Charles Darwin, Right On Species Origin, Wrong About Us?
Charles Darwin’s words at the very end of the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, regarding all life forms, are well known and, at least by the scientific community, widely accepted as being the truth about how life forms have multiplied over hundreds of millions of years to reach the present time when they probably number in the tens of millions of distinct forms or species.
“There is grandeur," he says, "in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
There are other words of Darwin, perhaps less well known and certainly not as widely accepted, even by the scientific community, that have been instead widely and tragically resisted, tragically because the resistance has meant an endless series of wars and the accompanying suffering and body counts.
"As man advances in civilization," he writes in the 4th. chapter of Part 1 of the Descent of Man, "and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”
Why the resistance to this insight? What has prevented and still prevents us from extending our sympathies to the men of all nations and races? For in fact the One World idea, which is Darwin’s idea no less than the Origin of Species, is still without the powerful draw of the family, the tribe, and the nation.
Today the nation (actually all 192 of them, the current roster of the United Nations) puts up the greatest resistance to our world being one. Any hope that this might not always be so stems from the fact that over time the earliest political units, the family and the tribe, are warring less and cooperating more, and have mostly accepted, although not aways willingly, to become parts of the larger community or nation.
Hope is still that the nations of the world will eventually be willing and cooperating parts of a much larger world community.
For Darwin is no less right about the seemingly different peoples of the earth being more properly integral parts of a single world wide community than he was about the origin of the tens of millions of species presently inhabiting the earth. As he says only "artificial barriers," mostly those of language, culture, and race, prevent the peoples of the world from coming together right now.
Under the skin of the seven billion individuals now inhabiting the earth, in their cells and within the nuclei of the cells, within the spiraling helices of DNA molecules constituted into 23 pairs of chromosomes, the seven billion individuals are 99.5% identical.
Our living together, our living together at peace, may only be a function of how much we look upon one another as being the same, or alternatively how much significance we give to our differences, the one leading to cooperation, the other in extreme instances of our differences, as in Africa and the Middle East, to disputes and ultimately to war.
In our country, up until now, the "one worlders," for example, Woodrow Wilson in the 1920s, Wendell Wilkie in the 1940s, both of whom knew at first hand the devastation brought about by wars between nations, have not been able to bring our country along with them.
Rather up until now the race has been mostly to the "real worlders," to the likes of Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger et al., for whom our security lay much more in the mostly material strength of our single nation than in our moral strength, in our belonging and adhering to international and one world treaties and organizations. Will things change? Will Darwin here also be proven to be right? One would like to believe so.
