The Voyage of the Beagle

How should we harmonize Darwinism with creationism? Many people harmonize the two by taking Darwinism literally, but creationism figuratively.

Indeed, there’s a psychological profile which goes with this harmonization. A boy is raised in one of those backward, fundy, churches in which he’s taught to take the Bible literally.

This, in turn, conditions him to take any venerable text literally. So when he goes to college and reads The Voyage of the Beagle, he superimposes his naïve literalism on this story as well.

That, in turn, confronts him with two literal, but contradictory creation stories. One popular fallback position is to reinterpret Genesis as a mythopoetic allegory.

So, at one level, our poor kid never outgrew his wooden hermeneutics. He simply transferred it from The Book of Genesis to The Voyage of the Beagle. Although he may now be a theistic evolutionist or even a naturalistic evolutionist, he applies the same jejune methods and assumptions to a quaint, Victorian story like The Voyage of the Beagle. It’s rather sad to see the blind faith that some men and women continue to invest in a musty old text.

I, by contrast, didn’t grow up in one of those backward, fundy churches. My Dad taught Classical mythology, among other things.

So I had no difficulty discerning that The Voyage of the Beagle was a transparent, if rather clumsy, adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. As a student of comparative mythology, the mythopoetic parallels were obvious enough.

In retelling the Sumerian myth, Darwin symbolizes Gilgamesh, the hero of the story. Our hominin ancestors symbolize Enkidu—half-man, half-beast. The “Descent of Man” symbolizes the acculturation of Enkidu, while the H. M. S. Beagle symbolizes Uruk.

The Church of England symbolizes the Sumerian pantheon. William Paley and Samuel Wilberforce symbolize Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, respectively—as the leading antagonists in the story—while Huxley symbolizes Shamash.

The Victorian version takes a number of liberties with the original, such as the substitution of the Lamark for Ishtar and Lyell for Shamhat.

Of course, I’m prepared to make every allowance for artistic license. As is often the case, though, the modernization is inferior to the original.

Among other adaptations, The Island of Dr. Moreau is dramatically superior—having a narrative consistency lacking in The Voyage of the Beagle.

However, Victorian taste was addicted to penny-dreadfuls, and The Voyage of the Beagle was the pulp fiction of the day. So that’s the version which caught on.

Just as the Epic of Gilgamesh has come down to us in several recensions, higher critics have also been able to distinguish between the Ur-Dawkins and the Ur-Gould strata underlying The Voyage of the Beagle.

If this were a true story, rather than a mythopoetic allegory, you wouldn’t have these glaring redactional variants; but once we appreciate the folkloric character of The Voyage of the Beagle, such legendary embellishments are just what we’d expect to find.

So the only rational solution is to take Adam literally, but the Beagle figuratively.

Unfortunately, the fideism of the Darwinian faith is so domineering that no amount of literary analysis is likely to break a believer’s social conditioning. Under the circumstances, the best we can do for such deluded individuals is to put them in cages for their own safekeeping as well as our own.