Natura non facit saltum

23rd August, on the Eurostar to Paris

I am currently cruising at about 200 miles per hour along the high speed railway line between London King’ Cross and Paris Gard du Nord. My eldest daughter (Matilda, 13) is sitting opposite me as we head off back to Switzerland to rendez-vous with the rest of our family (wife Gins and younger daughter, Verity, 11). There we shall spend a week hiking in the glorious mountains of the Swiss Bernese Oberland. We will then return by car next Sunday, ready for me to turn around toute-suite to board a train for Plymouth on Monday – and then on to the Stad Amsterdam that evening.

Seeing the countryside fly past so fast makes me wonder why, when so much seems to have changed over the last 150 years, we are still so fascinated by the writings and adventures of a once obscure British naturalist. After all Charles Darwin witnessed nothing of the traumas, advances and huge changes in lifestyles that have brought us into the 21st century? Why do we still find the words of this man so striking and relevant today?

I have been musing over this conundrum for the last half hour – and, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts.

Actually, I have concluded that life over the last 150 years has changed very little. In fact, when it comes to fundamentals, I’m not sure it’s changed that much at all.

What are the biggest agents of transformation during that period? My guess is that top of anyone’s list must be the extraordinary growth in human populations. Shortly before Darwin was born, worldwide population levels reached the 1 billion mark (c. 1804). Today we are careering towards 7 billion…

Such swollen numbers have led to truly dramatic changes in human lifestyles. In the “developed world” most people now live in cities as opposed to rural communities. Intensive farming and artificial infrastructure has reshaped much of the earth’s surface. Most of the seas are now a barren desert, void of life, thanks to the pitfalls of over-fishing and bottom-sea trawling.

Despite this, the issue of population growth is no different today from how it was Darwin’s time. In fact exponential population growth is almost exactly the same today as it was then. That’s why Thomas Malthus' essay in 1798 had such a profound impact on Darwin, giving him the keys (a Malthusian crisis) from which he deduced the mechanics of what he came to call ‘natural selection’.

Another defining feature of today’s world is the hegemony of oil – with all its offshoots including the internal combustion and jet engines. The oil economy, on which we are so reliant today for our material welfare and comfort, didn’t really kick in properly until the early 20th century, well after Darwin’s day.

Yet again, the key innovation afforded by today’s use of oil had already come about in 1801 when Richard Trevithick first stoked up the pressure of his “Puffing Devil” steam engine, the first to be mounted on wheels.

What Trevithick’s innovation did was free humanity from the shackles of nature by giving us a fully independent, transportable form of power. Until then, humans had to some extent always relied on the forces of nature for their power supplies be it by harnessing the wind (boats, windmills), water (canals, water mills), animals (horses, mules, human feet) or using the weight of the atmosphere (early steam engines).

Trevithick’s high pressure steam changed everything. It liberated humanity allowing people to power up when and where they wanted, revolutionising transport down mines, inland along railways tracks and via iron-clad ships across the seas. Steam power also gave birth to what is still the main form of electricity generation (87% of world’s electric power still comes from steam – even nuclear power stations are ultimatley driven by steam).

The discovery and harnessing of oil and petrol may have dramatically extended humanity’s liberation from nature, but the basic battle was already won with high pressure steam in Darwin’s day.

Now let’s think of what hasn’t changed in the last 150 years. Human beings have not physiologically ‘evolved’ at all during the period – evolution works on much grander times scales and, as Darwin was always keen to emphasise, it seldom, if ever, moves in leaps (Natura non facit saltum).

Edwardian gentlemen were generally a little less tall than people are today (try sitting in the cramped seats of an old London theatre for a 2 hour performance!) and there are probably a few more slim-hipped women about (owing to the advent of successful techniques for caesarian sections), But these are cosmetic differences. The basic human biological formula is unchanged.

As are our present day instincts from tribalism (from wars to competitive sports); competition (in form of economic capitalism) to vanity (humans use visual recognition as the primary mechanism for mate selection unlike most other mammals which use their sense of smell). Humans are also just as obsessed as ever with the pursuit of sexual reproduction (look at the role of sex in advertising and the media) and still have a woeful disregard for the welfare of other species (any growth in the animal rights movement has been more than offset by the horrors of intensive farming)….

Who can deny that these issues, all prevent in Darwin’s day, aren’t still defining questions we constantly grapple with in our society today, consciously or otherwise, despite the cosmetic and material differences of our 21st century lives?

Then there’s education. Don’t get me started!…..! The issue of man’s place in nature is still hardly on the curriculum in most schools and colleges which regard the study of the past (which they call history) as the record of human achievement only - exactly as it was taught in Darwin’s day. Little if any attempt has yet been made to see the past in terms of the context of humanity, other life and the planet itself (see www.whatonearthhappened.com).

So now it makes more sense why we have such current curiosity in this man, Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago. He was the first person to truly expose the origin, vulnerability and frailty of the human condition when seen in its proper evolutionary context. Yes – human beings are indeed subject to the same rules of survival and extinction as other species – rules that Darwin was the first to articulate.

And it is because so little has changed over the last 150 years that Darwin’s prophetic warning that ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,’ has such profound resonance today.