Evolution as Moral Truth

    This week at the University of Tennessee has been set aside for the celebration of Charles Darwin, and the revolution he created in biology. Darwin's revolution is still a source of controversy. Fundamentalists, impressed by the clash between the scriptural assertion that God created man in his own image and the Darwinian idea that man is a near-relative of apes, denounce evolutionary theory as corrosive and immoral. Biologists often reply, in the tradition of objective science, that the idea is ethically neutral. There is, however, a third possibility, less well-appreciated than the other two—that evolution is neither sin nor blank fact, but a source of moral wisdom. For the fact that all living creatures evolved from common ancestors implies a kinship among all the life on Earth.
    One of the greatest thoughts in history was the revolutionary notion that all men are brothers. Even today, though many profess it, few live it. And morality has in the meantime moved on. The idea, for one thing, would be better expressed without gender bias: not "all men are brothers," but "we are one family." Taking evolution seriously leads us to the still more expansive principle that all living beings are, if not siblings, at least distant cousins. And that is not metaphor or myth, but biological fact.
    There are, of course, those who disagree. Evolution, some say, is not a fact, but a theory. That's a sophistic quibble. Evolution is both. The two categories, "fact" and "theory" are not mutually exclusive. The germ theory of infectious diseases, for example, is both a theory and a fact. Likewise the theory of evolution.
    The advent of evolutionary theory altered our concept of human nature. The biblical conception, formulated in the first two chapters of Genesis, was that man is a special creation, made in God's image and, by virtue of this special status, granted dominion over all other living things.
    Evolutionary biology suggests, on the contrary, that human beings differ from other living creatures only in degree, not in kind. This suggestion has been dramatically strengthened by the studies of the natural behavior of our nearest relatives ¾ the gorillas and chimpanzees ¾ especially those carried out by two remarkable women, Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. One has only to watch the films of their groundbreaking studies to realize that these higher primates are, like us, intelligent creatures, who form loving families, plan, communicate, make tools, feel pain, mourn the dead, wage war, wonder at novelties and enjoy a rich inner life. We can understand these primates because their overall behavior is so similar to ours that we can readily infer what they perceive and feel. Other intelligent animals, our more distant cousins are more difficult to understand; yet we have every reason to believe that they too live in rich inwardness, alien and strange, yet perhaps no less wonderful than our own.
    At the bottom of the fundamentalist's objections to evolutionary theory may be the worry that evolution allows the world to be created by chance, and that a chance creation is incompatible with ultimate purpose or meaning. The fundamentalists fear that to admit the truth of evolutionary theory is to succumb to nihilism—the loss of all meaning. To this fear the great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer had a fitting reply:

In the production and maintenance of some definite form of life, [said Schweitzer] nature does seem to act purposively in a magnificent way. But in no way does she ever seem intent on uniting these instances of purposiveness which are directed to single objects into a collective purpose. She never undertakes to let life coalesce with life to form a collective life. She is a wonderfully creative force. We face her absolutely perplexed. What is full of meaning within the meaningless, the meaningless within what is full of meaning: that is the essential nature of the universe.
Denial of a collective or cosmic purpose does not, as Schweitzer reminds us, rule out meaning altogether. In fact, as anyone familiar with nature knows, the natural world is suffused with meanings of the most curious and diverse kinds.

Some people think that it demeans human beings to differ so little from the rest of Creation. But rather than lowering us to the level of beasts, the discoveries of biology and ethology can, if we let them, elevate our esteem for all life. The most constructive lesson to be learned from evolution is that if God created people in his own image, then the chimpanzee, the bear, the spider, the cicada and the sycamore tree are all images of God as well.

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