Power Shifts: Animals, Man, God, and Knowledge

In The Descent of Man Darwin presents a theory about the origins of mankind that necessarily changes how we understand humans, gods, and animals. A world of natural selection, of change and chance, of interrelationship (between animals and each other, between animals and environment) replaces the orderly world of God’s dominion over man and man’s dominion over animals in a universe created by God. Nowhere (in the first three chapters, at least) does Darwin deny or refute the existence God, but he subtly plays with the categories of human, god, and animal, ultimately subverting them all.

As the title suggests, this book is partially about man’s descent into animality from a privileged place in creation. Throughout these early chapters, Darwin repeatedly depicts man with characteristics of the animal. In his fetus pictures he shows the similarities between a human and dog fetus, which resemble each other far more than their adult forms. Likewise, when Darwin discusses rudiments, he gives examples of people with unusual hair growth: long eyebrows, “persons born with their whole bodies and faces thickly covered with fine long hairs” (37), and lanugo on infants. These rudiments or reversions not only establish the descent of man from animals, but highlight his still animal nature.

At the same time, Darwin draws attention to the ways in which animals possess a human nature. He attributes to animals a dizzyingly extensive catalogue of human-like characteristics: language, tool use, appreciation of beauty, superstition, caprice, memory, “rude architecture and dress” (104), mental improvement or growth, reason, and emotional states including: terror, suspicion, deceit, courage, timidity, sulkiness, ill- and good-temperedness, furious rage, a capacity for “long-delayed and artful revenge” (90), love, a desire to be loved, maternal affection, sympathy, fidelity, shame, pride, boredom, wonder, curiosity, dread, jealousy, gratitude, magnanimity, and humor. This would all seem like very over-the-top anthropomorphism in a different context, but Darwin provides proof for his representation of the animal through numerous examples and in the context of natural selection and evolution. Animals are like humans, not because we project our interiorities onto them, but because we are them, or at least are a version of them.

Darwin is also aware of the ways his theory excludes or diminishes God or gods and religion. Evolutionary theory changes what God is or what God can mean to us. Darwin ends his first chapter by suggesting that if we deny evolution it is due to the “arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods” (43). No longer made in the image of God, humans are made by their environment, by the same history of accumulation and sedimentation that produced animals and plants. However, Darwin also subverts the idea of a diminished human subject, referring to man’s “present high position in the organic scale” (85) and also suggesting that man is like a god to animals: “Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god” (119). Humans still have a high status in Darwin’s account, but man has achieved this status through a historical, natural process, not through divine intervention or creation.

These chapters focus on human and non-human animals, but Darwin does broach the topic of religion at a few points. Darwin employs a very light touch when referencing God or religion, but his comments on these subjects are telling. At the end of the first chapter, Darwin doesn’t explicitly say that his theory on the descent of man excludes God, but he does predict that one day people will be surprised that anyone ever believed humans and other animals were each “the work of a separate act of creation” (43). If species result from natural selection rather than separate acts of creation, the only place for God in this theory would be at the beginning, leading to a very deist interpretation of God (a diminished God). When discussing whether or not animals have religion or beliefs, Darwin brackets the question of whether or not “there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe,” though he says “this has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed” (116). Darwin doesn’t say “of course God exists” or “I believe God exists,” merely “really smart people think it’s true,” which is a complete evasion of the question which defers its truth or untruth to the mental capabilities of man. Man’s knowledge is supreme, an idea that comes back at the end of chapter three when Darwin expresses “an infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason, to science, and to our accumulated knowledge,” which saves us from the fear and superstition we might otherwise feel. In these chapters, Darwin elevates animals, diminishes man, and excludes God; intelligence, knowledge, and science become the gods and heroes of Darwin’s book, the tools that let us see the truth of our own descent.