A Brief History of Creation (20 page)

In Darwin's growing brood of evolutionary thinkers, there were others willing to meet the question of the origin of life head-on. Over the last few decades of his life, Darwin would watch from the sidelines as one of his most promising disciples would engage in a famous struggle over the origin of life, pitted against a scientist who saw evolution, at least at first, as an enemy. By the time it was all over, the winner of the argument would achieve a legendary reputation that would rival Darwin's own. The loser would find himself all but forgotten.

*
Although they would come to be known as “finches,” the birds Darwin encountered on the Galápagos were not related to true finches in the taxonomic sense. The confusion is largely the result of the popular 1947 book
Darwin's Finches
, written by David Lack.

†
Owen's attacks on Darwin shifted wildly over the years. He could attack Darwin, on the one hand, for suggesting that humans were related to apes—which Owen never accepted—and, on the other hand, for taking too much credit for the development of evolutionary theory. Darwin found the depth of Owen's animosity perplexing. Jealousy at being shut out of Darwin's circles of intimates has been suggested as a motivation.

PLEASANT, THOUGH THEY BE DECEITFUL DREAMS

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things
.

—SIR ISAAC NEWTON,
Principia
, 1687

 

O
N APRIL 7, 1864
, a huge crowd filled the grand amphitheater at the Sorbonne in Paris's Latin Quarter. Among them were some of the cream of Parisian high society, including Princess Mathilde (the niece of Napoleon Bonaparte and cousin of the Russian tsar) and Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, who had become a famous writer under her pen name, George Sand, and was the lover of Chopin, as well as, it was whispered, the actress Marie Doval. Dupin was a regular at such events, always recognizable because of her taste for dressing in men's clothing. Sitting prominently in the front row was another writer known to all of Paris, Alexandre Dumas, the author of
The Count of Monte Cristo
and
The Three Musketeers
.

The lecture was part of a new series of free biweekly lectures hosted by the University of Paris, part of the university's push to generate public interest and support for its work. The Monday lectures were devoted entirely to science. Billed as “scientific soirées,” they proved a huge draw. Part of the attraction was the array of technological devices the university had acquired for the amphitheater. Gas lighting could be raised or
lowered at the touch of a button. An electric arc lamp, invented by Humphry Davy, could be used to project a single beam of light onto the stage, illuminating the speaker or selected exhibits. To the amazement of audiences, it could also be used to project photographic images that had been encased in glass slides.

The week before, six thousand people had shown up for the inaugural science lecture on the subject of the three physical states of matter delivered by the physicist Jules Jasmin. Most of the throng had been forced to stand outside, crowding around doors trying to get a peek at the goings-on inside. This week the soirée organizers expected an even larger turnout, owing to the popularity of the lecturer, a handsome and charismatic man with a reputation for giving captivating speeches, who was fast becoming the darling of the French scientific establishment. His name was Louis Pasteur.

The Sorbonne event represented a victory lap for Pasteur. For the previous three years, he had been engaged in a public debate over the topic of spontaneous generation with the man who had been considered the country's leading advocate of the theory, the well-respected naturalist Félix Pouchet, director of the Natural History Museum in Rouen. Their debate had generated so much attention that the French Academy of Sciences had decided to try to bring it to a resolution by offering the organization's prestigious Alhumbert Prize and a 2,500-franc award to the scientist who could shed the most light on the question. Pasteur had been judged the winner, and the academy had lauded his mastery of the experimental method. The victory had made him a hero in Catholic circles, where he came to be seen as the defender of traditional religious beliefs against the heresies of radical scientific materialism.

The French translation of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
had been in print for three years, and Pasteur began his address by summarizing the questions that were on the minds of these Parisians: whether “creation ought to be dated thousands of years or thousands of centuries past, whether species are fixed, or rather undergo a slow progressive transformation into new species.” Pasteur was always a masterful orator, but
never more so than that evening at the Sorbonne. Like Shakespeare's Marc Antony, who came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, Pasteur began by saying that he could answer none of those questions. He then went on to imply that he had answered them all.

Pasteur summarized the evolutionary theory by repeating a rough account of the concept from a book many in the audience would have read:
La mer
(
The Sea
), by the radical historian-turned-evolutionist Jules Michelet: “We simply take a drop of sea-water, and out of this water, which contains a bit of inanimate nitric matter, sea-mucus, or, as he calls it, fertile jelly, the first creatures emerge by spontaneous generation, transforming themselves bit by bit, they climb the ranks of creation, reaching, after, say, ten thousand years, the level of insects, and doubtless, after a hundred thousand years, the level of apes, and of Man himself.” Behind it all, continued Pasteur, lay one question at the root of the whole evolutionary proposition: “Mightn't matter, perhaps, organize itself? Or . . . mightn't creatures enter the world without parents, without forebears?” If life were merely an outcome of natural processes, Pasteur told his audience, then they could arrive at no other conclusion than that “God is useless.”

Pasteur then proceeded to recite the history of beliefs on spontaneous generation, from van Helmont to Needham and Buffon to the more modern scientists who embraced the idea. But there was something that all of these esteemed naturalists had missed, he said. At that point, the gas lighting dimmed until the room was dark except for a single beam of light dramatically projected onto the stage. There, in the illumination, he directed the audience's attention to the thousands of tiny dust particles that now flickered in the lighted haze above the stage. There in the dust, said Pasteur, was the reason so many great minds of the past had fallen into falsely believing they had witnessed the spontaneous generation of life: tiny microorganisms, invisible and countless, drifting through the air we breathe. Drawing upon the name used by preformationists, he called them “germs.” The idea would eventually help make Pasteur one of the most legendary scientists in history.

 

I
N PASTEUR'S LATER YEARS,
after his work on understanding the causes and prevention of infectious diseases had led to remarkable advances in medicine that would establish his place in the pantheon of the world's greatest scientists, he maintained that spontaneous generation was the most important question he had ever put his mind to. It was a question loaded with metaphysical importance, especially in France. As a crucial part of the broad evolutionary framework of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, spontaneous generation was a theory that openly attacked the whole concept of a living world crafted by the hand of a deity. As France drifted ever deeper into politicized Catholicism, it also became an explicitly political question, one whose fortunes tended to ebb and flow with the notoriously fickle winds of postrevolutionary France.

Lamarck developed his theory at the turn of the nineteenth century, during the turbulent days of the revolution, while working as a professor at the Jardin des Plantes, as the Jardin du Roi had been renamed by the revolutionaries. He had been hired by Buffon himself and was widely recognized as Buffon's protégé. The young men of the revolution flocked to Lamarck's lectures about a natural world that was ever in flux and constantly evolving. He even dared to suggest that the natural world had the power to create life itself. Making such a claim would have once meant risking persecution or death, and it was a view held only by atheists on the fringes of science. For the time being, though, the revolution had made such ideas palatable.

As the French state and society grew more and more conservative with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Lamarck found his notions increasingly attacked or discarded. By the 1830s, the stage had been set for a decisive showdown in France over evolution. It would be waged by two of France's most admired scientists, who had come to represent the two opposing poles of the evolutionary spectrum: Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Both, like Lamarck, had once held professorships in anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. Both had also been close to Napoleon. Cuvier was a
trusted member of the emperor's inner circle, charged with overseeing the education of Napoleon's son. Geoffroy was handpicked to accompany Napoleon on the short-lived French invasion of Egypt.

Their paths began to diverge after the Bourbon restoration, scientifically as well as politically. After Napoleon's exile, Cuvier—sociable, charismatic, and doctrinally flexible—had little trouble insinuating himself into the new order. He continued to rise through the ranks of the French scientific establishment, receiving a series of prestigious appointments, a royal peerage, and even an invitation to the coronation of Charles X in 1827.

Cuvier's own interest in naturalism stemmed from reading Buffon's
Natural History
as a boy. Soon, he had developed a fascination with paleontology that would make him one of the giants of French science. As far back as Leonardo da Vinci's time, natural philosophers had recognized that fossils were the preserved remains of creatures that had lived in the past. Buffon was one of the first to argue that these were often the remains of species that also no longer existed in the present world, but his conclusions were hard for most to accept. Why, they wondered, would God have created species only to let them die out? But without accepting the phenomenon of extinction, geologists struggled to explain the variations of fossil species they continued to find in the natural record every day.

Working with skeletons of Siberian mammoths, Cuvier became convinced that he was seeing entirely different species from those that walked the Earth in his day. He became certain after working with the fossilized bones of a creature he named a mastodon. His 1799 paper on the subject, considered a masterpiece in paleontology, established incontrovertibly that natural extinctions had indeed occurred in the history of the Earth. But Cuvier never accepted Lamarck's concept that new species were being formed, taking the place of those that disappeared. These abrupt changes in the fossils of particular regions from different periods of history were, for Cuvier, simply the result of migrations of already-existing species into the territories once occupied by other, now-extinct animals. Cuvier liked to point out that his own conception of natural catastrophes was remarkably consistent with those described in the Bible. Privately, Cuvier had little time for religion, and those who had known him in his
younger days were surprised to find him resorting to charging his opponents with “materialism” to win scientific arguments. But he was ever the political opportunist.

Lamarck was the opposite. Doctrinally inflexible and socially awkward, he increasingly found himself isolated and ostracized, even by his old colleagues from the Jardin des Plantes. He spent his final years hopelessly in debt, struggling to find an audience for his revolutionary theories. When Lamarck died penniless and nearly blind in 1829, Cuvier penned a damning elegy for the French Academy of Sciences, full of left-handed compliments, such as praising Lamarck for being “gifted . . . with a lofty imagination.”

Geoffroy preferred to lie low as the political winds shifted, throwing himself into his work. He had come to adopt a different, more Lamarckian interpretation of the fossil record than Cuvier did. Where Cuvier saw differences, Geoffroy saw similarities. A human hand, a bird wing, and a whale fin were all nearly identical in their underlying bone structure. They had simply been put to different use. What variances they possessed were acquired through centuries of Lamarckian adaptation. Geoffroy didn't go so far as to claim that all organisms evolved from a single original species, but he did argue that all vertebrates—every creature that had a spinal column—traced its history to a common ancestor. Cartoonists began to humorously portray Geoffroy as an ape. Evolutionists would often be portrayed this way in the press for the rest of the century.