Life and work2

Darwin seems to have been a decent and compassionate man who was gradually drifting away from
the Christian beliefs he had been brought up with, and studied at theological school, while very largely
hanging on to the social and personal values which Christianity taught. Many millions of people would
follow that path � it is only to be guessed at how much Darwin knew that his theory would impel them
down that path. It is very probable that, like so many others, Darwin imagined that it would be perfectly
possible to maintain values such as 'the principles of justice and honour' once the Christian faith,
which taught that these values were compulsory because God-given, was swept away by 'rationalism'.
As The Beagle continued her journey around South America, some interesting views were
expressed, or rather stated as certain facts, concerning the preservation of the frozen carcasses of
extinct animals e.g. Siberian elephants and rhinoceri. He reflected that the preservation of these
carcasses is 'certainly one of the most wonderful facts in geology' but that 'the whole case is not, I
think, so perplexing as it has generally been considered'. This form of words is almost identical to the
'explanations' Darwin would offer later to deflect all criticisms of his theory. He suggested (and
Darwin's suggestions very soon became 'facts' in his mind) that the animals' dead bodies were
washed down rivers, froze in the shallow sea, and then were 'soon afterwards covered with mud,
sufficiently thick to prevent the heat of the summer-water penetrating to it, and if, when the seas
bottom was upraised into land, the covering was sufficiently thick to prevent the heat of the summer air
and sun thawing and corrupting it.' No evidence is presented to support this belief, Darwin was quite
happy to just assert these things about preservation of old carcasses and for him, that was enough,
the matter was settled. Darwin described the fossilised skeletons of various gigantic extinct land
animals found together 'embedded on the beach' and expressed surprise that so many different
species should be found together in one small area, he supposed that this unlikely happenstance was
due to the fact that the ancient inhabitants of the land were very 'numerous in kind'. Interestingly,
Darwin described fossil remains 'embedded in stratified gravel and reddish mud, just such as the

seas might now wash up on a shallow bank'. It can be noted through his reading and
admiring Charles Lyell (left), he had already rejected the idea of a catastrophic
global inundation which could readily account for the extinctions, stratification and
fossilisation of large whole animals which have been observed. Having rejected the
flood as a cause he is speculating for other causes of extinctions, and looking for
meaning in such extinctions. He was fascinated and evidently completely
persuaded by Lyell's at that time very new 'long age' uniformitarian theory of the
earth, otherwise he might have read these observations somewhat differently. (See

Mount St. Helens Catastrophism ). Darwin obtained the head of a Mylodon, a giant extinct
quadruped, and noted that the bones were so fresh that they contained by analysis 7% animal matter
and when placed in a spirit lamb it burned with a small flame. This certainly suggests that the fossils
of these gigantic extinct creatures may have been much more recent than the supposed millions of
years. It is interesting to compare this observation with a recently-discovered Montana T. Rex which
was found to have semi-solid material � apparently red blood cells � inside a fossilised thigh bone.
Darwin brought his able and enquiring mind to bear on questions such as the amount of food it took
to support a large animal, and made the interesting observation that, should whales have been
extinct and nobody had seen one, and the fossilised skeleton of a Greenland whale were found,
nobody would have believed that its diet consisted of small invertebrates living in icy-cold arctic
seas. This is an interesting observation which which casts light on how great speculations are made
about skeletons, and how, without more information, such speculations may be very far from true.

It is as true now as when Darwin made these observations that considerable variation occurs within
a species, but unless we assume molecules-to-man evolution as an a priori certainty, the observed
facts place us under no obligation to suppose a common ancestor for all kinds. He began to
speculate on extinctions, no doubt after brooding over the fossil skeletons of the giant quadrupeds
mentioned earlier. It is at this point that the writing style of the Darwin who produced The Origin of
Species begins to emerge, and what a change from the formerly lucid observer and chronicler of
facts to the user of convoluted logic and speculation mixed with banal observations! For example,
towards the end of chapter 8 he wrote, 'Certainly no fact in the long history of the world is so startling
as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants'. I would have thought that the existence of
the world and its inhabitants was more startling than the fact that some species no longer existed, but
that, I suppose, is a matter of personal opinion.