With respect to time, but not to space, Charles Darwin was the first cubist.
Let me explain. When you looked at yourself in the mirror this morning, you saw yourself. But you also peered at a two-and-a-half-million-year-old primate, one that was very long in its formation, by a knowable process with rules.
It seems plain that, leaving aside the fuss about theology and values, one of the sharpest and most decisive impacts of the Darwinian perspective was to remove the illusion of human centrality in time.
Galileo, whose 400th anniversary of using a telescope is being celebrated this year, was similarly bold. As a result of his mighty explanatory initiative, Galileo was persecuted, because he made the very theoretical and abstract announcement that the Earth revolved around the sun. (For that matter, why do people the hell care if the sun went around the moon or the candy store? A real puzzle, that.)
Darwin has been a comparable, favorite dartboard target for several hundred years because he provided the far more intimate and personal information that your face in the mirror is neither the beginning of reality nor its end.
Face it, face, you’re just a blip in a very large and historically deep narrative.
If you had those kinds of mirrors they have in bad amusement parks, you could see virtually endless refractions of your present self in ever-receding reflections. Your significance to yourself and a couple of dozen other people or even a huge community may be great. But it’s implacably clear that significant in any larger sense you are not.
One of the main jobs religions do is try to ease the trauma of this realization by positing certain large ideas: eternal life; heavens; deities who encompass everything; and a sense that existence neither begins nor ends at a cliff’s edge.
The central paradox of religions is to offer the explanation that because every object, every process, every event, requires a cause, an eternal God is that cause. Yet of course God is himself a result of–what? What is the cause of the God that caused the effect that is the world we know?
For countless people, the fundamental answer to that question is: “Don’t ask.” But the core paradox remains at the heart of the passion to understand why we are here and where we are headed.
Small wonder it’s remained such a durable controversy and small wonder so many people–evidently about half in the U.K. and North America–reject Darwin’s answer and prefer one or another form of biblical authority to answer their questions.
In a book I’m writing with Michael McGuire of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Department–who discovered the social consequences of the rise and fall in serotonin in monkeys, which has led to innovative treatments for humans such as Prozac–we conclude that the brain is somehow naturally wired to accept religious explanation. We call it “brainsoothing.”
Otherwise, reality is simply too paralyzing to manage. (Think of asking a centipede how it walks.)
In the face of these elemental questions about existence, belief is created by the brain and then received and used by it. Where else could it possibly come from? And there’s little point shouting at believers, because they are just doing what comes naturally. So long as they don’t scare the horses or corrupt minds or constrain others’ search for scientific accuracy, the neurotransmitters in their brains are their business.
There’s something even more alarming, however, raised by the post-Darwinian sight of your mirror face: It exists because your parents had sex. This is a speculation more heavy-duty than many people can congenially and comfortably entertain.
Freudian lore defines viewing of the Primal Scene as drastically traumatic for children. While this is both an exaggeration and somewhat ethnocentric, it is surely revealing that the puzzling strength of the idea of virgin birth is so durable. Numerous children are often embarrassed and/or troubled even witnessing their parents dance vivaciously.
Parental sex, however, is an inescapable part of understanding and accepting how the sexual selection practiced by your parents is part of the vast process of natural selection Darwin identified.
It’s evident that Darwin’s analysis of the processes of natural and sexual selection, while extraordinarily dispassionate, has the capacity to evoke personally passionate responses, especially about reproduction.
His insights into behavior are as fresh today as when they were written. The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Men could have been written last spring. The bewilderingly broad technical subject matter he confronted, from the mobility of worms to the nature of mold to the theories of geology, completely protected him from any charge of political sensationalism.
He was, in fact, heartily modest, and it’s charming–if surprising–to read that Darwin regarded himself as an author. With implications like these? Some author.
Lionel Tiger, a weekly columnist at Forbes.com, is the Charles Darwin professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Decline of Males (St. Martins, 2000), Men in Groups (Marion Boyars, 1999) and The Pursuit of Pleasure (Transaction, 2000).