Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin, written by Darwin’s great great grandson, Randal Keynes, is the basis for the newly released major motion picture of the same name, Creation. The biography is based on Darwin’s memoirs, letters, family papers, and manuscripts. It is the true life story of Charles Darwin, post HMS Beagle voyage, and how the death of his 10 year-old daughter affected his thinking on evolution, religion and human nature.
Once a deeply religious man, Darwin began questioning the book of Genesis, the accuracy of biblical ideas, and his commitment to faith, as he dug deeper and deeper into his theory of evolution. Darwin conducted experiments on his infant children, studying their behavior compared to that of a young orangutan. In one experiment when responding to his reflection in a hand mirror, the ape reached behind the mirror to touch the object, while his daughter did not. With this, Darwin concluded that the young orangutan was more intelligent than his own daughter! Through his studies with his son and daughter, he was confirming the link between human and animal, that humans are cousins to the apes.
After his daughter, Annie, died of fever, Darwin gave up on the Christian faith altogether. Every Sunday Darwin would walk his family to church and refuse to enter, while instead enjoying a stroll through the countryside. Darwin believed that we should not look for explanations of cruelty and pain in our lives, that God is not up there engineering and planning our paths, but instead that life is a natural process and nothing to do with moral actions of either child or parent. Not believing in God or an afterlife, Darwin constantly struggled with his wife, a devout Christian with a commitment to faith.
Listen to an npr interview with the author, Randal Keynes, here.
The movie was released January 22, 2010 in limited distribution. I have yet to find a theater playing the movie in Kansas City.
To celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birth year and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his “On the Origin of Species”, Darwin’s great great granddaughter, Sarah Darwin, is recreating the exact same five-year long journey. In the course of less than one year, on a modern version of the Beagle, the Clipper Stad Amsterdam, she will visit all the same locations as Darwin. The ship set sail September 1, 2009 from Plymouth, England due to return to England June 2010. While Darwin, 150 years ago, was studying the origin of the species, Sarah, a scientist herself, will be looking to study the state of the planet today…the future of species. Scientists from all over the world will conduct experiments onboard the sailing science lab using the most advanced scientific measurement equipment. The study will assess where the world stands today in light of Darwin’s evolution theory. Are we leaving behind an inhabitable world for future generations? Will the earth survive mankind?