The Monumental Discovery That Changed How Humans See Themselves

In his beguiling poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens recalls a past era when religion was meant to explain everything, “when bishops’ books / Resolved the world.” But, as he reminds us, “we cannot go back to that.” There’s a kind of grace in the dynamic and even provisional nature of the world, he suggests. And in science, too, which seemed, particularly in the first half of the 19th century, to be on the brink of something wonderful—or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

Two new books, Michael Taylor’s Impossible Monsters and Edward Dolnick’s Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, mark the end of the era that Stevens identified. The discovery of prehistoric fossils, largely in Britain, challenged long-held theological and scientific assumptions about nature and humankind’s place in it: that the Bible was to be taken literally; that the world had been made a mere 6,000 years before; that a divine being wrought man in his own image; that humans were the pinnacle of all Creation. As Taylor writes, “Few if any transformations in intellectual history have been more profound.”

Though stylistically very different writers, both Taylor and Dolnick tell much the same story with many of the same characters. Both authors begin with Mary Anning, a self-taught fossil hunter who was the impoverished daughter of a cabinetmaker. One day in 1811, in a fossil-rich area near her home in Lyme Regis, a small town on the English Channel, the 12-year-old Anning and her older brother discovered the 17-foot-long skeleton of an unusual specimen that had never been seen before.        

News of this weird creature spread quickly when the local newspapers—and then those in London and even abroad—began reporting on the Annings’ discovery. Intrigued, members of the scientific community examined the fossilized skeleton, which soon became a hot topic of discussion at the Royal Society, the most eminent scientific organization in the English-speaking world. The creature (soon to be named a “Proteosaurus”) wasn’t a crocodile or a fish or a whale; its structure differed enough from all other known species’ that scientists determined that it no longer existed. That was itself a shock. No longer existed? Just the idea of extinction, writes Taylor, was heretical. Hadn’t the Lord saved pairs of all animals from the flood?

According to Taylor, the discoveries of fossils and ancient bones of heretofore unknown creatures marks the place “where new knowledge of the Earth and its prehistoric inhabitants collided seriously and persistently with Christian belief in the accuracy of the Bible.” Genesis was perhaps not a factual account of how the world began. Fossils suggested that the world might actually be far older—by millions and millions of years—than anyone had imagined.

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Reckoning with a new way of comprehending time, life, and humankind’s relation to other living things wasn’t easy. Taylor explains how the geologist Georges Cuvier (Dolnick calls him “the pope of paleontology”) tried to reconcile the discovery of fossils with biblical history by suggesting that the days of Creation were metaphors and not to be taken literally. Meanwhile, in his groundbreaking three-volume book, Principles of Geology (published from 1830 to 1833), the Scottish scientist Charles Lyell argued that geological change had nothing to do with the Bible. Instead, the Earth had been gradually formed over time by forces such as erosion, whose effects could be seen in the present. “There was no question,” Taylor declares, “that Lyell regarded his book as a deliberate strike against religious dogma.”

As the 19th century progressed, more and more people began to question Genesis’s account of Creation. As Taylor writes, in 1844, the hugely popular Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published anonymously) argued that the appearance of new species had, in every case, clearly occurred without any divine intervention. “How can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form,” the author asked, “was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence?” The book was a sensation: The poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, loved it, and Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria.

Yet anxiety remained. As Dolnick writes, it was easier for many Victorians to “agree that cliffs might crumble” than to give up their central, divinely ordained place in the scheme of things. But as scientists continued to make discoveries, “the truth”—that human existence was possibly a fleeting blip in the history of the Earth—grew “harder and harder to ignore, like the squeaks and groans of an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster inching its way to the top of a giant hill.”

Unlike Taylor, who tells a more complete story that concludes at the end of the 19th century, Dolnick rather abruptly ends his book on New Year’s Eve 1853. Two years earlier, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations had been mounted in London, in the immense glass-and-iron Crystal Palace. After the fair, the palace was moved to a new location and became the home of a dinosaur theme park, with lakes and trees and models of prehistoric creatures painstakingly constructed by the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Hawkins and Richard Owen, a distinguished anatomist and naturalist who invented the term Dinosauria, meaning “terrible lizard,” hosted a New Year’s Eve dinner (the dinner party of Dolnick’s title) inside a gigantic model of an iguanodon. The event marked a domestication of these once-terrifying creatures. Humans had nothing really to fear from stuffed animals. “After some confusing years when dinosaurs had crashed the party … dinosaurs had been vanquished,” Dolnick concludes, “and all was quiet and cozy once again.”  

Though not quite. In the book’s last chapter, Dolnick briefly introduces Charles Darwin, whom he calls the “bomb maker.” In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which theorized that humans were not created by God but had evolved from earlier species. As Taylor observes, Darwin’s book and the influence of his ideas went hand in hand with changes in the social and body politic in Britain. There was pressure to extend the right to vote, slavery had been abolished in 1834, and restrictions that prevented Catholics and dissenting Protestants, such as Presbyterians and Congregationalists, from holding most offices were lifted. The changes weren’t limited to the British isles; in German universities, the practice of “higher criticism” approached the Bible as if it were a work of literature, not a sacred text, influencing writers such as George Eliot. The journalist and lecturer George Holyoake claimed that religion “has ever poisoned the fountain-springs of morality.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill championed the scientific method.

[Read: What’s so bad about asking where humans came from?]

Taylor acknowledges that religious imagery and exhortation were still prevalent in the press and in literature, and resistance to Darwin’s ideas remained among some notable geologists. But a number of scientists were much more receptive to the theories in Origin. Chief among them was the brilliant and eloquent Thomas Henry Huxley, who came to be known as Darwin’s “bulldog.” After the publication of Darwin’s book, Huxley debated the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. When Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was “through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey,” Huxley shot back, “Would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed … and yet who employs these faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” At this point, a member of the audience fainted.

Huxley fought not just for Darwin and evolution but also against superstition and willful ignorance. “Sit down before a fact as a little child,” Huxley told the theologian Charles Kingsley. “Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, [and] follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

Taylor’s discussions of Huxley and Darwin are among the best sections in his ambitious, readable, and informative book. He neither disparages religion nor generalizes about Victorians, whereas Dolnick depicts an entire populace that subscribed to the consoling theology of the influential Anglican cleric William Paley. During the “God-soaked 1800s,” Dolnick declares, Paley argued that nature reveals ours to be “a happy world” teeming with “happy beings,” all made with “benevolent design.” But as Taylor’s book makes clear, the 19th century was a long and complicated one.

When Darwin died in 1882, 70 years after Mary Anning uncovered the fossils at Lyme Regis, he was buried at Westminster Abbey, not far from Bishop James Ussher. Ussher was the 17th-century cleric who put a date to Creation, calculating that it occurred at 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 B.C.E. That Darwin was interred at the Abbey too seemed to indicate that there was truly no going back: The world was no longer explained by “bishops’ books,” as Wallace Stevens described it, but perhaps, more so than ever before, by science.