On November 24, 1859, a little-known biologist from England quietly published a book introducing a significant new scientific theory, proposing that a process he termed “natural selection” could explain how human beings had evolved from other species. The title would soon become known the world over—On the Origin of Species. The first edition sold out within days, all 1,170 copies, and the rest, as they say, is history. . . .
One hundred years later, in 1959, this event had become reason for celebration. A number of leading evolutionary pioneers gathered together at the University of Chicago to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Charles Darwin’s first book, spending several autumn days on the beautiful tree-lined campus paying homage to his unique genius and reflecting on the meaning of evolution. The star-studded interdisciplinary conference featured presentations from experts in the fields of biology, paleontology, anthropology, and even psychology. The best and brightest were in attendance, including legendary evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, who each shared their wisdom with the assembled audience. Even Darwin’s grandson was present.
But perhaps the most famous guest of all was the grandson of another great evolutionist, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the early supporters of Darwin’s revolutionary theory. Julian Huxley, his descendant, was a brilliant scientist, humanist, and world-renowned intellectual. As he ascended the podium to address the international audience, expectations ran high. Here was a man who had worked to convince the world that Darwin’s natural selection was a driving force of evolutionary change. The audience would have also known Huxley for his humanitarian ideals, which had helped inspire the great humanist movement, the twentieth century’s intellectual alternative to religious faith. Some may have been aware of Huxley’s interest in the existential implications of evolutionary theory, a passion that had led him to coin the phrase “We are evolution become conscious of itself.” Perhaps some even knew him as the fiercely independent thinker who had endured the outrage of his secular-minded colleagues to write the introduction to the controversial book on religion and evolution, The Phenomenon of Man, by recently deceased Catholic priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. What would Huxley offer his audience on this momentous anniversary, when some of the greatest minds of the era had their attention trained on his pulpit?
Huxley’s talk was called “The Evolutionary Vision,” and he delivered it with an almost religious passion, attendees recalled. He suggested that religion as we knew it was dying, that “supernaturally centered” faiths were destined to decline, to deselect themselves out of existence like nonadaptive species in a hostile environment. “Evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness in the arms of a divinized father figure whom he has himself created,” Huxley claimed, “nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of Divine Authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient, but unfortunately inscrutable, Providence.” Huxley’s words were strong, spoken with the conviction of one who had worked his whole life to free the human spirit from belief systems unsuited to the modern world. But before proclaiming the death of religion altogether, he added a notable line. “Finally,” he concluded, “the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that . . . will arise to serve the needs of the coming era.”
For Huxley, evolution was not merely a final nail in the coffin of traditional religious belief. It represented much more than the victory of a scientific theory over the historical forces of superstition and ignorance. The triumph of evolution also pointed us toward the future—toward a post-traditional synthesis that would arise out of our new understanding of who we are and where we came from.
In the fall of 2009, I attended another conference at the University of Chicago, held exactly fifty years following the first gathering and one hundred and fifty years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Like its predecessor, the event was also a meeting of some of evolutionary theory’s brightest lights, and I was curious to see what the intellectual descendants of Huxley, Mayr, and Dobzhansky might have to say about the “evolutionary vision” fifty years on down the road.
I found the conference to be fascinating, the lectures and discussions on the latest findings in evolutionary science wonderfully informative. Religion, too, was a major subject of the day. Today’s evolutionary scientists are veritably obsessed with their ongoing struggles against creationism and intelligent design; they are deeply vexed about the resistance to Darwin’s ideas and biology’s discoveries that still characterizes so many of today’s religious communities. As someone who grew up in the Bible Belt, where such controversies rage unchecked, I understood and shared their concerns. But what of Julian Huxley’s vision? What of his observation that a rich, novel kind of evolutionary knowledge might change our worldview, our sense of self and humanity’s place in the scheme of things?
There was little to report from Chicago on that front. To hear the version of things presented in those hoary halls, there is the ongoing march of new science, the ongoing resistance of old-time religion, and that’s about the extent of it. Admittedly, there was an occasional nod to the heroic attempt to reconcile evolution and faith, but no one was on the lookout for the emergence of a new evolution-inspired spirituality. No one was talking about the way in which evolutionary ideas might transform culture and human thought in the new century. In fact, it seemed that no one was paying much attention at all to the vision that Huxley had presented on that November day in 1959.
But just because they’re not paying attention doesn’t mean that there is nothing worth watching. Indeed, today Huxley’s evolutionary vision is more culturally relevant than ever. It is living in the hearts and minds of thousands of individuals around the world who are experimenting with new cultural perspectives, new philosophical epiphanies, new spiritual ideals, new religious visions—all based around the idea of evolution. Sadly, these cultural pioneers were not invited to the 2009 conference in Chicago. To find them, we must travel outside the conventional walls of the academy and beyond the ancient structures of traditional religion. We must journey to the frothy frontiers of culture, to the border between convention and controversy where the next great cultural breakthroughs are struggling to be born. This is a book about the search for that evolutionary vision and a new kind of worldview based on it.