Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Darwin's Apple
Where are you from?" It's the kind of question that strangers, trying to become friends, will often ask one another.
No one can begin to know another until he knows where that person is from. Not just his family, school, and town, but everything that has helped to bring him to this point in his life.
This book is about the ultimate "Where are you from?" question. As important as it may be to understand one's ethnic origin and cultural identity, the bigger question is one that every child, sooner or later, asks of his or her parents: "Where did people come from?" In each culture according to its fashion, every child gets an answer. For me, a little boy growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, the answer came in the form of the first couplet of my religious training:
Question: "Who made us?"
Answer: "God made us."
Every year, that training reached deeper, demanded more, and grappled with more sophisticated questions of faith and virtue. But every year, it began with exactly the same question: Who made us? And that question was always followed by exactly the same answer. God made us.
In a different building, only a few hundred yards away from the red brick walls of St. Mary's, I began to find another answer to that question. This other school did not always grapple with the same straightforward questions of right and wrong that were the weekly fare of our catechism, but it taught its students to believe something at least as intoxicating as the divinity of their origins--the possibility that the world around us was constructed insuch a way that we could actually make sense of it. That great secular faith drew strength from a culture in which science seemed to fuel not only the fires of imagination, but the fires of industry as well. And that faith extended to living things, which yielded, like everything else in the natural world, to the analysis of science.
Looking back on my youth, I am struck by how meticulously those two aspects of education were channeled to avoid conflict. Teachers on both sides, secular and religious, were careful to avoid pointing out the dramatic clash between the most fundamental aspects of their world views. No one ever suggested a catechism with a different beginning:
Question: "Who made us?"
Answer: "Evolution made us."
Nonetheless, the conflict between those two points of view is real. The traditional Western view of humanity as the children of God once had a direct, literal basis in the historical narrative of sacred scripture. Not only was God our spiritual father, He was also the direct agent of our creation. His actions were the immediate cause of our existence, and His planning and engineering skills were manifest in every aspect of our bodies. By extension, the splendor and diversity of the living world that surrounds us testified to the very same care and skill.
Charles Darwin himself recognized how profoundly scientific analysis had changed this view of life and humanity when he wrote the historical sketch that preceded his great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Generously (and correctly) he gave credit for this transformation to the now much-maligned French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck:
In these works, he [Lamarck] upholds the doctrine that all species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.
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