Illustration by DALL·E

Darwin: Man in a sequence

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the thinker who added a historical perspective to the picture Linnaeus had painted: animal species that look like each other in their skeleton necessarily evolved from a common ancestor. Hence the caricature of viewpoint which was quickly adopted by conservative Christian opinion: ‘Man is descended from the ape’.

In their book entitled They Studied Man, Kardiner and Preble summarise this:

« It dawned on Darwin that these puzzling sets of facts could be explained by a simple but heretical assumption: these similar species were blood relatives with a common descent. Species, in a word, are not immutable; the Judaic-Christian doctrine of creation must be wrong. For Darwin, a devout Christian, this realisation was like ‘confessing а murder’ » *.

Evolution, if recognised as the principle through which Man came into being, annihilates the chronology of the biblical account of separate creation. What Darwin offers is one further step in the debasement of the image of a privileged relationship between God and Man, his creature, as portrayed in the Old Testament, following Linnæus down the same path that the Swedish taxonomist had blazed.

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* Kardiner, Abram & Edward Preble, They Studied Man, London : Secker & Warburg 1961: 24

Illustration by DALL·E