Prospects for Human Dignity after Darwin

The concept of human dignity developed in classical paganism and in the Christian tradition as the assertion of human value based on two interwoven threads: human distinctiveness, particularly with respect to rational function, and the claim that humans bear a special relationship to the divine, what in the Jewish and Christian traditions has come to be called the imago Dei.¹ Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and the broader Darwinian revolution² that it spawned, fundamentally challenged human dignity. Against human distinctiveness and the human-brute dichotomy, ³ Darwinism advanced the notion of common ancestry and the related claim that human beings and animals differ by degree and not by kind (Darwin 1882: pt. 1, esp. chap. 1, 3-4, 6; pt. 3, chap. 21; see also T. H. Huxley 1959). Against the view that human beings reflect divine glory, Darwinism emphasized human kinship with animals and replaced divine creation with natural processes as an explanation for biological complexity (Desmond and Moore 1991: 503-8, 511, 515-16; Brooke 2009a: 199). The doctrine of special creation of species by immediate divine activity, which in the 19th century was a conceptual bulwark for the unique spiritual status of human beings, was the focal target of the “long argument” of On the Origin of Species and was further criticized in The Descent of Man (Darwin 1859: 459, 484-85; Darwin 1876: 424-25; Darwin 1875: vol. 2, 425-26; Darwin 1882: 607).⁴.