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Authors: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan
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held that Noah’s flood was the primary agent responsible for the present configuration of the Earth’s crust. A big enough flood, they thought, could transform the Earth’s geology in just forty days and forty nights, consistent with an Earth only a few thousand years old. With a little spin control on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, they felt they had managed to pull it off.
Lyell had been a lawyer for as long as he could stand it. When he was thirty years old, he abandoned the law for geology, his true passion. He wrote
Principles of Geology
to advance the “Uniformitarian” view that the Earth has been shaped by the same gradual processes that we observe today, but operating not merely over a few weeks, or a few thousand years, but ages. There were distinguished geologists who held that floods and other catastrophes might explain the Earth’s landforms, but that the Noachic flood wasn’t enough. It would take
many
floods,
many
catastrophes. These scientific Catastrophists werecomfortable with Lyell’s long time scales But for the biblical literalists Lyell posed an awkward problem. If Lyell was right, the rocks were saying that the Bible’s six days of Creation, and the age of the Earth deduced by adding up the “begats,” were somehow in error It was through this apparent hole in
Genesis
that the
Beagle
would sail into history.
Hired mainly as FitzRoy’s companion and sounding board, Darwin was obliged to bear with equanimity the Captain’s politically conservative, racist, and fundamentalist harangues. For most of the voyage, the two men managed to maintain a truce with regard to their philosophical and political differences. However, Darwin was simply unable to let FitzRoy’s opinion on one particular issue go unchallenged:
[A]t Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they wished to be free, and all answered “No.” I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. 13
Darwin fully expected to be kicked off the ship. But when the gunroom officers heard of the row, they vied with each other for the privilege of sharing their quarters with him. FitzRoy calmed down and actually apologized to Darwin, rescinding the eviction. Possibly, Darwin’s evolutionary views emerged, in part, out of his exasperation with FitzRoy’s inflexible conventionalism, and the necessity of the young man to suppress for five years the counterarguments that were welling up inside him 14
Perhaps it was the legacy of his grandfathers that enabled Darwin to detect the inconsistencies and injustices that other members of his social class would not see. At the very beginning of his book,
The Voyage of the Beagle
, he tells of a place not far from Rio de Janeiro:
This spot is notorious from having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seizedwith the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy. 15
Darwin had been lured to South America by the prospect of discovering new birds and new beetles, but he couldn’t help noticing the carnage the Europeans were inflicting. Colonial arrogance, the institution of slavery, the extirpation of countless species for the enrichment and entertainment of the invaders, the first depredations of the tropical rain forest—in short, many of the crimes
Lyell had been a lawyer for as long as he could stand it. When he was thirty years old, he abandoned the law for geology, his true passion. He wrote
Principles of Geology
to advance the “Uniformitarian” view that the Earth has been shaped by the same gradual processes that we observe today, but operating not merely over a few weeks, or a few thousand years, but ages. There were distinguished geologists who held that floods and other catastrophes might explain the Earth’s landforms, but that the Noachic flood wasn’t enough. It would take
many
floods,
many
catastrophes. These scientific Catastrophists werecomfortable with Lyell’s long time scales But for the biblical literalists Lyell posed an awkward problem. If Lyell was right, the rocks were saying that the Bible’s six days of Creation, and the age of the Earth deduced by adding up the “begats,” were somehow in error It was through this apparent hole in
Genesis
that the
Beagle
would sail into history.
Hired mainly as FitzRoy’s companion and sounding board, Darwin was obliged to bear with equanimity the Captain’s politically conservative, racist, and fundamentalist harangues. For most of the voyage, the two men managed to maintain a truce with regard to their philosophical and political differences. However, Darwin was simply unable to let FitzRoy’s opinion on one particular issue go unchallenged:
[A]t Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they wished to be free, and all answered “No.” I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. 13
Darwin fully expected to be kicked off the ship. But when the gunroom officers heard of the row, they vied with each other for the privilege of sharing their quarters with him. FitzRoy calmed down and actually apologized to Darwin, rescinding the eviction. Possibly, Darwin’s evolutionary views emerged, in part, out of his exasperation with FitzRoy’s inflexible conventionalism, and the necessity of the young man to suppress for five years the counterarguments that were welling up inside him 14
Perhaps it was the legacy of his grandfathers that enabled Darwin to detect the inconsistencies and injustices that other members of his social class would not see. At the very beginning of his book,
The Voyage of the Beagle
, he tells of a place not far from Rio de Janeiro:
This spot is notorious from having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seizedwith the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy. 15
Darwin had been lured to South America by the prospect of discovering new birds and new beetles, but he couldn’t help noticing the carnage the Europeans were inflicting. Colonial arrogance, the institution of slavery, the extirpation of countless species for the enrichment and entertainment of the invaders, the first depredations of the tropical rain forest—in short, many of the crimes
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