From Atlantis to the Sphinx

  Nevertheless, things were slowly changing. In 1780, a German army doctor named Friedrich Hoffmann was walking in a chalk mine near Maastricht, in Holland, when he saw a gigantic ‘dragon’s’ skull in the chalk. He had discovered the first dinosaur skull. Hoffmann had the skull removed and taken back to the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, where it created a sensation. He and his fellow scientists decided to call it a ‘saurian’. Unfortunately, Hoffmann had neglected to ask the owner of the mine, a priest named Godin, for permission to remove the skull.

  Godin sued for its return, and won. Deprived of his epoch-making discovery, Hoffmann grew depressed and died. Godin, who sounds an extremely unpleasant character, locked up the skull, and refused to allow scientists access to it. But in 1794, the French invaded, and—to Godin’s chagrin—seized the skull, even though he did his best to hide it. It was sent back to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and studied by the great naturalist Georges Cuvier.

  Suddenly everyone began to dig for dinosaurs, and many ancient bones were uncovered. Cuvier became the great expert on extinct species—he boasted that he could reconstruct a whole skeleton from a single bone. But how had these species vanished from the face of the earth? According to Cuvier—who borrowed the theory from his predecessor Count Buffon—the answer was that the earth had been subject to a series of great catastrophes, like floods and earthquakes, and these had wiped out whole species. Then Nature had to start all over again. Man and his cousin the ape had been a product of the latest stage of creation, since the last catastrophe...

  This meant, of course, that Cuvier was totally opposed to Maillet’s theory of evolution—which was now becoming popular with many younger scientists, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Species did not ‘evolve’. They were created, and then wiped out by catastrophes, like the dragon discovered by Hoffmann.

  A young Englishman named William Smith had been crawling around in British mines, and announced that he had identified no less than thirty-two ‘layers’ containing fossils—he gave them names like Carboniferous, Cretaceous and Devonian. And these layers were quite distinct. You did not find Devonian fossils in the Carboniferous layer. That seemed to mean that each geological epoch came to an abrupt end—with a catastrophe.

  It is true that Cuvier was momentarily worried by a discovery made by one of his most faithful disciples, Baron Ernst Schlotheim, in 1820. Searching among some mammoth bones in Thuringia, Schlotheim found human teeth. According to Cuvier, that was impossible—mammoths belonged to the last age of creation. Cuvier explained soothingly that probably a gravedigger had buried a body in soil belonging to the pre-diluvial age, and Schlotheim breathed a sigh of relief—he was too old to start changing his mind. Two more lots of human remains turned, up among bones of extinct animals; again, Schlotheim let himself be persuaded that this was a freak.

  But in 1823, a human skeleton—lacking a head—was found in ancient strata at Paviland, in Wales; because it had been stained red by the earth, it was called the Red Lady of Paviland. (In fact, it turned out to be a man.) Inspired by this, a clergyman named McEnery found ancient tools among mammoth bones in Kent’s Cavern in Devon. This should have convinced Cuvier that he was wrong. He shrugged off the new discoveries as some kind of accident.

  Cuvier was undoubtedly a great scientist, but he was also a dogmatic bully, who destroyed the career of his fellow professor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an evolutionist who not only believed that species gradually evolve, but that they evolve because they want to.

  Cuvier was lucky; he died in 1832, just before the science of geology discredited his catastrophe theories.

  The man responsible was a barrister who was also an enthusiastic student of geology, Charles Lyell. After ten years of careful study of the earth’s crust, he concluded that Archbishop Ussher’s chronology—still accepted by millions of Christians—was absurdly wrong, and that the earth had been formed over millions of years. Given this time scale, there was no need for catastrophes to thrust up mountains and flood valleys; it could all be explained by slow erosion. His Principles of Geology (1830-33) was one of the most epoch-making books in the history of science. He concluded that the Flood had been real, but that it had been the result of melting ice at the end of the last great Ice Age, some fifteen thousand years ago. Landscapes had been slowly carved by glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years. And fish fossils found in mountains had once been at the bottom of prehistoric seas. Lyell was opposed by Catastrophists, Floodists and religious fundamentalists alike, but his views slowly prevailed.

  The theory of earth history that would gradually emerge over the next fifty or so years was roughly as follows.

  Our earth has been in existence for about four and a half thousand million years, but during the first thousand million, it was a red-hot cinder that gradually cooled. Sometime during the next thousand million years, the first living organisms developed in the warm seas—tiny cells that were birthless and deathless. The first fossils are of these unicellular organs, dating back to three and a half thousand million years ago.

  A mere 630 million years ago, the first truly living organisms appear—organisms that can reproduce themselves, and therefore afford to die. Life developed its method of handing on the torch to the next generic ation, which would hurl itself afresh at all the old problems.

  Another forty million years passed before the first invertebrate organisms, like trilobites, appeared in the seas. We call this the Cambrian era—about 590 million years ago—and it was also the era of the first fish. Some of the first plants also appeared on land.

  In the Devonian period, about 408 million years ago, fish who found the sea too dangerous began to drag themselves on to the land, and as flippers changed into legs, became amphibians. Reptiles appeared in the Carboniferous periods, 40 million years later. This first great period in Earth’s history—known as the Palaeozoic—ended with the Permian era, 286 million years ago.

  The second of the three great periods, the Mesozoic, is the age of mammals, then of dinosaurs, and extends from about 250 million years ago to a mere 65 million. We also now know that Buffon and Cuvier’s catastrophe theory was not altogether incorrect. It seems that some great object from outer space struck the earth 65 million years ago, and destroyed 75 per cent of its living creatures, including the dinosaurs. Whatever it was—perhaps a vast meteor, perhaps a comet, perhaps even an asteroid—probably filled the atmosphere with steam, and raised the temperature enough to kill off most of the larger creatures. But for this catastrophe, it is unlikely that human beings would now exist.

  For at the beginning of the third great age in the earth’s history—known as the Cenozoic era—there was a warm, moist world of vast tropical jungles that extended far into northern Europe. Without the great flesh-eating predators—like Tyrannosaurus Rex and the gigantic toothed bats—it was a fairly placid place, with feathered birds, and squirrel-like rodents that leapt from tree to tree and fed on grubs and birds’ eggs. These rodents gave birth to their young from their bodies, instead of laying eggs, and they nurtured and protected theirmyoung, so increasing the survival rate.

  Sometime in the middle of the Cretaceous era—which began about 144 million years ago—there developed a tiny shrew-like creature that probably lived in the roots of trees and ate insects. Shrews are incredibly fierce little animals (which is why we call bad-tempered women shrews), like tiny mice; their hearts beat 800 times a minute, and they eat several times their own body weight per day. (Because they are so tiny they cannot retain heat.) In the peaceful Cenozoic era that followed, these shrews felt confident enough to take to the trees, where they ate seeds and tender leaves, and a new evolutionary development called fruit. In the trees they developed a ‘hand’, with a thumb and four fingers, to cling to branches. Many shrews were exterminated by their cousins the rodents, who had teeth that never stopped growing, so never wore out. But they survived in Africa—or rather the vast continent that then included Africa and South America—and became monkeys, with eyes that
were side by side, instead of on either side of the head, making them a better judge of distance. We human beings are a descendant of the tree shrew.

  This great revolution in human thinking came about, as everyone knows, because a young naturalist named Charles Darwin set out, in December 1831, to sail to South America on a ship called the Beagle.

  The main aim of the voyage, oddly enough, was to take three dark-skinned natives of Tierra del Fuego, off the coast of South America back to their home. The Beagle’s captain, Robert Fitzroy—a devout Christian and supporter of slavery—had purchased them at low cost (he only paid a pearl button for one of them) and intended to use them in England as unpaid servants. (One of them, a pubescent girl, Fitzroy had purchased because he was disgusted to see her walking around naked.) Unfortunately, an anti-slave law had been passed while he was at sea, and he was indignantly ordered to take them back. And to give the expedition some practical purpose, the minister in charge of the Home Office decreed that a scientist should go along too, to study South American flora and fauna. The man chosen was regarded as something of a failure in life. At 22, Charles Darwin was already a failed medical student and a failed clergyman. Then he found he enjoyed zoology and botany, and his professor at Cambridge recommended him for the post on the Beagle.

  Darwin also happened to be a good liberal (they were called Whigs in those days), and he entirely agreed that the three natives should be returned. The captain was a lifelong Tory, and told the young scientist that he was being sentimental. In life, the race was won by the fittest and the fastest. The strong survived, the weak died off.

  Darwin was not sure he liked this theory. But then, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written a long poem called The Temple of Nature (1803) in which he argued that all life had originated in the seas, then moved on to the land, where the fishes developed limbs and turned into animals. So perhaps Captain Fitzroy was right. Perhaps competition was responsible for the slow improvement of species...

  The return of the three natives to Tierra del Fuego strengthened his opinion. One of them, a youth they had named York Minster, was strong and dominant, and was soon happily settled with his brother savages. He quickly threw off his civilised ways and went about naked, to the distress of a missionary named Matthews who had been sent to try and convert the natives. So did the pubescent girl, whom Fitzroy had named Fuegia. But the youngest and gentlest of the natives, known as Jemmy Button, was bullied and beaten, and tearfully begged to be allowed to return on the Beagle; the captain had to refuse him, and as the Beagle sailed away, it was perfectly obvious that, unprotected by the artificial barriers of civilisation, Jemmy Button was going to have a hard life.

  The same proved to be true of Fuegia. Ten years later, a ship full of seal hunters stopped off the island, and Fuegia hastened on board to renew her acquaintance with white men. They were unable to believe their luck, and raped her continuously until she collapsed with exhaustion and almost died. When she was next seen by British observers, she looked like an old woman. Darwin never learned of this, but if he had, it would have reinforced his increasing certainty that nature was not designed according to liberal principles.

  As Darwin studied the flora and fauna of Patagonia, he found unmistakable signs that Cuvier—who was still alive—was mistaken about catastrophes. He came upon the bones of extinct creatures like megatheria (giant sloths) and toxodonts, yet saw equally ‘prehistoric’ animals like armadillos and anteaters surviving and flourishing. He also observed the bones of extinct llamas, and saw oddly similar llamas—called guanacos—walking around. The extinct llamas were smaller. But surely it was unlikely that God—or nature—had wiped out the ancient llamas then gone to the trouble of creating larger ones? Was it not more likely that the guanacos had evolved from their extinct ancestors?

  It was half a dozen years later, back in England, that Darwin came across a book that once again set him thinking about the ruthlessness of nature left to itself. It was called An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, and it took a distinctly gloomy view of history. Society is not ascending towards prosperity and liberalism, for prosperity leads more babies to survive, and the increase in population soon outstrips the increase in prosperity. Society is not headed up but down. If we want to do something about the problem—Malthus argued later—we ourselves have to try to control the population. But in nature, of course, there is no one to control growth. So population explodes, and the weakest die of starvation.

  The truth, Darwin recognised, was that if every couple of animals or birds or fishes produce more than two offspring, and those offspring also produce more than two offspring, the resulting population explosion would cover every habitable inch of the earth in a few generations. Death is nature’s way of preventing the earth from being overrun.

  He began breeding livestock—dogs, rabbits, chickens, pigeons—and over twenty years studied the variations from generation to generation. There were far more than he had suspected. That settled it. He now had a mechanism that explained evolution. Nature produced variations. The useful ones survived, the useless ones died out. So, just as his grandfather had supposed, there was a steady change and improvement, as the useful variations continued to breed and multiply.

  Darwin was in no hurry to publish these revolutionary conclusions. He regarded himself as a good Christian, and was aware that his findings amounted to a decisive rejection of the Book of Genesis. So he plodded on with a vast work that would have been at least 2500 pages long, and which he half-expected to publish after his death. Then, in 1857, came the bombshell—a letter from another zoologist, an ex-schoolmaster named Alfred Russel Wallace, which outlined a theory virtually identical to his own. Darwin was shattered; it looked as if he had wasted a quarter of a century of work. It would be unfair of him to stand in Wallace’s way. He sought the advice of Sir Charles Lyell, the author of Principles of Geology. Lyell’s advice was to publish Wallace’s paper, and a brief summary of his own ideas, simultaneously. This was done in the journal of the Linnaean Society. Then Darwin settled down to making a condensation of the vast work he had been writing for years. It took thirteen months, and was entitled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

  When it appeared in November 1859, it created the greatest intellectual uproar of the nineteenth century. The book was obviously deeply serious, and its mass of fact was overwhelming. Yet its conclusions flew in the face of every religious principle that man had held since the beginning of time. The diversity of nature was not the handiwork of God—or the gods—but of a simple mechanical principle: the survival of the fittest. There was no mention of man—except a brief comment in the conclusion that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’—but Darwin’s views on that subject emerged clearly in the rest of the book. Man was not ‘made in God’s image’; he had no unique place in nature. He was simply an animal like other animals, and was probably descended from some kind of ape.

  The man who was largely responsible for the book’s instant success—it sold out its first edition in one day—was a scientist named Thomas Henry Huxley, who reviewed it for The Times and hailed it as a masterpiece. Huxley would go on to become Darwin’s most powerful defender. Evolution’s equivalent of the Battle of Hastings took place in Oxford in June 1860, when Huxley debated Darwin’s thesis against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (known as ‘Soapy Sam’ because of his unctuous manner). Wilberforce gave a satirical account of evolution, and then turned to Huxley and asked whether he was descended from a monkey through his mother or his father. Huxley muttered under his breath: ‘The Lord has delivered him into my hands.’ He then rose to his feet, and quietly and seriously explained Darwin’s theory in simple language. He concluded that he would not be ashamed to be descended from a monkey, but that he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. The audience burst into roars of applause; one lady fainted. And Wilberforce, knowing he was beaten, declined the o
pportunity to reply.

  It is impossible for us to understand the impact of these views. It is true that Maillet and Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had already outlined theories of evolution. But Darwin’s work did not amount to a theory. It had all the brutal impact of undeniable scientific fact. And he appeared to be telling the world that all its religious creeds were nonsense. There was no need for God to intervene in nature. It was, in effect, a gigantic machine that ground out new species as an adding machine grinds out numbers.

  Darwin was himself opposed to this ‘soulless’ interpretation of his ideas. After all, a machine has a maker, and has to be set in motion by human beings. Darwin felt that he had merely discovered how the mechanisms of evolution operate. Anything that had to be discarded as rubbish was not worth keeping anyway.

  In a sense he was right. Yet his opponents were also right. Whether he intended it or not, Darwin had brought about the greatest intellectual change in the history of the human race. Man had always taken it for granted that he was the centre of the universe, and that he had been created by the gods. He scanned the revolving heavens for some sign of Divine purpose, and he scanned nature for the obscure hieroglyphics that would reveal the will of the gods. Now Darwin was telling him that the hieroglyphics were an optical illusion. The world was merely what it appeared to be. It consisted of things, not hidden meanings. From now on, man had to accept that he was on his own.

  And what was this ‘origin of man and his history’ upon which Darwin promised to throw some light? Now that most biologists were Darwinians, there was no excuse for being vague and imprecise.