"It was the cause of bitter controversies. The Church protested vehemently and the scientific world was sharply divided. That was not really so surprising. Darwin had, after all, distanced God a good way from the act of creation, although there were admittedly some who claimed it was surely greater to have created something with its own innate evolutionary potential than simply to create a fixed entity."
Suddenly Sophie jumped up from her chair.
"Look out there!" she cried.
She pointed out of the window. Down by the lake a man and a woman were walking hand in hand. They were completely naked.
"That's Adam and Eve," said Alberto. "They were gradually forced to throw in their lot with Little Red Rid-inghood and Alice in Wonderland. That's why they have turned up here."
Sophie went to the window to watch them, but they soon disappeared among the trees.
"Because Darwin believed that mankind was descended from animals?"
"In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he drew attention to the great similarities between humans and animals, advancing the theory that men and anthropoid apes must at one time have evolved from the same progenitor. By this time the first fossil skulls of an extinct type of man had been found, first in the Rock of Gibraltar and some years later in Neanderthal in Germany. Strangely enough, there were fewer protests in T871 than in 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species. But man's descent from animals had been implicit in the first book as well. And as I said, when Darwin died in 1882, he was buried with all the ceremony due to a pioneer of science."
"So in the end he found honor and dignity?"
"Eventually, yes. But not before he had been described as the most dangerous man in England."
"Holy Moses!"
" 'Let us hope it is not true,' wrote an upper-class lady, 'but if it is, let us hope it will not be generally known.' A distinguished scientist expressed a similar thought: 'An embarrassing discovery, and the less said about it the better.' "
"That was almost proof that man is related to the ostrich!"
"Good point. But that's easy enough for us to say now. People were suddenly obliged to revise their whole approach to the Book of Genesis. The young writer John Ruskin put it like this: 'If only the geologists would leave me alone. After each Bible verse I hear the blows of their hammers.' "
"And the blows of the hammers were his doubts about the word of God?"
"That was presumably what he meant. Because it was more than the literal interpretation of the story of creation that toppled. The essence of Darwin's theory was the utterly random variations which had finally produced Man. And what was more, Darwin had turned Marv into a product of something as unsentimental as the struggle for existence."
"Did Darwin have anything to say about how such random variations arose?"
"You've put your finger on the weakest point in his theory. Darwin had only the vaguest idea of heredity. Something happens in the crossing. A father and mother never get two identical offspring. There is always some slight difference. On the other hand it's difficult to produce anything really new in that way. Moreover, there are plants and animals which reproduce by budding or by simple cell division. On the question of how the variations arise, Darwin's theory has been supplemented by the so-called neo-Darwinism."
"What's that?"
"All life and all reproduction is basically a matter of cell division. When a cell divides into two, two identical cells are produced with exactly the same hereditary factors. In cell division, then, we say a cell copies itself."
"Yes?"