From Dr M. Asciak

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Charles Darwin published his theory on the origin of the species including man himself. It must be pointed out that in Victorian England he had to be quite brave to come out with such a theory! He in fact mulled it over in confidential silence for 20 years after returning from a voyage on HMS Beagle, where he discovered the way that species evolved and came into being. When he suggested that it was the female birds that did the actual choosing of the male bird, and rather than simply accept pre-arranged marriages or wait to be picked up by some dashing or not so dashing male, it did not go down well in his time! His unavoidable clash with the Anglican (funnily enough not Catholic) establishment was an omen that society repeatedly fails to see the scientific writing on the wall because of prejudices and preconceived ideas. God did not create the world in seven days! That is what the religious account of creation tells us, but it is a religious account aimed at telling us that God created the world and not how he actually did it. That is the remit of scientific investigation. We have this odd habit as human beings of telling God what to do!

Many people do not know that Darwin’s formal university education was in Divinity. He was trained to become a parson. Biology was his favourite hobby. Whereas people up to that time believed that God created species ex nihilo, it became evident to him that there were other processes which were responsible for forming life as we know it. The process of natural selection whereby individuals in species and the species itself survive according to their ability to cope with fast changing environmental conditions was not known at the time. Another selection process noted by Darwin was one of sexual selection, where the best placed members of one sex often chose the best placed members of the opposite sex in the same species, thereby ensuring that the best placed members of the species pass their genes on to their offspring.

Darwin (and to give due credit, Wallace) was hindered by his lack of knowledge of the mechanism whereby this selection process, both natural and sexual, actually took place. They had no knowledge of the DNA code and the genetic means by which this selection was ensured. It is said that a Catholic priest, Gregory Mendel, wrote to Darwin (and other scientists) about his experiments with peas in the monastery garden and his calculations on inheritance patterns, but neither Darwin nor the others saw any importance in the calculations he had made and which we now know to be so significant.

The moral of the story, besides remembering a great man, is that we should not pooh-pooh new ideas before they are properly examined. Society has a penchant for this. One of the most important analytic British philosophers, Bertrand Russell, did not even mention Darwin in his History of Western Philosophy, because he did not believe that he had contributed anything to human thought! Even in the religious sphere this tendency not to accept new scientific developments could lead to the kind of scenario Darwin and Galileo faced if we are not open minded. If natural law is our rational grasp of eternal law, then we have to keep our minds open to developments in the light thrown by scientists on the law of nature, which itself informs us about important concepts of natural law. Unless we do this we will never be able to evolve our social teaching and fundamental concepts even about God itself. So long as our knowledge on the laws of nature continues to increase and evolve, so will our knowledge on natural law, which should always be considered to be correct up to the time of printing subject to future review if developments occur.

Michael Asciak