Today I had a pseudo-debate about evolution with a group of tenth graders. They asked me how I could not believe in God, wondered why I thought people were the babies of monkeys, were concerned about my apparently intimate knowledge of fish people. Sigh. Needless to say, in the 21st century, we still don’t get it. But our discussion got me thinking, how did the world react—read, freak out—when Darwin’s theory of evolution was published in the first place? In a nutshell, here’s what happened:
Thought
-Most Victorian thinkers believed that Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” wasn’t based on random selection based on a species’ adaptability to its environment. Instead, they often believed a species survival was based on a species being innately superior and evolved based on a greater universal plan.
Writing
-Pre-Darwin, Romantic writers dealt with how man, God, and Nature would be united. They didn’t address God’s concern for man, instead they believed in a God or higher power that valued and had a larger plan for man. After Darwin, Victorian writers had to concern themselves with making man human and helping him overcome his animal nature. Writers had to question whether man knew anything about God, his world or himself.
-Even the idea of pantheism-- God in everything and everything is God—was blasted to smithereens because Victorians believed Darwin took God out of the random evolution of the universe.
-Victorians, with God, religion, and faith removed, were the first writers to have to define man as a separate entity from animals.
Religion
-The Christian ideal that an all-knowing creator crafted man and his universe had to be overturned in favor of a universe based on randomness and chance—Darwin’s natural selection that said the survivor was randomly best suited for his environment
-There were two theories which “evolved” from Darwin’s theories called “naturalism” and “positivism,”—both of these forms of thought restricted thought and study to things which can be critically observed and experimented upon.
-Thomas Henry Huxley created Agnosticism in 1869 in response to science leaving the supernatural out of the equation. He said that “doubt is a beneficent demon” because if people doubt things, then they can err without fault
--Rather than believing fact as the ultimate truth, the agnostic believes in questioning these perceived truths. This doubt in facts leaves room for a God or a higher power in the universe.
-Agnosticism, and it’s religion of “doubt,” intruded onto all subjects, making it hard for Victorian thinkers to trust anything.
Feminism
-The idea of “Variation Under Domestication” illustrated the idea of resemblances between two different creatures caused by the same evolutionary reaction to an environment.
-Domestic life allowed women less variation in their lives than what they were capable.
-Victorian feminists believed that the changing of species was related to the spiritual change within a population as well as the external change.
Darwinism and evolution affected everything in Victorian England, it seems. And why wouldn’t it? It seems that people then, and now, have used evolution to fit their particular realms of experience and points of view. Or pretended it never existed.