Darwin Day Lecture 2005

2005 February 11, Hong Kong Theatre, London School of Economics

he BHA’s third Darwin Day lecture, Darwin – a “Devil’s Chaplain” ? , was given by Dr James Moore, attracting a large and enthusiastic audience to the LSE’s impressive Hong Kong Theatre on the evening of 11 ^thFebruary.

Appropriately for this international celebration, it was an international gathering, with the speaker flying in from Harvard and audience members from as far away as Belgium and Switzerland.

The chair of the event, Professor Richard Dawkins, began the evening by introducing the Darwin Day concept, and wondering why Darwin’s simple but astonishingly powerful theory took until the 19 ^thcentury to emerge, and why Darwin, once he had worked it out, sat on it so long. He anticipated that Jim Moore, a very distinguished historian of science, would offer some answers.

Dr Moore, aided by a vivid collection of slides, placed Darwin squarely in his time, an era when science was social, exciting and dangerous, and when, in the circles in which Darwin moved, there was much radical thought and activity. But with that came the policing of knowledge: the British Association for the Advancement of Science was set up at the time by scientists and Anglicans to do just that. Darwin ’s respectability and nervousness about what he might unleash (“Let one species change… and the whole fabric totters and falls” he wrote in one of his private notebooks), led to his caution about publishing on evolution and reluctance to use the word. He referred to “creation” throughout On The Origin of Species, which Jim Moore described as a “pious” book, more likely to upset freethinkers than religious believers.  But at the same time Darwin was privately describing himself as a “materialist” and a few years later, after T H Huxley invented the term, as an agnostic.

Darwin shared his doubts and heretical thoughts with few people, and thanks to his cautious approach evolution became a respectable theory, generally accepted as compatible with faith – as indeed it is today. On his death Darwin had the rare distinction of a funeral service at Westminster Abbey, attended by the great and the good of his day. His family continued to protect his privacy and respectability, and the first Life and Letters, by his son Francis, found little room in its three hefty volumes for the more freethinking Darwin. This omission, and the family’s unwillingness to engage in controversy, allowed others, particularly American evangelists, to spread the story of a death bed recantation. Dr Moore described the circumstantial detail which gave the story of Darwin ’s deathbed conversion by one “Lady Hope” so much credibility, though he was sceptical about its central content. Ironically, in the 60s RPA’s The Humanist recycled the story for another audience, and it still flourishes today in American churches and amongst American university students.

Discussion and questions tended to focus on worries about American fundamentalism, and the compatibility of Darwinism and religious belief. Dr Moore was more worried by the effects of American piety on politics than on science, which remains robust, and referred to empirical evidence supporting the idea that people could believe in both evolution and in religion. Later he made a distinction between evolution amongst animals, which after all had been observed in selective breeding for centuries, and the evolution of man from animals, which people found much harder to accept for religious reasons. But if there was a crisis of faith in the 19 ^th century, Darwin was a symptom of it, not the main cause. The Chair thought that Dr Moore had given too much credibility to “Lady Hope” by stressing the circumstantial details of her story, and Dr Moore admitted that his work had been used by creationists, though the circumstantial details did not make the story true. He ended by saying that answering creationist propaganda dignified it and that we should not be like the evangelicals – we can best promote Darwinism and Darwin Day by observing the importance of humility but offering something better to believe in.

Richard Dawkins thanked Dr Moore for his erudite talk, “worthy of Darwin himself” and then was thanked in his turn by BHA Executive Director Hanne Stinson, who also thanked the organisers, Marilyn Mason of the BHA and Satoshi Kanazawa of LSE’s Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, and told the audience a little about the BHA. Speakers and audience then continued to celebrate Darwin’s birthday over drinks and nibbles generously provided by the Interdisciplinary Institute of Management.

There was some media interest in the event, but two radio interviews with Jim Moore were cancelled because Prince Charles’ wedding announcement earlier in the week had taken over the space!

Dr Moore's lecture can be downloaded below.

Passages in the lecture are adapted from James Moore’s The Darwin Legend and "Telling Tales: Evangelicals and the Darwin Legend," in D. N. Livingstone , D. G. Hart, and M. A. Noll, eds., Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Full documentation and numerous illustrations are available in these sources and in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin).