The Human Error Darwin Inspired
Since its publication in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been read as a blow to the hubris of Homo sapiens. We aren’t God’s final and most perfect creation, after all, but merely one more product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to apes, lampreys, and limpets. In his eulogy to Darwin, delivered in 1882, the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond put it concisely: “Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world.” Just as Copernicus had displaced man from the center of celestial orbits, Darwin had toppled him from the pinnacle of “animated beings.” Du Bois-Reymond’s analogy gained broad intellectual currency, and in fact it is often misattributed to Sigmund Freud, who appropriated it with just a wee bit of vainglory, adding psychoanalysis as “the third and most bitter blow” to humanity’s “naive self-love.”
Just for the record, since I am about to indict him: He is among my heroes.
If the idea that Darwin humbled us has become canonical, what is less often observed is the fact that the newfound humility was, in certain important respects, misleading—and dangerously so. In the latter half was not, in fact, just another species, an organism like any other. To the contrary, was just embarking on a period of more sudden environmental transformation than any single species had ever achieved. was, in fact, quite special.
