No one claims that Darwin was the first to suggest the idea of evolution, that is, that new

species appear
by modification of older ones rather than divine creation. In fact, his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin,
had written about this at the end of the previous century, but it was Charles Darwin's book, The Origin
of Species, published towards the end of 1859, that sparked off a debate that convinced most scientists
and, indeed, most educated people that evolution was valid as an alternative to a divine creation, which
more conservative figures wanted to retain.

Nowadays, we have another reason for celebrating Darwin's position. Not only was he recognised as the
founder of evolutionism, which happened very rapidly – by the time he died in 1882, he was buried in
Westminster Abbey as a hero of science – but we also recognise him as the originator of the explanation
of how evolution works that is still seen the most plausible today. This is the theory of natural selection.
This was also suggested by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, but Darwin had got the idea earlier and
Wallace himself admitted that Darwin had led the way in promoting the theory.

Natural selection depends on the observation that a population, making up a species, consists of a lot of
individuals who are not the same. They vary amongst themselves. These variations are usually seen as
pretty trivial and undirected. Nowadays, we attribute many of these characteristics to the genes, which
transmit them from one generation to the next. The variations ultimately originate in genetic mutations,
that is, copying errors in the course of transmission. That's why they are pretty undirected, rather than
having any specific purpose. What Darwin realised was that if a species was exposed to a changing
environment, some of those variant characters, just by chance, would turn out to be beneficial, others
harmful. Those that were beneficial would allow the organisms with those characters to survive and
breed better and, of course, vice versa. Over many generations, this would change the makeup of the
population and ultimately a new species would be formed. That's the explanation we use today.

Now, Darwin didn't have the science of genetics. His own ideas on heredity were very different to the
modern ones. Partly, for that reason, but also for others that I'm going to explore, it turns out that
Darwin converted the world to evolutionism even though most people at the time didn't think his theory
of natural selection was the best possible explanation. They didn't like natural selection and for several
decades scientists and many others looked for alternative explanations of how evolution would work.
I've spent quite a lot of time investigating these alternatives, which I'd love to describe to you, but,
unfortunately, it would take a lot longer than this video would allow me to fill in.

What I want to do instead is concentrate on what these things tell us about the situation in which
Darwin was able to convert the world to evolutionism quite rapidly, yet no one took his explanation of it
seriously. That seems something of a paradox. People didn't like natural selection, they looked for a lot
of alternatives. I'm interested in what those alternatives gave to them that helped them to accept the
theory of evolution.

It's almost as though, on the question of evolution itself, Darwin was pushing at an open door. The origin
of species had lots of indirect evidence in its favour and most progressive thinkers were quite happy to
accept that and to convert to the general idea of evolution. That's why the conversion took place
relatively rapidly at the time. But it's as though people were looking for a somewhat different kind of
evolutionism to the one that Darwin was proposing. They wanted to believe in an evolutionary process
that was purposeful and progressive, advancing in a positive line as though there was a main line of
development, preferably one that was aimed at producing the human race as the pinnacle of the whole
process. In a sense, this retained the traditional idea that humanity has a key role to play in the universe.
That's precisely what Darwin's theory doesn't really allow you to believe, because natural selection
doesn't work in a way that has a goal, an endpoint in mind towards which the whole process is working.

Think about how natural selection works. The variations are pretty purposeless in themselves. It's only
by chance that a few of them turn out to be beneficial, in what the philosopher of the evolutionary
movement at the time, Herbert Spencer, called “the survival of the fittest”. Some people at the time
thought that the “fittest” were the best in some sort of absolute sense, so that human beings were the
“fittest”, the highest point in creation. But for Darwin “fitness” means just fitted to the local
environment. It's what works in allowing the organism to cope with the local environment. Natural
selection is, in a sense, a process of trial and error. Lots of random variations occur and selection picks
out the few that happen to do best, but it's only "best" in the local conditions. That means there can be
no directing agency pushing evolution in a single, purposeful direction.

We can see the implications of that in another innovation of Darwin's, one that he actually came to even
before he got the idea of natural selection. This is the way of representing evolution by the image we
now call the “tree of life”, depicting evolution as a tree with many branches going out in different
directions, the species being at the end of each branch, but the branches constantly splitting and re-
splitting as time goes on. Darwin used a primitive form of a “tree of life” diagram like that in one of the
notebooks that he wrote after returning to the UK from the voyage of the Beagle. This notebook
headlined recently, as it seems to have disappeared from the collection of his papers at Cambridge
University.

In this notebook, Darwin is speculating about the implications of his observations on the voyage of the
Beagle. In particular, we all are familiar nowadays with his work on the Galápagos Islands and the
different species that are found on those islands; particularly the different species of finch that are
found and now called Darwin's finches, each adapted to a different way of life suited to the conditions
on the particular island. What Darwin was trying to do with his first little diagram of a tree was to
indicate that what was once a single population must have split in various directions, as it was split up
on the different islands and each sub-population then adapted in its own way. The tree has multiple
branches. The branches are going in many different directions and if you add that up over vast periods
of time, of course, each branch in itself may branch again.

The second significant point is that Darwin's tree is really a bush, not a tree. It's not like a Christmas tree
with a central trunk and a lot of side branches leading onwards and upwards, with the human species
appearing at the top of the Christmas tree like the angel that we stick on top and all the side-branches
going away from the main line. Darwin's tree is really a bush, it doesn't have a central trunk; each
branch is going off in a different direction and each is as valid as any other. Now, what that means is that
there isn't a main line for evolution at all. Evolution is not being pushed towards some particular goal. If
you think about the ancestry of the human species, it means that at any point in our past history, if our
ancestors had been pushed into a slightly different environment, things would've gone differently and
we wouldn't be here. There would be no human race. There would be a world with living things in it but
they wouldn't be humanity.

Darwin himself believed that evolution was in the long run, at least, progressive, so it’s even possible
that there could be something else that was intelligent, but not human. That was a very difficult thing
for people to accept and this is what accounts for the reluctance to accept Darwin's particular approach
to evolution. The reason why people looked for alternatives was that most of those alternatives gave a
sense of purpose and direction to evolution and to allow them to construct trees of life which were
more like the Christmas tree. We see that in a number of popular presentations of evolution in the
period after Darwin published the Origin of Species.

It took some time for people to come to terms with this rather disturbing image of humanity as not the
goal of evolution, but as what happened to come about in the history of life on this particular planet, the
Earth. It seems to me that it's only towards the end of the 19th century that people at last began to face
up to this rather disturbing prospect and come around to a more Darwinian view. We see this in the
science fiction stories of, for instance, H.G. Wells written in the 1890s. The Martians, for instance, of The
War of the Worlds, are intelligent, they have better technology than ours, yet they're completely alien.
This concept of a non-human alien intelligence became a standard theme in science fiction, but it's
something that only makes sense if you believe that evolution doesn't have to turn out with humanity as
its final goal. On different conditions on Mars, something else becomes intelligent, but non-human.
Most of us nowadays have had to come to terms with this rather more insecure position that we seem
to have in the world. Darwinism, I think, plays an important role in forcing us to come to the realisation
that humanity is not the central goal of creation. That's why we celebrate Darwin's work. There are, of
course, still some who find it very difficult to come to terms with the implications of that theory and
resist it. These are people, perhaps, who wish that Darwin had never come up with his dangerous idea.