Darwin and the Heavenly Rhinoceros - a Short Story
Let me introduce myself, I’m a Welsh rhinoceros, born in North Wales during a warm interval in the last Ice Ages. I was everything that a rhinoceros should be and now I live in heaven, where I learn the secrets of the universe and amuse myself by looking down on earth. One day I saw two men come and dig out a tooth of mine which was miraculously preserved in Cefn caves near St Asaph in Wales. The younger man, Charles Darwin, was thrilled by this fabulous find.
Charles was a curious lad who was very interested in beetles and rocks. He had recently taken a degree in Classics at Cambridge and just after he found my tooth he was offered the chance to travel around the world. He had no money so he asked his father to pay for the trip, but his father thought it was time he started to earn a living as a clergyman. Fortunately the boy’s uncle pointed out what I’d already noticed: that Charles was ‘a man of enlarged curiosity’ who would profit from the voyage, and so his father paid up
.I was disappointed in the boy at first; he was miserable and sick at sea. On land he perked up, and in South America he found the fossil remains of a gigantic sloth, which ‘must have been nearly as large as a rhinoceros’, he wrote. I was so pleased to know he hadn’t forgotten me. He’d never seen a living rhinoceros, so he was obviously remembering me and my tooth. To cut a long story short, he came back from the five year long trip round the world with a variety of interesting specimens, although, regrettably, his collection did not include a rhinoceros.
In Darwin’s time there were millions of rhinoceros. There are fewer now, but five species remain: the Javan and Sumatran, the Indian, and two African species, the white Rhino and the black Rhino (both of which are grey). A study of rhinoceros would have been relevant to Charles’s ideas on the role of natural selection in the origin of species, and I was disappointed that he spent so many pages of his book on this subject discussing varieties of pigeons.
Of course pigeons are easy to keep in a pigeon loft and it would have been difficult to accommodate rhinoceros in the garden of the house where Darwin lived with his wife. They had ten children, so he obviously didn’t suffer from the problem which has led to the slaughter of thousands of rhinoceros, killed so that their horns can be ground up and eaten by men who cannot (how shall I put it?) keep their end up. Rhinoceros horn is useless for this ailment; it’s nothing but keratin, like hair. Now that drugs like Viagra are on sale the demand for rhinoceros horn is thankfully declining.
Darwin’s book was a best seller, but people who worshipped the English God made a fuss. Human notions of God appear strange to a rhinoceros with a heavenly mind: some of them even think God made the world just for humans. Thank heavens my earthly mind was too simple for me to imagine that God made of the entire universe for rhinoceros. Most Christians then were Creationists who saw God as a Creator, a craftsman who made each plant and animal as people make mechanical toys, except that God’s models faithfully reproduced themselves. They believed God created everything once, and after that acorns sprouted into identical oaks for eternity, and a rhinoceros always gave birth to an exact replica and so on. There was no variation, so there could be no natural selection of the variations most suited to the prevailing conditions as Darwin suggested.
The churches complained that Darwin’s ideas undermined their teachings. They said people would act like pagan savages without Christian instruction. (I did wonder, with my heavenly mind, whether the pagan savages were more savage than the civilised men who sold them as slaves.) Some Churchmen were very certain they knew all about God, which I thought odd, as many exceptionally holy people throughout history had believed that God was an infinite mystery. Most humans, though, prefer to visualize God in a little box. Ages ago it was an animal shaped box, for example the sacred scarab of Egypt, Aaron’s golden calf, the glorious rhinoceros worshipped by a nameless African tribe. Later many people, the ancient Greeks for instance, put their gods into boxes of human shape.
Darwin preferred to nudge his theory, just as a mother rhinoceros will nudge her child gently in the right direction with her horn. His theory was his child, or ‘our child’, as he put it in a letter to Alfred Russell Wallace. Alfred, like me, was born in Wales and had the same ideas as Darwin while in a fever in the Malay Archipelago.
Since Darwin’s time there has been a lot of charging and nudging as scientists have modified and expanded evolutionary ideas. Most churches now float easily on top of the flood of evolutionary evidence, and look for God in the hills as the writer of Psalm 121 recommended. With my heavenly vision I can see that the human vision of God has been as changeable over the millennia as varieties of pigeons or species of rhinoceros. Creationists though, think that to accept evolution is to deny the only true idea of God, and some scientists believe science can answer all questions and they have a mission to destroy the idea of God.
Schools won’t teach Creationism in science lessons; so Creationists are trying out a new idea, Intelligent Design. This supposes that evolution in general relies on Natural Selection but God helps with the difficult bits. These new Creationists believe, for instance, that God may have designed whip like structures that allow bacteria to move, and which move the moisture in human and rhinoceros lungs, because no one knows how these essential structures (flagella and cilia) have evolved. These creationists want to fill any gaps in the understanding of evolution with their idea of God; they hope the evolution of Creationism will enable their ideas to survive; that the words Intelligent Design will smell as attractive to humans as a fragrant swathe of grass smells to a rhinoceros. It doesn’t smell good to my heavenly nose though. The word ‘intelligent’ is designed to refer to human competence, and to think of the Originator of the Universe in this way is to belittle God.
Humans have trouble in thinking vast, enormous, rhinoceros-big-thoughts. They can hardly imagine the largest land mammal that ever lived, a rhinoceros known as Indricotherium which weighed about 30 tons, so it’s not surprising that many of them can’t begin to imagine a God that is infinitely beyond all words, measurements, and symbols.
When I lived I’d have been pleased to think, if I’d had the intellect, that some humans had worshipped the rhinoceros, but now that I have a heavenly soul it seems odd to squash God into a little box of human or animal shape. Humans, though, don’t have heavenly minds and so it’s hard for them to worship an Inconceivable God, or to focus their mind’s eye on the power behind the preposterous number of colossal suns and the vast inhuman distances in the Universe. A human who tried might feel as frazzled as a rhinoceros who had ventured into a desert where there are no leaves to nourish him and no water to cool him. Humans need to live somewhere that’s watered by myths and metaphors, and where rivers of ritual flow from one generation to the next.
All the unbelievable stories humans have ever told about God are a way of reaching out towards the Originator of the universe; only through these stories can humans glimpse the shadow of an inconceivable God.
Why, you ask, should I, a long dead heavenly rhinoceros, care about human stories and beliefs? I care because beliefs can have devastating effects. Darwin was very interested in barnacles, tiny crustaceans which fix themselves to rocks with immensely strong glue. Humans who fasten themselves like barnacles to their beliefs may become unhinged if challenged and in their cruel confusion kill those who don’t cling to the same belief. It sometimes seems possible that the human species could drown itself in a bloodbath of warring beliefs. This would be unfortunate for humans but would improve the prospects for the survival of rhinoceros; there’d be no more occupation of our feeding grounds, no massacres by greedy guns.
For better or worse, the human population continues to increase in spite of ideological wars. Fortunately there are humans who delight in massive glory of the rhinoceros and want to save them from extinction. Humans are also beginning to look carefully at the delicate complexity of the earth, and to realise that crashing about as though they own the world could be damaging to humans as well as rhinoceros.
When Darwin was old some important people came to see him. He told them he was studying worms. They said worms were trivial, that a famous man should think about important questions such as whether God exists. Darwin argued that worms are immensely important. His last book describes how worms renew the soil through their monumental efforts and prepare it to grow sweet smelling vegetation. Rhinoceros have an excellent sense of smell, we really appreciate vegetation.
It would be too ridiculous for a rhinoceros to advise a human, but a heavenly mind is not afraid of absurdity and so I advise you and all humans not to stay indoors too long chasing your tail and smelling your own mental stink. I recommend that you go out and smell the world as Darwin did.
You ask if my story is true. What a question! Darwin held my tooth in his hand and I am a truly heavenly Welsh rhinoceros who watched over that curious boy all his life. I’m off now to browse on ambrosial flowers and wallow in divine mud.
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'Darwin and the Rhinoceros' appeared in issue 9 of CFUK magazine in November 2006
Back to Strange Attractor homepage Darwin biography, as impartial as I can make it, without fundamentalist 'religious' disapproval or overzealous 'scientific' trumpeting of his work.
Monumental worms, a poem on earthworms, the subject of Darwin's last book Sonnets on Darwin's work: 'Bonded to Barnacles', on the animals he studied for eight years, and 'Darwin's Loft', on the pigeons in the Origin of Species. Darwin and the Heavenly Rhinoceros - a short story Darwin's Voyage two poems on Darwin's five year long voyage on HMS Beagle. Evolution and religion - A brief outline of some current debates 'Space with Wordsworth' explores the idea that science is hostile to poetry. 'Unsung by Singers' considers the scarcity of poems on science.
