, but their actual dates in history, from the earliest signs of life more than 3.85 billion years ago, to the earliest animals 600 million years ago, to the first members of our own species 150,000 years ago.
Of all the objections that were raised against Darwin, be they religious, biological, or geological, one of the most troubling to him was over the age of the planet. It came not from a bishop, a biologist, or a geologist, but from an unexpected source: a physicist.
William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin) was one of the world’s leading physicists when Darwin first published Origin of Species. For Kelvin, the universe was a swirl of energy, electricity, and heat. He demonstrated how electricity acted like a fluid, just like water. He also showed how entropy dominates the universe: everything goes from order to disorder unless it receives energy to keep it organized. Burn a candle down to its stump, and the soot, gases, and heat that it releases will never spontaneously join back together into a candle.