Origin of the Origin of Man

1909 marked the centennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the semicentennial of the publication of Origin of Species. According to Gary James Bergera,

Seven months after the Darwin centennial, and perhaps in response to questions raised during the Darwin celebration [apparently at BYU - M&E], the First Presidency of the LDS church, consisting of life-long Mormon official Joseph F. Smith and counselors John R. Winder and Anthon H. Lund, asked Apostle Orson F. Whitney to draft an official statement on the "origin of the physical man." A special committee of apostles corrected Whitney's text, which was then read to the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles, was "sanctioned by them" as "the official position of the church," and appeared in the November 1909 issue of the official Improvement Era.

James Talmage, not yet an apostle, was also involved in the drafting of the statement.

Interestingly, the 1909 statement draws on an article previously written by Orson F. Whitney and published in the Contributor in 1882. (Contributor, vol. 3 (October 1881-September 1882) June, 1882. No. 9.) In that article, Whitney discussed the absurdity of both evolution and creation ex nihilo. The end of the article is quite similar to the end of the 1909 statement.

Below I have formatted the passage to show the changes made to the 1882 paragraph.

"[The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, proclaims] [m]an is [to be] the direct [and lineal] offspring of Deity, of a being who is the Begetter of his spirit in the eternal worlds, and the Architect of his mortal tabernacle in this. God himself is an exalted man, possessing body, parts and passions, refined and developed to the highest state of perfection [perfected, enthroned, and supreme]. [By His almighty power] He organized the world [earth] and all that it contains, from matter; from ever-living spirit and everlasting element, which exist co-eternally with [H]imself. He formed every plant that grows and every animal that breathes, each after the image of its own kind, and determined the fixity of their respective species. [spiritually and temporally--"that which is spiritual being in the likeness of that which is temporal, and that which is temporal in the likeness of that which is spiritual."] He made the tadpole and the ape, the lion and the elephant,; but He did not make them in His own image, nor endow them with godlike reason and intelligence. Monkeys are the offspring of monkeys, and have been from time immemorial. Hybrids may appear, but they are without the power to propagate. There is no instance on record where a baboon ever evolved into a human being, and science in attempting to unearth a "missing link" which it is claimed will connect mankind with monkeykind, is like a blind man hunting through a haystack to find a needle which isn't there. [Nevertheless, the whole animal creation will be perfected and perpetuated in the Hereafter, each class in its "distinct order or sphere," and will enjoy "eternal felicity." That fact has been made plain in this dispensation (Doctrine and Covenants, 77:3).]

[new paragraph]For [M]an is the child of God, fashioned in His [formed in the divine] image and endowed with His [divine] attributes, and even as the infant son of an earthly father [and mother] is capable in due time of becoming a man, so the undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable in due time of becoming[, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into] a God."