[00:00:04] Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:13] Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'd like to read for you excerpts from a review of Charles Darwin's 1859 book on the origin of species by english bishop, speaker, and writer Samuel Wilberforce.
[00:00:29] Let me give you a little background on Samuel before we begin. Born in London in 1805, he was the third son of William Wilberforce, well known to history as a leader of the movement in Britain to abolish the slave trade, Samuel's father provided him with a private and domestic education with a traditional teaching of the classics in a clerical home environment.
[00:00:51] In 1823, Samuel entered Oxford as part of the debating society there, graduating three years later with degrees in mathematics and the classics.
[00:01:02] After marrying Emily Sargent in 1828, he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, eventually rising to Bishop of Oxford, a position he held for 24 years. In 1845, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. One of the things Samuel Wilberforce is remembered for today is his criticism of Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection.
[00:01:26] In 1860, the same year as he published his lengthy review of Darwins book, he participated in a memorable debate over Darwins theory at a meeting of the British association in June 1860. There he gave a speech critiquing Darwins new arguments, published just seven months previously.
[00:01:45] Also in attendance at the event and giving speeches was Darwins Bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, as well as botanist Joseph Hooker.
[00:01:53] Huxley naturally defended Darwins theory, and Hooker made the argument that botany could be best explained through evolution. The meeting was summarized in publications of the day, but no official transcript was ever produced.
[00:02:07] All three men later considered themselves the prevailing voice in the debate, and at the time, selecting a winner really wasnt the primary objective.
[00:02:16] But as Darwins argument took hold in the latter half of the 19th century, this meeting began to take on more and more importance as a symbol of the debate over evolution.
[00:02:26] Not surprisingly, Darwin defenders have turned this meeting into a legendary event that helped to usher in the autonomy of science in Britain and the erosion of faith and religion and superstition.
[00:02:38] They hail the debate as the first public face off between biblical literalism and the growing science of evolution.
[00:02:46] But in reality, this view is more myth than fact. When set in the context of the period, the debate wasnt as influential as some have suggested. After all, the idea of evolution wasnt new to people by the mid 19th century.
[00:03:01] The debate likely started in England in the late 18th century with the publication of Erasmus Darwins poetry and his medical treatise Zoonomia Erasmus was, of course Charles Darwins grandfather. French and german anatomical and evolutionary ideas made their way to medical schools in Edinburgh and London. In 1844, scottish publisher Robert Chambers penned a sensational book, vestiges of the natural history of creation, that proposed a cosmic theory of evolution. Discussion of evolutionary proposals continued to gain support throughout the 1850s. And then Darwin came along with his book on the Origin of species, making an argument for natural selection as the mechanism by which evolution had produced the variety of life on earth. So by all accounts, the debate was already raging about the origin and development of life and mans place in it. The debate with Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker then, was a memorable expression of the currents of thought already running through british science and society. By 1860, Darwin hadnt started it, but he had issued the latest argument for it. Wilberforce had written a scathing review of Darwins origin of species that was published the month after the public debate in quarterly Review. So the text of this article likely formed the basis of his speech at the debate. So now let me read to you some excerpts of Wilberforces review. I say excerpts because the whole review is a hefty 30 pages long, over 18,000 words. If you'd like to read the whole thing, we'll include a link to it in the show notes for this episode. A review of on the Origin of Species by Samuel Wilberforce any contribution to our natural history literature from the pen of Mister Charles Darwin is certain to command attention.
[00:04:51] His scientific attainments, his insight and carefulness as an observer blended with no scanty measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make all his writings unusually attractive. His present volume on the origin of species is the result of many years of observation, thought and speculation, and is manifestly regarded by him as the opus upon which his future fame is to rest. The essay is full of Mister Darwin's characteristic excellences. It is a most readable book, full of facts and natural history, old and new, of his collecting and of his observing. And all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination.
[00:05:40] It assumes too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to everyone who is interested in the history of Mandev and of the relations of nature around him, to the history and plan of creation. With Mister Darwin's argument we may say in the outset that we shall have much and grave fault to find. But this does not make us the less disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work, and we will seek to give our readers a few examples of these.
[00:06:13] Here, for instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful interdependence of nature, of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth. Now all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel, as we walk abroad with Mister Darwin very much as the favored object of the attention the Durvais, the muslim mystic, must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye and had it opened to see all the jewels and diamonds and emeralds and topazes and rubies which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes, save those which the d'Urvais had enlightened. But here, we are bound to say, our pleasure terminates. For when we turn with Mister Darwin to his argument, we are almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an argument that the essay is put forward as an argument we will test it. We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mister Darwin's chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them first the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them, next the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference, and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his propositions. The conclusion then, to which Mister Darwin would bring us is that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great earth museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son, animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number, as mister Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests, or rather as growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us from one single head. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth, man, therefore, of course included, have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the creator.
[00:08:44] This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume of mister Darwins. Man, beast, creeping thing and plant of the earth are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. This is undoubtedly, at first sight, a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at to find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of today, and venerable saurians, truffles and men are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primeval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguishing honor of being the one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the creator. This, to say the least of it, is no common discovery, no very expected conclusion.
[00:09:45] But we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness.
[00:09:52] Newton's patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses. And if Mister Darwin can, with the same correctness of reasoning, demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms. Now the main propositions by which Mister Darwin's conclusion is attained are that observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of descents from a common progenitor two, that many of these variations tend to an improvement upon the parent stock that by a continued selection of these improved specimens as the progenitors of future stock, its powers may be unlimitedly increased and four, lastly, that there is in nature a power continually and universally working out this selection, and so fixing and augmenting these improvements. Mister Darwin's whole theory rests upon the truth of these propositions, and crumbles utterly away if only one of them fail him.
[00:10:58] These, therefore we must closely scrutinize. We will begin with the last in our series, both because we think it the newest and the most ingenious part of Mister Darwin's whole argument, and also because, whilst we absolutely deny the mode in which he seeks to apply the existence of the power to help him in his argument, yet we think that he throws great and very interesting light upon the fact that such a self acting power does actively and continuously work in all creation around us. Mister Darwin finds then the disseminating and improving power which he needs to account for the development of new forms in nature, in the principle of natural selection, which has evolved in the strife for room to live and flourish, which is evermore maintained between themselves by all living things. One of the most interesting parts of Mister Darwin's volume is that in which he establishes this law of natural selection. We say establishes because repeating that we differ from him totally in the limits which he would assign to its action. We have no doubt of the existence or of the importance of the law itself that such a struggle for life then actually exists, and that it tends continually to lead the strong to exterminate the weak, we readily admit, and in this law we see a merciful provision against the deterioration in a world apt to deteriorate of the works of the creator's hands. This indeed is no new observation, Lucretius new and eloquently expatiated on its truth. And this which is true in animal is no less true in vegetable life. Hardier or more prolific plants or plants better suited to the soil or conditions of climate continually tend to supplant others less hardy, less prolific, or less suited to the conditions of vegetable life, those special districts.
[00:12:41] Thus far, then, the action of such a law as this is clear and indisputable. But before we can go a step further and argue from its operation in favor of a perpetual improvement in natural types, we must be shown first that this law of competition has in nature to deal with such favorable variations in the individuals of any species as truly to exalt those individuals above the highest type of perfection to which their least imperfect predecessors attained above, that is to say, the normal level of the species, that such individual improvement is in truth arising above the highest level of any former tide, and not merely the return, in its appointed season, of the feebler dip to the fuller springtide. And then next we must be shown that there is actively at work in nature coordinate with the law of competition and with the existence of such favorable variations a power of accumulating such favorable variation through successive descents.
[00:13:38] Failing the establishment of either of these last two propositions, mister Darwins whole theory falls to pieces. He has accordingly laboured with all his strength to establish these, and into that attempt we must now follow him. Mister Darwin begins by endeavoring to prove that such variations are produced under the selecting power of man amongst domestic animals. Now all of this is very pleasant writing, especially for pigeon fanciers. But what step do we really gain in it all towards establishing the alleged fact that variations are but species in the act of formation or in establishing Mister Darwin's position that a well marked variety may be called an incipient species, we affirm positively that no single fact tending even in that direction, is brought forward. On the contrary, every one points distinctly towards the opposite conclusion. For with all the change wrought in appearance, with all the apparent variation in manners, there is not the faintest beginning of any such change in what that great comparative anatomist professor Owen calls the characteristics of the skeleton or other parts of the frame upon which specific differences are founded. Not let our readers forget over how large a lapse of time our opportunities of observation extend. From the early egyptian habit of embalming, we know that for 4000 years at least, the species of our own domestic animals, the cat, the dog and others, has remained absolutely unaltered. Yet it is in the face of such facts as these that Mister Darwin ventures. Nor must we pass over unnoticed the transference of the argument from the domesticated to the untamed animals. Assuming that man, as the selector can do much in a limited time, Mister Darwin argues that nature, a more powerful, a more continuous power, working over vastly extended ranges of time, can do more. But why should nature, so uniform and persistent in all her operations, tend in this instance to change?
[00:15:34] Why should she become a selector of varieties? Because, most ingeniously, argues Mister Darwin in the struggle for life, if any variety favorable to the individual were developed, that individual would have a better chance in the battle of life, would assert more proudly his own place, and handing on his peculiarity to his descendants, would become the progenitor of an improved race, and so variety would have grown into a species. We think it difficult to find a theory fuller of assumptions and of assumptions not grounded upon alleged facts in nature, but which are absolutely opposed to all the facts we have been able to observe. We have already shown that the variations of which we have proof under domestication have never, under the longest and most continued system of selections we have known, laid the first foundation of a specific difference, but have always tended to relapse and not to accumulated and fixed persistence. But secondly, all these variations have the essential characteristics of monstrosity about them, and not one of them has the character which Mister Darwin repeatedly reminds us is the only one which nature can select of being an advantage to the selected individual in the battle of life, an improvement upon the normal type by raising some individual of the species not to the highest possible excellence within the species, but to some excellence above it. So far from this, every variation introduced by man is for man's advantage, not for the advantage of the animal. Correlation is so certainly the law of all animal existence that man can only develop one part by the sacrifice of another. The bulldog gains in strengthen and loses in swiftness. The greyhound gains in swiftness, but loses in strength. Even the english racehorse loses much which would enable it in the battle of life to compete with its rougher ancestor. So too with our prize cattle. Their greater tendency to an earlier accumulation of meat and fat is counterbalanced, as is well known, by loss of robust health, fertility, and of power of yielding milk in proportion to their special development in the direction which man's use of them as food requires. There is not a shadow of ground for saying that man's variations ever improve the typical character of the animal as an animal they do, but by some monstrous development make it more useful to himself. And hence it is that nature, according to her universal law, with monstrosities, is ever tending to obliterate the deviation and to return to the type. The applied argument then, from variation under domestication fails utterly. But further, what does observation say as to the occurrence of a single instance of such favourable variation? Men have now for thousands of years been conversant as hunters and other rough naturalists with animals of every class. Has any one such instance ever been discovered? We fearlessly assert not one.
[00:18:28] Variations have been found. Rodents whose teeth have grown abnormally, animals of various classes, of which the eyes, from the absence of light in their dwellings, have been obscured and obliterated, but not one which has tended to raise the individual in the struggle of life above the typical conditions of its own species. Mister Darwin himself allows that he finds none, and accounts for their absence in existing fauna only by the suggestion that in the competition between the less improved parent form and the improved successor, the parent will have yielded in the strife in order to make room for the successor. And so both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form. A most unsatisfactory answer, as it seems to us, for why, since if this is nature's law, these innumerable changes must be daily occurring, should there never be any one producible proof of their existence here? Then again, when subjected to the stern baconian law of the observation of facts, the theory breaks down utterly. For no natural variations from the specific type favourable to the individual from which nature is to select can anywhere be found. Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men, and yet that the closest microscopic observation has never detected the faintest tendency in the highest of the algae to improve into the very lowest zoophyte. Again, we have not only the existing tribes of animals out of which to cull, if it were possible, the instances which the transmutationists require to make their theory defensible consistently with the simplest laws of inductive science. But we have in the earth beneath us a vast museum of the forms which have preceded us over so vast a period of time. Does Mister Darwin extend this collection that he finds reasons for believing that it is not improbable that a longer period than 300 million years has elapsed since the latter part of the secondary geological period alone. Here, then, surely at last, we must find the missing links of that vast chain of innumerable and separately imperceptible variations which has convinced the enquirer into natures undoubted facts of the truth of the transmutation theory, but no such thing. The links are wholly wanting. And the multiplicity of these facts and their absolute rebellion against Mister Darwin's theory is perhaps his chief difficulty. Here is his own statement of it and his mode of meeting it. Why, then, is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. This imperfection of the geological record and the geological succession are the subjects of two labored and ingenious chapters in which Darwin tries, as we think utterly in vain, to break down the unanswerable refutation which is given to his theory by the testimony of the rocks, but not only do the facts to which Mister Darwin trusts to establish his vast lapses of years, not only do these give him the same power of supposing the progress of changes of which we have found neither the commencement nor the progress nor the record. But when passing from these unlimited terms for change to work in, he proceeds to deal with the absence of all record of the changes themselves. The plainest geological facts again disprove his assumptions. Mister Darwin is compelled to admit that he finds no records in the crust of the earth to verify his assumption. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer. It would be wearisome to prolong these proofs, but if to any man they seem insufficient, let him read carefully the conclusion of Sir Roderick Murchisons masterly work upon Siluria, we venture to aver that the conviction must be forced upon him that the geological record is absolutely inconsistent. The truth of Mister Darwin's theory. And yet, by Mister Darwin's own confession, this conclusion is fatal to his whole argument.
[00:22:38] If these forms of life had existed, they must have been found. Even Mister Darwin shrinks from the deadly gripe of this argument.
[00:22:46] The case, he says at present, must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained more than once. Indeed, does he make this admission. One passage we have quoted already from page 280 of his work. With equal candor he says, further, I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory? And once more, why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? We meet with no such evidence, and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory. We come then, to these conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species, first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced for the supposed power of natural selection on which to work, whilst all variations from the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid sterility. Further, the embalmed records of 3000 years show that there has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most familiar domesticated animals, and beyond this, that in the countless tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable species, no one has ever discovered a single instance of such transmutation being now in prospect, no new organ has ever been known to be developed, no new natural instinct to be formed, whilst finally, in the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth embed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record, yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain or the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual approximations, to shade off into unity.
[00:25:19] On what, then, is the new theory based? We say it with unfeigned regret. In dealing with such a man as Mister Darwin on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded assumptions. And in the following passage, he carries this extravagance to the highest pitch, requiring a license for advancing as true any theory which cannot be demonstrated to be actually impossible. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. What new words are these for a loyal disciple of the true baconian philosophy? I can conceive it is not incredible. I do not doubt it is conceivable. In the name of all true philosophy, we protest equally against such a mode of dealing with nature as utterly dishonourable to all natural science as reducing it from its present lofty level as one of the noblest trainers of man's intellect and instructors of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy. Without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation, we cannot open the august doors of the venerable temple of scientific truth to the genii and the magicians of romance. We plead guilty to Mister Darwin's imputation that the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The other solvent, which Mister Darwin most freely and we think unphilosophically, employs to get rid of difficulties, is his use of time.
[00:26:59] This he shortens or prolongs at will by the mere wave of his magician's rod.
[00:27:04] Thus the duration of whole epochs during which certain forms of animal life prevailed is gathered up into a point, whilst an unlimited expanse of years, impressing his mind with a sense of eternity, is suddenly interposed. Between that and the next series. Though geology proclaims the transition to have been one of gentle, and it may be swift accomplishment, all this too is made the more startling because it is used to meet the objections drawn from facts. We see none of your works, says the observer of nature. We see no beginnings of the portentous change. We see plainly beings of another order and creation, but we find amongst them no tendencies to these altered organisms.
[00:27:45] True, says the great magician with a calmness, no difficulty derived from the obstinacy of facts can disturb true. But remember the effect of time. Throw in a few hundreds of millions of years, more or less, and why should not all these changes be possible? And if possible, why may I not assume them to be real? Together with this large license of assumption, we notice in this book several instances of receiving as facts whatever seems to bear out the theory upon the slightest evidence, and rejecting summarily others merely because they are fatal to it. We grieve to charge upon Mister Darwin this freedom in handling facts. But truth extorts it from us. That the loose statements and unfounded speculations of this book should come from the author of the monograms on cirripedes, and the writer in the natural history of the voyage of the Beagle of the paper on the coral reefs, is indeed a sad warning how far the love of a theory may seduce even a first rate naturalist from the very articles of his creed. We have dwelt a little upon this, because it is by such seeming solutions of difficulties as that which this passage supplies, that the transmutationist endeavours to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation. There are no parts of Mister Darwin's ingenious book in which he gives the reins more completely to his fancy than when he deals with the improvement of instinct by his principle of natural selection. Such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonourable and injurious to science. And though out of respect to Mister Darwin's high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to weigh the argument again set by him before us in the simple scales of logical examination.
[00:29:27] Our readers will not have failed to notice that we have objected to the views with which we have been dealing solely on scientific grounds. We have done so from our fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts, or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by revelation. We think that all such objections savor of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well instructed faith. He who is as sure as he is of his own existence, that the God of truth is at once the God of nature and the God of revelation, cannot believe it to be possible that his voice, in either rightly understood, can differ or deceive his creatures to oppose facts in the natural world, because they seem to oppose revelation, or to humour them so as to compel them to speak. Its voice is but another form of the ever ready, feeble minded dishonesty of lying for God and trying by fraud or falsehood to do the work of the God of truth. It is with another and a nobler spirit that the true believer walks amongst the works of nature. We cannot therefore consent to test the truth of natural science by the word of revelation. But this does not make it the less important to point out, on scientific grounds, scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God's glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to himself. To both these classes of error, though we doubt not quite unintentionally on his part, we think that Mister Darwin's speculations directly tend if any of our readers doubt, what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion? Let them turn to the pages of oken and see for themselves the end of that path, the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation theory. It is by our deep conviction of the truth and importance of this view for the scientific mind of England that we have been led to treat at so much length Mister Darwin's speculation. That Mister Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir Charles Lyell as one of his converts. No man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell shows the fallacy of lamarcks reasoning, and by anticipation confutes the whole theory of Mister Darwin when gathered clearly up into a few heads. The recapitulation of the whole argument in favour of the reality of species and nature. Lyell urges, number one, that there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves to a certain extent to a change of external circumstances. Number two, the entire variation from the original type may usually be affected in a brief period of time, after which no further deviation can be obtained. Three, the intermixing distinct species is guarded against by the sterility of the mule offspring. And number four, it appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished. We trust that Sir Charles Lyell abides still by these truly philosophical principles and that with his help and with that of his brethren, this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was. In spite of all denials, we must venture to call its twin, though less instructed brother, the vestiges of creation.
[00:33:07] In so doing, they will assuredly provide for the strength and continually growing progress of british science that was portions of Samuel Wilberforces review of on the Origin of Species, published in 1860 in Quarterly Review, I read you about 5000 words. The full review, at over 18,000 words provides much more detail, goes into more examples, and quotes more liberally from Darwins work.
[00:33:33] My hope is that these excerpts have given you an understanding of some of Wilberforces main arguments. I think one of the strengths of his critique is how he values Darwins theory scientifically, not theologically. Its worth repeating Wilberforce on this point, he says in the review. It is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them in taught by revelation.
[00:34:07] We think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well instructed faith.
[00:34:15] And when we place Wilberforces arguments, written right after the publication of Darwins theory, alongside what weve learned in the last century about the digital code of DNA, the nanomachinery powering even the simplest living cells, the evidence of a beginning to the universe, and of exquisite fine tuning throughout it, as well as what weve been discovering about the limitations of natural processes. We can see Wilberforce was correct to push back on Mister Darwins assumptions.
[00:34:42] If youd like to read the full review, ill post a link to it in this episodes show
[email protected] on the website you can search for episodes on any topic of your choosing in our archive, stretching back almost 20 years now. Thats all at id the future well, thank you for joining me. I'm andrew mcdermott for id the future. Thanks for listening.
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