People love to put things into categories.  This helps us to understand the world, and to communicate with each other.  But these categories are human categories, not divine ones.  I think that to God all individuals are just themselves.  God knows them all and does not need to put them into categories.  Seeing a group of us in Meeting for Worship surely God does not think, ‘Ah, a group of homo sapiens.’  I am sure God would think ‘Ah there are David and John, Julie and Mary’.

The concept of a species is of special significance to us humans, because reproduction takes place within the species.  If a group within the species become so different that they cannot mate successfully with the rest, but can mate successfully with each other, they are now a new species.  The species was of special interest to the Victorians, because fame came with the discovery of a new species, which hopefully could be named after you.  When Charles Darwin set forth on the Beagle his aim was to discover new species.  It is easier to categorise dead animals than it is to categorise living ones, so he took with him a shooter.  Victorian biologists were great shooters.  There was an ornithologist called John Gould who produced a wonderful book of bird illustrations.  There was a Gould League of Bird Watchers named after him.  I assumed he was a man who loved birds.  I was disappointed to find there wasn’t a bird that he wouldn’t shoot.  Once he had categorised the birds his team dissected and stuffed the birds so that illustrators (primarily his wife) could draw them at leisure.

The evolutionists in this manner were able to illustrate ways in which living things had changed to suit their environment.  As to how the organisms changed, they could not then say, as they had little knowledge of genetics.  The process has become clearer recently. One thing was clear to them however, which was that unless enough members of a species lived long enough to reproduce, the species would die out.  In some ways this is not a very novel discovery, but it led them to concentrate on the features of each species that were favourable to survival.  This came to be known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  This was an unfortunate phrase, because it suggested that survival depended on being bigger, stronger and fiercer, although survival could equally depend on being small and easy to camouflage, on giving better parental care, or on the ability to cooperate with others.

We are richer for the insights that the Theory of Evolution has brought us.  My main worry is that it has given us a rather narrow view of the world.

There was a field ornithologist by the name of William Henry Hudson who really disliked Charles Darwin.  His problems were not of a religious nature as Hudson was not a conventionally religious man.  He complained that Darwin spent too much time with dead animals as opposed to living ones.  In fact, he felt that the scientists of the period placed no value on the study of animals living in the wild.  Darwin had claimed that the male bird sang to attract the female.  Hudson said that he doubted that Darwin had ever heard the male bird sing.  He, Hudson, had heard him, and asserted that the bird sang for joy!  It was convenient that the female bird happened to like the song.

When I am watching a nature documentary, I tend to become irritated by the narrator’s constant attempts to put the creature concerned into its right position on the tree of life.  Sometimes I beg them to stop wittering on and give me time to enjoy the creature on the screen.  It has its own life, its own pleasures, its own tastes. It is not a mere conveyor of genetic material. I am not disputing the narrator’s knowledge; I just find that it sometimes shows no appreciation of the individual.

 Jesus said that no sparrow fell to the ground without God knowing.  The life of a single sparrow was important to God.  One cannot imagine God thinking, ‘There goes a sparrow but I have plenty more of those’, or ‘That sparrow never lived long enough to breed so it was a waste of space’.  The emphasis on the species seems to me to devalue the individual. 

As Quakers we believe that ‘each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God’ (Advices and Queries 24).  This is true whether we are loaded up with evolutionary advantages. Indeed, we owe a special responsibility to the disadvantaged, both animal and human. Was this not the orientation of Jesus’s teaching?