Ladies and gentlemen, the more that I look at history, the more I look at the world, the more I’m beginning to agree with Charles Darwin. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Uh-oh, Rabbi, did you hear what Max Antony said? Take him off. I tore it. He doesn’t belong there. He agrees with Darwin.” Hold your horses. Let’s see.
There’s a very famous book written by Charles Darwin called On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, which, very interestingly, never addresses the origin of the species. He never says where it came from. Life began from something. He always starts where life already existed. But what he says in there is that, for the most part, the earth was populated by what are called single-celled organisms, which eventually evolved into the higher forms of life. And so, the earth was populated by what’s called the higher forms of life that we see today.
Now, according to Darwin, there is an evolutionary chain that goes from algae to fish to birds to reptiles to warm-blooded animals to cold-blooded animals, eventually to mankind, which, interestingly, is exactly the same sequence that we hear in Bereshit. We know that. Hashem created the water, and then the fish, and then the birds, and then the animals, and then He created mankind. So, Charles Darwin hasn’t come up with anything new. But what he did do is leave out one very important consideration: the probability that any of this could have happened by accident is against astronomically calculated odds.
If you, as a scientist, a biologist, a geneticist, a botanist, an agnostic, an atheist, they will all admit that, even if we don’t know the answer to this question, the simplest human cell is more complex, more complicated than any invention that mankind could possibly conceive of. There had to be another factor leading up to the arrival of man. So here, I can say that I agree with Darwin. No, we don’t agree on that. Absolutely not. But I want you to consider the second part of his report, of his title, which is called The Survival of the Fittest.
What he’s saying is that along the chain of the eventual development of all of the beings that we see nowadays, there were predecessors, and these were less than complete. So, for example, you had skunks without smell, birds without feathers, cats without claws, or rabbits without reproductive genes. Only those that were most fit survived. The rest fell by the wayside.
Now, here’s where I think Darwin makes a lot of sense. He makes a lot of sense. He makes a little bit of sense. Chas veshalom (Heaven forbid), not from an evolutionary standpoint, but from the view of human history. When you look at the last 6,000 years of recorded history, what do you see? You see many civilizations, many societies that considered themselves absolutely fit and expected to survive forever. They would always be around. And yet, it turns out, they were considerably less than that. You had the Egyptians, the Assyrians—not the Syrians, the Assyrians—the Persians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Huns, the Ottomans, the Nazis, the Communists, the Socialists, the Democrats nowadays, and all of them rose to power, and they expected to be around forever. But look around. They’ve all fallen by the wayside. There’s only one nation that has seen them all, lived amongst all of them, survived among them, beat them all, and it continues even until today. There’s only one: the Jewish people. Perhaps that’s because what we stand for, what we believe in, and what we actively practice is the fittest of all the ideals for humanity. So yes, in this regard, I’m beginning to agree with Darwin. Only the fittest survive. That’s us.