“A venerable Oragutang” – caricature of Darwin from The Hornet, a satirical magazine of 19th Century England
But it was these two provocative ideas–that species cold become extinct, and, that new species could arise–that first began to chip away at the mighty edifice that was The Great Chain of Being. Darwin’s later, key concept of “descent with modification” was but a final, intellectual nail in the coffin of Special Creation. From this observation—coupled with the Lyell’s theories of vast geological time scales and continuity of action–one could readily infer descent from earlier, but morphologically related, forms. To be sure, this was truly a revolutionary synthesis. But it was these former two notions— hinted at in the pre-Origin writings of Wallace, Darwin and others–that caused the first disruptive waves of the advancing scientific flood. For they implied the unthinkable: a creation neither perfect (creatures could die out) nor complete (new creatures could emerge). This was a dual assertion that anyone, of nearly any social stature, could comprehend.
As these ideas came out into the public arena, the shock waves would follow. The much later, popularized notion of humans being descendants of apes (or often, ignorantly, “of monkeys”) would come to replace (in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century) these earlier, outrageous insinuations by England’s respected and cherished core of naturalists. But these possibilities of extinction and emergence remained implicit in every mention of descent, natural selection, and the “possibility of continued divergence” (Wallace).
About Michael Ricciardi
