FROM DARWIN TO MILLER: THE EVOLUTION

Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, under pressure to beat Alfred Wallace to the pre-eminent position on evolutionary theory. Darwin's novel caused a furor in the European intellectual community, despite the fact that he carefully witheld much of his ideas concerning the evolution of humanity until his later Descent of Man. His theories embroiled men and women from all walks of life in heated debates about the nature of human existence and humanity's place within what he termed "the struggle for existence." It was into this era of fervent debate that H. G. Wells, author of several groundbreaking novels including The War of the Worlds was born, and it was from these kinds of intellectual, philosophical, biological, and moral inquiries that Wells took much of his material. Likewise, Walter Miller, Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, deals with issues of evolution and morality in his works. Each of these authors interpreted Darwin and the repercussions of his theories in unique ways, ways which are evolutionary timelines in themselves.

Charles Darwin, by the time he died, was a broken and defeated man. He had turned the world on its ear, but not perhaps in the way he had anticipated. As Lynne White states:

"...Darwin made man completely part of nature. There should have been nothing surprising about this. If we can believe anthropologists and the historians of non-Western cultures, most people in most times and places have thought of themselves as being such, and have found sustenance in the idea. The trouble among Westerners was that by the twentieth century the late-medieval emphasis on the importance of matter, and on mathematics as the only basis for rational certainty, had created a lifeless and impersonal image of 'nature' with which few wanted to be identified" (qtd. in Nandy 78).

Despite the fact that scientists might have been ready to receive Darwin's ideas, most of the rest of the European community was not. Darwin's ideas were misinterpreted, ridiculed, and feared. Christians, especially, found his ideas that humanity had actually evolved through a long period of time and not sprung forth from the dust of the divine breath of God extremely disturbing. However, I do not think that Darwin saw the struggle for life as any less glorious than the creation of humanity at one stroke by a divine being. If anything, Darwin's work shows an amazing amount of awe at the fact that humanity achieved its status in the way that it did, as the following paragraph shows:

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (Darwin 215).

Darwin's ultimate message was one of hope and kinship with the natural world. He firmly believed that the struggles that happened due to evolution and natural selection were only for the benefit of every species involved. "And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection" (Darwin 215). Thus, in Darwin's view, natural selection, the process by which certain characteristics are retained and others lost over time within organisms, was cause for humanity to rejoice over its longstanding triumphs.

Unfortunately, even some of Darwin's most staunch defenders chose not to agree with him on this standpoint. T. H. Huxley, often known as "Darwin's bulldog," chose to see evolution in the light of cosmic pessimism. "As to the human race, he [Huxley] believed the 'Hobbesian war of each against all' was its residual condition, inherited from animal progenitors: 'I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity,' he wrote; 'Man...is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes' - and intelligence was powerless. Huxley held the epiphenomenalist belief that 'intelligent' behavior is an automatic play of neural nets and physiological reflexes, which consciousness may accompany but cannot influence..." (Hughes and Geduld 19). It was from influences like these that the genius of Wells and Miller evolved.

"As he was not born until 1866, The Origin of Species was simply for Wells an immutable fact of existence and the evolutionary hypothesis just another unquestioned item in his intellectual baggage" (Morton 100). Wells' works are classic examples of an admixture of Darwinian and Huxleyan thought. Wells studied for a long while under Huxley in anticipation of becoming a biologist much like Huxley. However, Wells discovered that he soon did not have the stomach for the kind of scientific work that Huxley exhibited, and that his imagination had taken him to places where few other writers had traveled before him.

"What was it that Wells offered that none of these other writers did?...There was the steady reminder that science is not always beneficent, that outside the little envelope of our human life a great ordered universe swings through dimensions unimaginable to our minds, that outside the flickering glow by which science has enabled us to see something of its wonders, is...'darkness still'" (Dickson 71).

Wells had the ability to see into this darkness and trick things out of it that other writers could not. Through his keen attention to and fascination with Darwinian theory, Wells was able to extrapolate upon the possible future of humanity, especially in works like The War of the Worlds. The opening of The War of the Worlds begins with a contemplation upon the way in which humanity is most likely viewed by the Martians:

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us" (Wells 51).

Wells begins his narrative almost immediately by infusing it with a scientific viewpoint that both objectifies mankind and relates it to the rest of the natural world by references to microscopes and infusoria. "...[P]art of Wells's intention is to disturb man by reminders of his kinship with the natural world. When the novel opens, Homo sapiens is on one side of a dividing-line, with the rest of earth-life on the other. With the arrival of the Martians, man is pushed back amongst his fellow terrestrials. Imagery constantly reclaims him for the animal world: in the course of the book, men are compared to infusoria, monkeys, lemurs, sheep, dodos, cows, ants, frogs, bees, wasps, rabbits, rats, and oxen. And they are saved not by their intelligence but by the action of the 'humblest things...upon this earth,' disease bacteria" (Kemp 23).

Wells was convinced that Darwin's view of mankind as a species evolved from and part of nature was a valid one. As is mentioned in the above quote, he continually makes references to the animal kingdom in relation to the feelings of humanity as the Martians continue to destroy the area around London. In speaking of the Martians' eating habits, the narrator remarks, "..the bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit" (Wells 150). It is interesting that usually species such as rabbits, typically associated with fear and stupidity (and thus good food sources) are referred to in many of the aforementioned passages. "At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the short-sighted timidity of the Martians. So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. 'We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear'" (Wells 73).

However, while these passages serve to remind the reader of the connection that exists between humanity and the natural world, there is a dubious quality to Wells' interpretation of the goal of evolution itself. His references to the Martians clearly implicate the teachings of Huxley and Huxley's bemoaning of humanity as little more than a brute among other brutes. Huxley had become sure that since humanity was "...no longer a sophisticated product of engineering design by a Divine Craftsman, the body had to be viewed instead as a ramshackle structure where make do and men is the only guiding inspiration; a body tacked together, like Frankenstein's monster, from a variety of ill-fitting animal parts" (Morton 108). This notion, too, can be seen in Wells' assumption about the further evolution of humankind.

"It may be demonstrated in fact that...Wells...had but one conception of the degenerative consequences of selection working uninterruptedly on our species over aeons of time: He expected it to result in the whole body becoming an organ as vestigial to the brain as the present day appendix is to the intestine..." (Morton 107). This much can be seen in the narrator's close descriptions and ruminations upon the Martians. The narrator describes these thoughts at some length in the following passage:

"It is worthy that a certain speculative writer...did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition...He pointed out...that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages...[H]ere in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands...at the expense of the rest of the body" (Wells 151).

It seems apparent that Wells believed that the probable "perfection" of the human organism rested in the further development of the brain. It is obvious that Wells believed that a humanity of this sort, a humanity like the Martians would be "all brain and no heart" (Wager 392). As the narrator notes in The War of the Worlds, "Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being" (Wells 151). This, essentially, is Wells' way of warning the human populace, and reminding it must remember its place in nature, lest we go the way of the "vanished bison and the dodo" (Wells 52).

However, unlike pessimistic ideas proposed by Huxley, in which humanity is simply a brute, Wells' stories served to affirm the idea proposed by Darwin of evolution as a beautiful, ancient process. Humanity triumphs in The War of the Worlds, not through the powers of its intellect but through its kinship with the natural world. As the narrator notes: "[B]y virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle...By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright on earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain" (Wells 184).

Many years after Wells had lived and died his prophecies, his beliefs in evolution and the primacy of the human will to survive, Walter Miller, Jr. entered the science fiction scene with a remarkable work called A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller's motives for writing this Hugo-award winning novel may be evident in the following passage:

"When human extinction (as a result of a decision) is assigned a probability, however small, and a finite negative value, however large, and these two quantities are multiplied, and added to a list of other such products to obtain the expectation for a given political or military decision, the statistician and his employer should be detected, apprehended, and led away in strait jackets to the nearest lobotomy ward. Such people are not just running loose in Washington and Moscow, they're running things" (qtd. in Garvey 696).

Miller's struggle with evolutionary theory is on a rather different plane than Wells'. By the time of the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, much of what Wells had described in some of his less popular works like The Way of the World had come to pass. The atomic bomb had been dropped on innocent citizens, and millions had suffered the effects of the Holocaust. Miller himself ran several missions as a pilot in World War II, and so was able to see the devastations of war firsthand. It is from this anger about the tragedies of war that Miller wrote the above quotation and A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller's novel seems to uphold the idea that "..the Church regards scientific knowledge as potentially harmful, since man is not yet morally mature enough to handle his technology without harming the human race. More importantly, from a religious point of view, science is arrogance" (Spector 343). This viewpoint most certainly brings into question the earlier evolutionary views of Darwin and Wells.

Interestingly enough, some years after A Canticle for Leibowitz appeared, scientists were beginning to postulate on theories of evolution that match Miller's narrative structure, especially at the ending of the novel, with a great deal of exactitude. These ideas, known collectively as the "jump theory" of evolution have been supported by many well-known modern scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, for example. These scientists "..accept the Darwinian theory of small-scale evolution on the grand scale, which they say proceeds by throwing up new species, with chance playing a large part in these 'jumps'...As evidence for this view, the new evolutionists point to the fossil record. Darwin himself drew attention to 'missing links'...Darwinians attribute this to the tumultuous history of the Earth; the new theorists to evolutionary 'jumps'" (Silcock and Silcock 36).

Miller's novel skips great gaps of time, periods of 600 years, usually. At the beginning of these time periods, some event usually happens, i.e. the discovery of the sacred blueprint of Leibowitz, to spark some kind of intellectual fervor or 'speciation.' At the same time, too, genetic mutants are constantly being born in the Valley of the Misborn and reshaping the species. "Jump" theorists suggest that "large-scale rearrangements of the chromosomes..could produce major evolutionary changes..." (Silcock and Silcock 36). Such "large-scale rearrangements" could easily occur due to nuclear holocaust. Perhaps without realizing it, Miller was suggesting a form of evolutionary theory very unlike Darwin's. However, it is very much in keeping with the sense of the novel - that knowledge and science uninformed by compassion and spirituality begets horrors.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, humanity's connection with the natural world, while a given, is seen in a less positive light. Miller's works "...express strong apprehension about the possibility of radical new biological developments for man that is implied by Darwin's theory of evolution...[A Canticle for Leibowitz] indicates that an apparent evolutionary progress can be in large part illusory, new mental endowments ironically being more than offset by remaining flaws that reflect humanity's animal ancestry" (Ower 442). This apprehension is reflected in several scenes of the novel, especially those involving the predatory nature of the buzzards at the end of each section of the novel.

The buzzards are mirror images of the progression of human evolution after the Flame Deluge. The buzzards live in a state of perpetual saprophagy, living off the abundant death of the land. Each time they appear within the novel, they act as a resolution for the death of some human who has been in some way important to the narrative of the novel. They also widen the scope of the narrative and objectify existence, much like the microscope image at the beginning of The War of the Worlds. They, like the infusoria, show the kinship of human life with the natural world, but in a grotesque way which emphasizes the predatory nature of all life.

This vision is very different from the beautiful, slow adaptation that Darwin and Wells saw. Not only does it emphasize death, it emphasizes stagnation. There is no possibility of progression within the buzzards; they have reached the pinnacle of their evolution, and that pinnacle is death. "The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries. She would nourish them for centuries more..." (Miller 110). The buzzards, like humanity, in the years after the Flame Deluge, have developed a sense of hubris, due to the sheer fact of their survival. Miller states that the buzzards are:

"..searching for the fulfillment of that share of life's destiny which was theirs according to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regnans had created the world especially for buzzards. They worshipped him with hearty appetites for many centuries" (Miller 223).

Unfortunately for the buzzards and the majority of humanity, the effect of such evolutionary stagnation is a descent into extinction. Just as the human race repeats its tragic mistakes due to the moral regressions involved in the human hunger for mastery over the Earth, the buzzards likewise begin to suffer the same fate (Ower 59). As Zerchi observes while the buzzards watch him during his last hours, "It would not have many meals to look forward to, he noticed, before the bird itself became a meal for another. Its feathers were singed from the flash, and it kept one eye closed. The bird was soggy with rain, and the abbot guessed that the rain itself was full of death" (Miller 308).

However, it is not quite over for humanity, as one would tend to think. Despite humanity's efforts to once again destroy itself, the seeds of hope are laid again in the survival of both Mrs. Grales in the form of Rachael and the starship fleeing Earth just as the bomb impacts. Interestingly enough, the novel ends, not with a reference to the buzzards but to a shark deep in the ocean:

"A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season" (Miller 313).

Darwin, Wells, and Miller each had very different outlooks on the ramifications of evolutionary theory. Darwin, although he assented that humanity had evolved upwards from some "lower" lifeform, felt that this was a cause for wonder and pride, rather than despair over humanity's "bestial" origins. It was clear that Darwin made an earnest attempt to celebrate the discovery he made, but it became very apparent that much of humanity was unwilling to believe that its origins were no more divine than the pharoahs long ago. Wells, too, felt pride in the possibilities inherent in evolutionary theory, and predicted the vast opportunities available to an animal so highly evolved in the realm of the intellect. Wells differed from Darwin only in his Huxleyan postulations of what kind of creature the human race would ultimately turn out to be. Unlike Darwin and Wells, Miller felt threatened by the human lusts and complacencies that seemed to be condoned by evolutionary theory, although he obviously could not deny the feeling that evolution in some sense existed, due to the nature of his work.

All of these authors share one common thread in their works: a warning. Each one of these authors was firmly convinced that humanity has the power with its vast potential for learning and knowledge to either continue to "rise", or to fall. Though all of their beliefs may have differed as to the outcome of human potentiality, Darwin, Wells, and Miller alike imply that without the work of mind and heart conjoined, humanity has little chance of continued existence as it is now known on the planet.

Through Darwin's theories, authors like Wells and Miller attempt to explore that "darkness" which is beyond human understanding. But they both caution that this can only be done with compassion and mercy. Wells makes this explicitly clear from the very beginning of The War of the Worlds:

"And before we judge them [i.e. the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (Wells 52)