from
Darwin in Malibu
by
Crispin Whittell

Sarah:
Hi, sweet. Are you asleep...? Or are you awake and just pretending you’re asleep...? Or are you awake...?

Darwin:
I think I’m pretending I’m awake. You?

Sarah:
I’m pretty sure I’m asleep.

Darwin:
They’re dangerous things, diaries.

Sarah:
They are?

Darwin:
Well, they’re windows to thoughts, aren’t they? One thing you can never be absolutely sure of is what someone else is thinking. Which is why you often catch yourself wondering what someone else is thinking. With a diary you can know. But knowledge comes at a price. If you read someone’s diary — rather than just stare at it, for instance — you’re sure to find something you wanted to know, but you’re also bound to find something you wished you didn’t.

Sarah:
I guess. But I don’t care what you’re thinking.

Darwin:
Ah, but I’m not your boy. It’s no wonder we have such thick skulls. It’s to stop our thoughts from slipping out.

Huxley:
[...] the thing I liked about Crick and Watson was its beauty. The idea that each of us carries our own unique story written into every cell of our body, in its own special alphabet, four letters long. In the conception of a child one’s own story becomes an idea for another story. An idea of someone. And this idea meets another idea of someone. The idea of that dearest someone to you in the world. And these two ideas meet and merge, and become a new idea. A new story, written in the same alphabet, composed of excerpts from you and excerpts from her. Yet utterly unique.

Wilberforce:
I’ve given it a lot of thought. We’re in purgatory.

Darwin:
One more time.

Wilberforce:
And I, for one, would like to get to heaven. I don’t mind admitting that it’s been a source of considerable personal torment that I’m not there already, what with being a bishop and everything. You sort of hope that if it doesn’t exactly give you a passport, then it would at least give you the status of, I don’t know, a frequent flyer.

Wilberforce:
Darwin? He went for a walk.

Huxley:
Not Darwin. God. Your God. Where is he?

Wilberforce:
He’s everywhere.

Huxley:
Is he? Because I don’t see him.

Wilberforce:
But don’t you feel him?

Huxley:
I can’t say I feel him, either. I’m resisting the urge to point out that whenever you hear the sound of gunfire, whenever a shell lands or a building goes up in a ball of fire or a cloud of dust, you can be pretty certain that a couple of the world’s great religions aren’t far away, hammering it out.

Wilberforce:
You’re not resisting the urge very well, if I might be so bold.

Sarah:
Good point.

Huxley:
But I mean honestly! How far has religion really come in the past two thousand years? We’ve seen advances in everything else: The world is now round, gravity exists and is pulling stuff towards us, America has been discovered, man’s on the moon, light travels terribly fast and in straight lines, Mozart has written his Requiem, and a surprising number of people have run the hundred metres in under ten seconds. And yet, the organised religions of the world, which are supposed to be promoting peace and goodwill between men, still seem to be responsible for most of the bloodshed and violence ... But we’re talking about your religion.

Wilberforce:
You’re not.

Sarah:
Good point.

Wilberforce:
But what about Mady? Your beautiful, talented girl? Don’t you want to see her again?

Huxley:
Do I want to...? Samuel, I would swap eternity in paradise for the chance just once to watch her dream! But does that mean I’m going to see her? No, it means I want to! Should I simply suspend all rational thought, and settle for ... for this...? For the idea that Eve was, in fact, created from Adam’s rib while he was having a snooze...? “Want” is written all over religion. “Please, God, let this be true!” leaps from every pew and rings from every pulpit. It explains why God is needed, but it doesn’t say he’s there.

Darwin:
So, I am in heaven where, as a reward for being good, I get the chance to shoot good partridges. The good partridges go to heaven where, as a reward for being good, they get shot at by me. I’m just starting to feel a bit sorry for the partridges here.

Wilberforce:
So don’t shoot them. I’m sure there are other things to do. Badminton, for instance. (A thought strikes him.) Perhaps our heaven is partridge hell.

Darwin:
I’m actually less concerned that your Christian heaven might be filled exclusively with partridges than I am that it will be filled exclusively with Christians. It gets worse: good Christians. I mean, if God had seen fit to throw in a few bad Christians, just to mix things up a bit, it might be tolerable. But let’s face it, he hasn’t even found room for you.

Wilberforce:
I know, I know. Why is that?

Darwin:
Just think of it! Think how sickeningly good the good Christians in heaven must be if you, a very good Christian, didn’t make it.

Wilberforce:
A bishop, no less.

Darwin:
Can you imagine how smug they would be? The nods. The winks. The surreptitious handshakes. “Well done!,” “Jolly good!” “I knew you’d make it!” That! For eternity! Imagine the looks as I reached for my shotgun. I’m afraid I’d end up turning the twelve-bore from the bad partridges to the good Christians.

Wilberforce:
You wouldn’t be the first.

Darwin:
You know that I’m not actually shooting Christians here, don’t you?

Wilberforce:
Of course you’re not. You’re shooting partridges. Bad ones.

Darwin:
I’m not shooting partridges either. I’m actually having a pop at heaven.

Wilberforce:
Oh dear. Why?

Darwin:
Samuel, when you say you want to go to heaven, are you sure you mean you want to go to heaven? Or do you mean that you want to live after you die?

Wilberforce:
What’s the difference? Heaven is where you go when you die.

Darwin:
Is it...? It’s just that when you speak of heaven, you talk as if it’s a real place. A bit like Burbank.

Wilberforce:
They didn’t have to take fishes, of course, because of all the water round the boat.

Huxley:
Yes, let’s leave the fishes in the water because we can both agree they’re happiest there. What I’m concerned with is what’s going on on the water. Because, if I’ve heard you correctly, we have Noah, his three sons, their wives, and only eight thousand species.

Wilberforce:
Well, obviously it would have been sufficient only to bring representative animals from each genus.

Huxley:
Obviously?

Wilberforce:
Clearly.

Huxley:
Why “obviously”? You say “obviously.” There’s nothing obvious to me about this.

Wilberforce:
Well, clearly, all the species for a given genus have the ... the same amount of genetic complexity .. don’t they? Just ... expressed physically in different ways. Size. Colour. And so forth.

Huxley:
Big cat, small cat, you mean? Red parrot, blue parrot, green parrot.

Wilberforce:
Creationists and evolutionists can both agree that the ... uh ... variations between animals of a particular genus, that is, each separate species, can be derived from a common ancestor.

Huxley:
Okay, now if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, the Ark is sinking before our very eyes, and you are close by it, treading water with some vigour, fishing frantically for a plank. Because what you seem to be accepting is that evolution took place after this whole soggy business with the Ark, just not before —

Darwin:
Enough!

Huxley:
Which begs the question, if you’re accepting the existence of evolution why don’t you go the whole hog and accept the existence of evolution?

Darwin:
Nine hundred and thirty. Which is pretty good going. Even by the standards of the time. So what’s going on? What is the price of knowledge if it isn’t immediate death? What is the Lord talking about when He says, “If you eat from the Tree of Knowledge ye shall surely die,” if He doesn’t mean “if you bite it you’ll bite it”?

Sarah:
You’ll know you’re gonna die.

Darwin:
Totally. Eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you’ll know you’re going to die. “Steer clear of the apple,” God’s saying, “because if you don’t, you’ll become conscious of your own death, and trust Me, you don’t want to go through life knowing that you’re going to die.” Adam, the poor sod, lived for the best part of a millennium knowing he was going to die. This book is precious to you, Sam, because it describes man’s creation better than I ever could. For me it is precious because it describes man’s creation better than I ever did. The difference between us is that for you this describes the fall of man, but for me it describes his rise.

Darwin:
It is the consciousness of death which marks man out from other animals.

Wilberforce:
Yes!

Darwin:
And it’s the consciousness of his own death from which God wishes to spare Adam.

Wilberforce:
Amen!

Darwin:
Death is all over our lives, stalking us, stealing away our nearest and dearest before our very eyes. Our Madys, our Emilys, our Annies. Reminding us in the cruellest way imaginable that the same fate awaits us at any moment.

Huxley:
The truth is that my daughter was a desperately unhappy girl who died in Paris in eighteen-eighty-seven.

Wilberforce:
That isn’t the truth, those are the facts. The truth is that your daughter died mad and you feel responsible.

Huxley:
I certainly did not! I wasn’t responsible!

Wilberforce:
Oh come on! We all feel responsible! There’s no shame in that! Charles felt responsible as he watched Annie die, didn’t you, Charles? I felt it as Emily slipped away. I thought it must be my fault because it certainly wasn’t hers. It’s the most natural thing in the world. When something so enormous, so senseless is unfolding in front of you, you have to try and make sense of it. That’s what Charles is talking about, we need to make sense of things.