CHAPTER 4
Controversy
The tidal wave of comment began almost immediately. Despite all Darwin’s carefully amassed evidence, and his repeated invitations to the reader to consider the issue impartially, Victorians found it nearly impossible to accept the idea of gradual change in animals and plants, and equally hard to displace God from the creative process. Yet this volume, and the ensuing debate, placed the issue of evolution before the public in a form that could not be ignored. The essence of Darwin’s proposal was that living beings should not be regarded as the carefully constructed creations of a divine authority but as the products of entirely natural processes. As might be expected, there were scientific, theological and philosophical objections from all quarters, often mixed up together. Were human beings to be included? Should science be allowed to address questions that up until then were the business of theologians? What was the purpose of our world if there were no reason for the existence of virtue? How could an ape be my grandfather?
Journalists, men of letters, merchants, businessmen, educators and ordinary men and women added their voices to the throng. Bishops, poets, kennel-hands and governesses read the book. Even Queen Victoria took an interest, although she confided to her daughter that she expected it would be too difficult to understand. Nor was the reaction confined to Britain. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia and North America, and progressively all over the globe, people from every walk of life discussed the idea of evolution by natural selection and relocated this controversial issue within their own cultural contexts. It was one of the first genuinely public debates about science to stretch across general society. These varied responses, evocative of the cultural diversity of the nineteenth century, remind us that the introduction of new ideas is rarely straightforward and that the past histories of science have involved many different forms of publication, many different audiences and many different languages as well as the ideas themselves.
In retrospect, it is also evident that Origin of Species contributed markedly to other fundamental shifts already under way in the West – in particular in religious affairs. The Anglican Church still lay at the heart of the British nation’s daily life and provided the framework in which most people operated, either more or less devoutly according to private inclination. Yet its grip was looser than before. Schisms and fractures appeared, splinter groups broke away, dissatisfaction was expressed. Dissenting and non-conformist groups claimed the right to worship in their own manner, to educate the young, to be represented in parliament, to take public positions and have their views heard. A non-denominational University College was established in London, rapidly filling up with the brightest and best unconventional minds. A number of theologians converted to Catholicism. Prominent men and women among the establishment declared themselves sceptics or critics of traditional doctrine. Even clergymen undermined their own message. One of the authors of Essays and Reviews was the Reverend Baden Powell (grandfather of the scoutmaster), professor of geometry at Oxford University, who once claimed miracles could not occur, praised Darwin’s Origin as ‘a masterly volume’ and pronounced in favour of ‘the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature’. A book such as Origin of Species was therefore bound to arouse hot controversy and range more widely than science itself. Discussion was never going to be limited to butterflies or primroses.
Surprising as it may seem, there was little sustained opposition to Darwin’s book on the grounds that it directly challenged the account of creation in Genesis. Learned biblical study since the Enlightenment had encouraged Christians increasingly to regard the early stories as potent metaphors rather than literal accounts. Biblical fundamentalism is mostly a modern concern, not a Victorian one. The real challenge of Darwinism for Victorians was that it turned life into an amoral chaos displaying no evidence of a divine authority or any sense of purpose or design.
This was a political and social issue as well as a theological one. The reaction of many respectable middle-class believers was to reject evolution because it threatened the Church’s role in guarding the nation’s morals and social stability. Some freethinkers moved in the opposite direction and used evolution to level varying degrees of criticism at ecclesiastical policy and the state. A few hardliners already well on the way to atheism abandoned religious faith altogether. Equally hard Calvinists managed to accommodate the idea of natural selection by integrating it with humanity’s struggle to overcome sinfulness. But there were also liberal Christians willing to accept evolution as a fact of nature if it could be reconciled with moral principles. Perhaps evolution could be regarded as a purposeful process regulated by God? This compromise soon emerged in Britain. In 1861 the astronomer John Herschel wrote that he could believe in an ‘Intelligence’ that guided the steps of change according to the laws of science. By the end of the century a number of Anglican clergymen, such as Charles Kingsley and Frederick Temple, promoted a similar theology in which the shaping of the earth and its living beings were seen as a continuous process controlled by laws God had instituted in the beginning. Or again, was it possible to replace the mechanical process of natural selection with something else of divine origin? A number of scientists, among them Darwin’s friend Asa Gray, took this route and put back the moral purpose and future goals – the teleology – that Darwin had removed.
One of the most well-known aspects of the Origin of Species controversy is that Darwin kept out of the limelight. On the face of it, this is completely true. Darwin never enjoyed public debate, hated confrontations in which his honour or honesty might be called into question, preferred to stay quietly at home in the background, and was content to let others wave the flag more vigorously than he felt able to do himself. Privately, he believed that disagreements between scientists were generally fruitless. None the less the underlying story is more complex. Darwin kept in close touch. Even though he stayed put at Down House, a barrage of correspondence was despatched and received daily. His letters were out there in the world of argument: encouraging, supporting, nudging, explaining, politely disagreeing, thanking, consulting and advising. He used letters to persuade and to influence. He used them to get favourable reviews, correct mistakes, arrange translations and produce revised editions. He gathered support, made new contacts, found out things. Without this extraordinary correspondence, rising to a peak of some 500 letters a year after Origin of Species was published, Darwin’s theory would have sunk. In this he was materially helped by the rapid development of the Victorian postal system, brought to heights of efficiency by Rowland Hill from the 1840s and 1850s, and the expanding infrastructure of empire.
Scholars agree that the course of the Origin controversy was unique in several respects. The book’s wide and immediate impact in Britain was greatly enhanced by an expanding publishing industry and new review journals being produced for rapidly diversifying audiences. It was greatly enhanced, too, by mid-century peace and prosperity, political stability and imperial expansion. The audience for science was the largest and most appreciative that it had ever been, its appetite whetted by the development of local scientific societies, lending libraries, public lectures and exciting practical demonstrations of electricity, chemistry or magnetism, and reinforced by the broadening availability of manufactured goods and obvious achievements in roads, railways, bridges, ships and canals. Writings like Chambers’s Vestiges and Tennyson’s In Memoriam already helped readers explore the big issues of human existence, questions of origin, meaning and purpose.
Highly characteristic, too, was the personal element. Four of Darwin’s friends carried the brunt of the public storm: each one an acknowledged specialist in his scientific field, independent, clever and far from sycophantic. These four supported Darwin wholeheartedly even while pointing out flaws in his evidence or reasoning. They stood united, gathering their own disciples and followers, engaging in individualized battles on Darwin’s behalf but also moving the debate further and wider, drawing in other thinkers, other topics, other implications, in an incremental process that ultimately generated major transformations in cultural attitudes and scientific thought. With Darwin busy in the background writing letters, these four recruited a standing army, commandeered the journals, invaded the learned societies, monitored the universities, dominated dinner parties and penetrated the byways of empire. The opposition never quite consolidated in the same way. There were of course individual heavyweight opponents who publicly challenged Darwinism, some of them witheringly effective, but no united group rallied to the attack or mustered behind powerful spokesmen. There was never an explicit anti-Darwinian movement, in the same way as there was a pro-Darwinian group held together by intellectual commitment and friendship. The existence of this Darwinian alliance was perhaps the single most important feature of the debate and contributed markedly to the ultimate triumph of evolutionary theory. At its core were Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray and Thomas Henry Huxley.
Inspired by Darwin’s ideas, Lyell focused on human archaeology and prehistory in an impressive text called The Antiquity of Man (1863). In this book he undermined the traditional story of the Creation and Flood, and showed how humans had appeared on the globe much earlier than anyone then thought possible, contemporaneously with animals now only known as fossils. Though he did not coin the expression ‘cave man’, which came later, nor could he claim to be the only one intrigued by discoveries of worked flints and stone arrowheads, Lyell was among the first to write about these early peoples within a broadly evolutionary structure. Since he was one of the most widely respected scientific authors of the century, the effect of extending Darwin’s thesis into the prehistoric world was incalculable. Privately, he felt unable to go as far as Darwin in believing that human beings were entirely natural organisms. To the end of his life he felt that humans possessed a divine soul. Once he told Huxley that he ‘could not go the whole orang’.1 Lyell’s interest in early human cultures was soon extended by a generation of gifted evolutionary anthropological thinkers. John Lubbock, a younger friend and neighbour of Darwin’s, discussed the archaeological evidence of primitive cultures in Europe in his studies Pre-historic Times (1865) and The Origin of Civilisation (1870). This was powerfully followed by the main thrust of high Victorian cultural anthropology in Edward B. Tylor’s evolutionary Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1870), Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) and Sir John Evans’s work. These men codified the late nineteenth- century belief that human development had progressed through a sequence of stages from savagery through barbarism to civilization, and that primitives were relics of the earliest stages that could be studied for insights into the history of mankind.
While Lyell grappled with early humanity, Joseph Hooker aimed at the empire of botany. Hooker’s father – and then Hooker himself – was director of Kew Gardens, located just outside London, the largest and fastest-growing centre for botanical research in the world, with a special focus on economic botany and colonial expansion. Hooker’s public work at Kew furthered the introduction of plantation crops in far-flung corners of the globe such as tea, coffee, sisal, sugar, mahogany, cinchona, cotton and flax. Much neglected by historians, botany during the nineteenth century was the most significant science of its day, creating and destroying colonial cash crops according to government policy and building the economic prosperity of a nation. Almost singlehandedly Hooker coordinated the activities of British colonial gardens and orchestrated a worldwide correspondence with other botanists. Like Lyell, he was one of Darwin’s closest friends, a man that Darwin trusted and liked. He was the first to show how Darwin’s theories might work in the plant world and supported him loyally in publications, reviews and correspondence. He never wrote a signature book like Lyell, but his influence and scientific position at the centre of imperial science was a key strength on Darwin’s side.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Asa Gray defended Darwin just as effectively. Based at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gray was also a botanist, a rival professor to Louis Agassiz, the most celebrated naturalist in the United States. Agassiz was no fan of Origin of Species. His belief that the ‘essence’ of every species should reflect God’s divine blueprint guaranteed that he would emphatically reject evolution – how could one hope to classify anything if it was constantly changing? Gray and Agassiz argued fiercely about Darwinism in public meetings in Boston in 1859 and 1860, and perhaps Gray was the only man in America who could (occasionally) get the better of Agassiz in debate. Gray felt, however, that Darwin’s scheme should be modified to help those who sincerely believed in God’s presence in the natural world. To him, natural selection, acting blindly on occasional chance variations, did not seem sufficient to account for so many organisms exquisitely ‘designed’ for their role in life. Gray therefore proposed that God created good and useful variations which natural selection then preserved in a population. While this view was completely antithetical to Darwin’s proposal, Gray promoted it earnestly in several widely distributed reviews. Darwin respected Gray’s opinion, saying that it was the best natural theological commentary he had ever read. He appreciatively declared that every one of Gray’s attacks on opponents ‘tells like a 32-pound shot’. Soon he was convinced that ‘no other person understands me so thoroughly as Asa Gray. If I ever doubt what I mean myself, I think I shall ask him!’2
Last, and most famous of all, Thomas Henry Huxley, the brilliant zoologist and comparative anatomist, cast himself as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Flamboyantly, he defended Darwin on the question of ape ancestry and the close anatomical resemblance between humans and primates, and reigned supreme over what can justly be called the marketing of evolutionary theory – a heady publicity campaign for a new kind of science based on rational thought untainted by religious belief. One important plank of his platform was to wrest education from the hands of the clergy, for schoolchildren and university students were for the most part still educated within traditional Anglican institutions or by dissenting church missions. Another was an increasingly violent feud with the rival comparative anatomist Richard Owen, a man profoundly against evolution, whom Huxley thought was blocking his path to success. Superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum (at that time located in the Bloomsbury building), and in many eyes the leading naturalist in Britain, Owen made a brutal attack on Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April 1860 that angered Darwin and supplied the backdrop for much of Huxley’s venom during the early 1860s. Other personal characteristics included Huxley’s intense dislike for religious ‘claptrap’ and zest for public showdowns. Late in life he was credited with having coined the word ‘agnostic’ to describe his position: one who cannot believe without rational evidence for that belief. ‘In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable… That which is unproved today may be proved, by the help of new discoveries, tomorrow.’3 His reputation for wit and coruscating prose was well established.
In fact, the months immediately surrounding publication of the Origin of Species really belonged to Huxley. As Huxley recalled it, the beauty of Darwin’s theory flashed on him like lightning showing the way home. ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’ he exclaimed. He composed three magnificent reviews, one in The Times newspaper, the others in well-known literary journals, the Westminster Review and Macmillan’s Magazine.
In the Westminster Review he issued a battle cry. Origin of Species was a ‘veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism’. It would free the world from theological dogma:
What is the history of every science but the elimination of the notion of mystery or creative interferences?… Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the stran gled snakes besides that of Hercules, and history records that whenever science and dogmatism have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.4
This opening blow against religion not only made Huxley’s name but served him and Darwinism well in the future.
Huxley’s first public showdown – now regarded as a famous set-piece in the history of science – took place at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford in June 1860. There are few records left of the occasion. No one even knew for sure who had won. Nevertheless, the occasion meant a great deal in historical terms. It became an enduring symbol of an angry clash between science and religion over the origin of species.
As was customary, the British Association meeting ran for a week in the summer and made the latest developments in science more widely known to the public. Irresistibly drawn by the prospect of heated exchanges about monkey-ancestors, an unusually large number of people arrived at the session held in the Oxford University Natural History Museum on Saturday 30 June. Darwin did not attend the meeting because he was ill. Huxley and Owen were both there. Earlier in the week there had been several intellectual skirmishes between them, especially when Owen asserted that there was no anatomical evidence in primate brains for evolution. Huxley had jeered at his competence. ‘You and your book forthwith became the topics of the day,’ Joseph Hooker told Darwin.
The session promised sparks. An American philosopher John William Draper, known for his denunciations of Roman Catholicism, was scheduled to speak on the evolution of human society ‘with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin’. As it turned out, Draper’s talk was dreary. The mood visibly lightened when Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the current Bishop of Oxford, rose to speak. Wilberforce was a powerful orator, witty and eloquent. As a theologian, he naturally used the occasion to defend the divine creation of humankind. He had just written a damning review of Darwin’s book for the Quarterly Review and his speech repeated many of the points published there, particularly using anatomical information supplied by Owen. How could anyone seriously believe that mankind had developed from oysters, he asked? At some point he turned to Huxley and facetiously enquired ‘was Huxley related to an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side?’
The audience smelled blood. So did Huxley. He answered at length, first repudiating the anatomical arguments used by Wilberforce and then praising the way that Darwin’s theory united previously chaotic data. The exact words he used were not recorded. But his final thrust was to say that he ‘would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather than… a man who introduced ridicule into a grave scientific discussion’. The audience cheered and went away convinced that Huxley would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a bishop. They felt they had witnessed in miniature a titanic confrontation between the church and science – two utterly incompatible views on the position of mankind in the natural world.
Afterwards, Huxley made his position clear in a small, vivid volume called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), a popular book that addressed audiences primarily wanting to hear about apish ancestors. It included a lucid and favourable exposition of Darwin’s theory. Here Huxley continued his argument with Richard Owen by attacking Owen’s anatomical work on the great apes. For a long time, Owen had insisted there was a small fold in the membranes at the base of the human brain (the hippocampus minor) that could not be found in any of the apes. This, Owen thought, along with other differences such as the human hand and upright posture, indicated the special nature of human beings. Huxley vehemently disagreed. Professional reputations and expertise were at stake here. Simple observation would not be able to resolve the issue because the disagreement rested on questions of judgement, interpretation and scale. In his book Huxley claimed that there were clear continuities in anatomy between gibbons, gorillas and mankind. Visual reinforcement was supplied in an engraving that showed the skeletons of four species of ape lined up in an evolutionary sequence with a human being. This first pictorial representation of evolution has since become as iconic as the double helix of DNA.
Huxley’s view has come to prevail. At the time, however, his argument with Owen raged through the popular press bringing the shocking possibility of ape ancestry home to the masses. Charles Kingsley found the clash a rich source of satire when writing his children’s book The Water Babies in 1863. He included caricatures of Huxley and Owen quar relling over the definition of a water baby, and joked that ‘apes have hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have… Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test’. Edward Linley Sambourne, the artist, illustrated the two men quarrelling over a baby in bottle.
All the while apes were pushing noisily to the fore. Most remarkably, the gorilla suddenly became front-page news through the exploits of Paul Du Chaillu, an explorer who in 1861 brought specimens and skins to Europe. At least one of those skins (perhaps as many as three) was stuffed and trav elled about with Du Chaillu as he gave public lectures about the gorilla’s ferocity and the dangers he escaped during his West African travels. Few had ever seen or heard anything like it before – gorillas were almost entirely unknown in the West until 1854 when bones were despatched from Africa to Harvard University for identification. Victorians were horrified to think that these reputedly violent animals – distorted men in shape and size, representing the brutish, dark side of humanity – were possible ancestors. Museum curators competed shamelessly for the carcasses, until Owen persuaded the trustees of the British Museum to pay a fortune to acquire six skins from Du Chaillu. Elsewhere, humorous journals such as Punch seized on the idea of apish grandfathers and printed a wide variety of cartoons and satires depicting humanized gorillas. ‘Am I a Man and a Brother?’ asked an ape in one famous illustration in Punch, May 1861, playing simultaneously on Du Chaillu’s stuffed gorilla and the antislavery movement. In truth, the furore generated by evolutionary ideas pulled apes, anatomy, polemic, fear, disgust and sensationalism into a single debate. Benjamin Disraeli, the future Conservative prime minister, exposed the unease of his contemporaries in 1864 when he asked ‘Is man an ape or an angel?’ He went on to assure his audience that he was on the side of the angels.
Others engaged with the Origin’s arguments with philosophical curiosity. While John Herschel complained that natural selection was the law of ‘higgledy-piggledy’, and that Darwin was not following traditional procedures of demonstration and proof, Henry Fawcett at Cambridge University and the philosopher John Stuart Mill compared the new style of reasoning favourably against the old. Mill endorsed Darwin’s work in the 1862 edition of his System of Logic, saying that although Darwin had not proved the truth of his doctrine, he had shown that it might be true, an ‘unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis… He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee’.5 Ernest Renan, the noted theological writer, whose Life of Jesus deliberately left out the divine, said much the same thing. So did George Henry Lewes when discussing natural selection in his Animal Life (1862): ‘it may be true but we cannot say that it is true’. These thoughtful authors saw the argument’s explanatory value and were not prepared to dismiss it out of hand simply for religious reasons.
Even those who disagreed with Darwin were mostly able to concede the merits of his case. The great philologist Friedrich Max Müller addressed Darwin’s theories in lectures about the origin of speech during the winter lecture season in London, 1861–2. Müller forced his audience of fashionable swells to think carefully about what it was to be human. Had our gift of language developed from animal sounds? He thought not. Words could only exist with thoughts, and thoughts were the special preserve of humans. Animals did not have anything like human concepts, he claimed. Müller vigorously opposed evolutionary theory. Yet he praised the notion of natural selection and applied it enthusiastically to the descent and historical relationships of Indo-European languages, as the other great language scholar of the day, August Schleicher, was to appreciate.
Poets and authors were not far behind. Alfred Lord Tennyson never accepted Darwin’s proposals but was keen to meet him in 1868 when they both coincided on holiday in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson had been deeply affected by Chambers’s Vestiges and did not trouble to distinguish the two books from each other. ‘Darwinism, man from ape, would that really make any difference? Time is nothing, are we not all part of deity?’ he remarked to William Allingham in 1863. Tennyson’s gloom about the void after death, although not generated by Darwinism, nevertheless moved him broadly in the same direction as Origin of Species. Robert Browning similarly questioned whether there was any purpose in human existence. But perhaps Matthew Arnold spoke clearest of all for Victorians beset by religious doubt. In his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1851) the sea of faith that once supported spirituality was now nothing more than a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’.
And Karl Marx was famously intrigued by Darwin’s thesis, saying on several different occasions that he saw in its workings the capitalist system of competition and laissez- faire. At one time it was thought that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin but this was based on a misunderstanding. Marx certainly mentioned Origin in his text and sent a presentation copy of his third edition of Das Kapital to Darwin as a mark of respect. It remains in Darwin’s book collection with an inscription from Marx inside. The confusion emerged from a misidentification of a letter to Darwin. The letter was actually from Edward Aveling, the political philosopher and Marx’s son-in-law, who enthusiastically adopted Darwin’s secular insights. Aveling asked if Darwin would accept a dedication in one of Aveling’s books. Not wishing to be publicly associated with Aveling’s atheism, Darwin rejected the request.
Running alongside these intense debates over apes and angels were two main scientific objections to Origin of Species. The first cut to the heart of Darwin’s proposal and queried the origin and preservation of favourable variations. The theme was picked up in 1867 by Fleeming Jenkin, a Scottish engineer and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson. Jenkin asked how could advantageous individuals survive and reproduce in sufficient numbers to shift the whole population in the same favourable direction? Jenkin was hampered, like many of his contemporaries, by believing in what was then known as ‘blending inheritance’, where the characteristics of any two parents were thought to mix and blend in the offspring. If this was so, then any favourable new traits would be blended out in future generations. It was only later, with Moritz Wagner’s insistence on geographical isolation in the evolutionary process (a notion itself developed from Darwin’s work), that the blending problem looked as if it was solved.
Darwin was very perplexed to answer the point satisfactorily. He recognized – indeed the majority of reviewers told him – that the major gap in his book was that he did not explain the origin of variations nor the process of heredity. He tried to do so in his next significant book, On the Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868). He devised a theory of inheritance that he called ‘pangenesis’ in which each part of the parent’s body was thought to throw off minute particles, or ‘gemmules’, which accumulated in the sexual organs to be transmitted in reproduction. Parental gemmules did not blend, he claimed. Instead they were reorganized.
The scheme was roundly criticized, first by Huxley, and then most tellingly by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), an enthusiast for evolution who was interested in inheritance and the ‘fitness’ of the human race, and took Darwin’s theories into the human domain under the label of eugenics. Galton hoped to prove Darwin’s pangenesis by making blood transfusions between rabbits and then breeding from them, but, to his dismay, ended up showing that gemmules were not present in the blood. The two cousins never saw eye to eye over the business. Late in life Darwin was gratified when the pioneer geneticist August Weismann (1834–1914) took up the notion of gemmules (pangenes) as a vehicle for the transmission of information from parent to offspring.
Commonly disregarded by historians of genetics, Darwin’s theories should perhaps be placed more in the mainstream of investigations into inheritance. He was one of many others who at that time felt that heredity must hold the key to the question of origins. The problem was under prolonged and intense investigation from the 1860s onwards by Charles Naudin, Karl Wilhelm Nägeli, Karl Friedrich Gärtner and Weismann. Coincidentally, Gregor Mendel (1822–84) was also at work in the monastery in Brno (Moravia, now Czech Republic) where he spent his life as a pastor. Mendel’s crossing procedures with pure lines of peas and other garden species, although later the foundation of the modern science of genetics, were more or less ignored when published in the local natural history journal in 1865, and there is no evidence that Darwin read Mendel’s article or that it would have provided him with the necessary clue if he had done so. Darwin’s theory of inheritance did not convince contemporaries, who continued to point to the gap in his argument.
The other scientific sticking point emerged in 1866 when the experimental physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) announced that the earth was not old enough for evolution to have taken place. Propelled by anti-evolutionary Scottish Presbyterian inclinations, Thomson stated that 100 million years was all that physics could allow for the whole of the earth’s geological history. Uniformitarians like Lyell and Darwin, who believed in slow and gradual changes over vast aeons of time, were dumbfounded. Thomson’s arguments were ‘an odious spectre’. Decades of continuing debate over the age of the earth were resolved only with the discovery of radioactivity early in the twentieth century that provided a different way of counting and let the evolutionists off the hook.
Darwin responded to these criticisms, and others, in the pages of succeeding editions of his book. One of the most important changes has been noted by many commentators. In the closing pages of the first edition Darwin had written of life being breathed into a few primordial forms. For the second edition he altered this to read ‘the breath of the Creator’, a concession that he came to regret. In the second edition he also added a few words (unattributed) from a letter written to him by Charles Kingsley, indicating that it was possible to believe in God as the ultimate author of evolution. These words remained more or less intact until later editions. Historians have also remarked on Darwin’s willingness to include increasing levels of Lamarckian evolution as the years went by.
During his lifetime Darwin published six editions of Origin of Species, 18,000 copies in total. The first edition numbered 1,250 copies. It is worth comparing these figures with two of the most popular scientific books of the century, Vestiges (1844), which sold 24,000 in sixteen years, and nearly 40,000 by 1890, or George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), which sold 11,000 in eight years. There were eleven translations of Origin produced before Darwin’s death in 1882, and numerous shortened versions and commentaries, many of which required close cooperation with the authors and editors. It has appeared in a further eighteen languages since.
One area where Darwin’s theory obviously impinged on human society was in the suggestion that there was a struggle for existence among nations and races. After the Origin of Species was published, the notorious doctrine of ‘social Darwinism’ took the idea of success to justify social and economic policies in which struggle was the driving force. Intimately tied up with national economies, embedded in powerful class, racial and gender distinctions, dancing to a variety of political commitments, there was no single form of social Darwinism. Indeed, some scholars argue that it hardly derived from Darwin and Wallace’s scheme of natural selection at all but was more closely connected with Herbert Spencer’s pervasive social evolutionism. Spencer’s nostrum of ‘survival of the fittest’ was well suited to describe economic expansion, rapid adaptation to circumstance and colonization.
Be this as it may, the dominant economic strategy of developed nations during the second half of the nineteenth century took shape in the aftermath of the Origin’s publication. It was common to use the book directly to legitimize the competition that flourished in free-enterprise Victorian capitalism. Darwin was perfectly aware of these activities and may even have approved of them. Early on he noted that a reviewer in Manchester (one of the largest manufacturing cities in Britain) stated that the Origin promoted the notion that ‘might was right’. Darwin’s ideas were welcomed by many industrial magnates and manufacturers. By the end of the century they were being put into action by the businessmen, philanthropists and robber barons who masterminded the development of North American industry, especially J. D. Rockefeller and the railway owner James J. Hill, who used ‘survival of the fittest’ as their catchphrase. In their view the strongest and most efficient company would naturally dominate the market and stimulate economic progress on the wider scale. Others, like Andrew Carnegie, the émigré Scotsman who created a vast fortune and spent the rest of his life giving it away, revered Spencer. These commitments were heavily biased towards the political right. Few such thinkers believed in socialism or state support for the poor. A welfare state or subsidized industry, it was assumed, would encourage idleness and permit an increasing number of ‘unfit’ people or firms to survive, thereby undermining economic and social progress and national health – an obvious resurgence of Malthus’s original ideas, now poured back into economic thought with a fully ‘scientific’ backing provided by Darwin.
Enthusiasm for free enterprise merged readily into growing ideologies of imperialism and eugenics. The ‘survival of the fittest’ supported notions of inbuilt ‘racial’ difference and appeared to vindicate harsh and continuing fights for territory and political power on the international stage. The success of white Europeans in conquering and settling in Tasmania, for example, seemed to ‘make natural’ the who- lescale extermination of Tasmanian aboriginals. Conquest was deemed a necessary part of progress. A fairly typical view was expressed by Karl Pearson (1857–1936), the committed Darwinian biologist and London statistician. No one should regret, he said in 1900, that ‘a capable and stalwart race of white men should replace a dark-skinned tribe which can neither utilize its land for the full benefit of mankind, nor contribute its quota to the common stock of human knowledge’.6
Social commentators appeared to agree. Eugenics was given its name and leading principles by Francis Galton in the 1880s, drawing on nationalistic, racial and social assumptions already well established but acquiring great social force when attached to evolutionary theory. Galton felt that civilized societies tended generally to prevent natural selection working, in the sense that many of the ‘unfit’ were preserved by medicine, charity, family or religious principles, whereas in a state of nature such people would die. The worst elements of society were the most fecund, he said. The human race would deteriorate, he declared, unless policies were introduced to reduce breeding rates among what he categorized as the poorer, unfit, profligate elements of society and promote higher rates among the worthy middle classes. One of the most pervasive social movements of the early twentieth century, spreading widely through Europe and the Americas, eugenics increasingly became the channel through which anxieties about racial and political decline were projected on to the ‘unfit’ in society. Many eugenicists believed passionately in improving humanity, in political meritocracies, education, birth control and greater freedom for women, were advocates for technological and scientific advance and often committed socialists, and yet also promoted nationalism, chauvinism and prejudice. While Darwin’s Origin of Species can hardly account for all the racial stereotyping, nationalist fervour and harshly expressed prejudice to be found in years to come, there can be no denying the impact of providing a biological backing for human warfare and notions of racial superiority.
Towards the end of his life, it could almost be said that the Origin of Species devoured Darwin. The constant pressure was draining. Through the 1860s and 1870s he became ill more frequently and for longer periods. One unpleasant episode of sickness dominated 1864, during which Darwin was bedridden for much of the time, vomiting and nauseated, unable to see friends or work except at the most sedentary occupations, too weak even to write his usual cascade of letters. His wife Emma and daughter Henrietta acted as amanuenses. He gave up the water-cure and placed his faith in dietary regimens and resting his ‘nerves’. Under the care of several physicians he also took a variety of Victorian remedies for dyspepsia. In 1866, when he re-emerged from the sickroom, he had become the frail old man with the enormous grey beard that everyone remembers.
Yet he managed to write a number of other books following Origin of Species. The first was on orchids in 1862, that represented a very deliberate exploration of adaptations in nature, what he called ‘a flank move on the enemy’. It was his answer to William Paley’s heavenly watchmaker and stimulated much theological discussion with Asa Gray. ‘I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design’, he told Gray.
By far the most influential was his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published by John Murray in two volumes in 1871. After all the heated discussion about human origins perhaps it was a little overdue. Other voices, other texts had meanwhile put the case both for and against the animal basis of humankind. Indeed, Darwin confessed to a correspondent that he felt ‘taunted with concealing my opinions’. However, he was at last dealing with what he called ‘the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist’. Some material was too extensive even to include in this new book, so Darwin set it aside for an innovative volume published the following year, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). These two titles represent Darwin’s great anthropological cycle, his ‘man’ books, the final, vital counterpart to Origin of Species.
Alfred Russel Wallace played an important role in Darwin’s thinking in this regard. After Wallace’s return to England in 1862 the two had become good friends, each respecting the other’s achievement. Nevertheless, Wallace bowed to what must have seemed the inevitable. Much of the shock of evolution had died down by the time of his return. Darwin’s Origin of Species occupied the front line and the word ‘Darwinism’ was already circulating as a synonym for evolutionary theory. Wallace’s position was therefore different from that of Lyell, Hooker or Huxley, and perhaps uncomfortable, being neither disciple nor primary author. Eventually he wrote one of the best nineteenth-century texts on natural selection, modestly calling it Darwinism (1889). Somehow he never gained the celebrity or status in Victorian science that Darwin achieved and is often regarded by historians as an outsider, a fascinating figure who joined the establishment only briefly. Increasingly he and Darwin agreed to differ on particular points. Wallace revealed that he did not like the expression ‘natural selection’ and in 1868 persuaded Darwin to introduce the expression ‘survival of the fittest’, taken from Herbert Spencer’s writings.
Their main difference was over the origin of human beings. Wallace wrote two compelling articles on human evolution in the 1860s. In the second, published in the 1869 Quarterly Review, he declared that natural selection was insufficient to explain all the evolutionary beginnings of humankind. He proposed instead that natural selection pushed our apish ancestors only to the threshold of humani ty. At that point, physical evolution stopped and something else took over: the power of mind. The human mind alone continued to advance, human societies emerged, cultural imperatives increased, a mental and moral domain became significant and civilization took shape. Not every society developed at the same rate – primitives were slow, Caucasians fast. For all his genuine social democratic principles, Wallace believed in a hierarchy of savage and civilized. Darwin was taken aback. ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,’ he exclaimed in surprise. It was partly the impact of seeing this article that encouraged him to express his own views fully in The Descent of Man. He was determined to show that everything human – language, morality, religious sense, maternal affection, civilization, appreciation of beauty – had emerged from animals.
The book was large and Darwin solicited assistance from many friends and scholars already working within evolutionary anthropology, such as Huxley or the talented German-speaking naturalists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. The text included an important new idea that he called ‘sexual selection’. This accounted, as he thought, not only for the differences between males and females – the secondary sexual characteristics as they are usually called – but also the differences between human races. Darwin used the terminology of his day, writing of racial characteristics and racial ‘types’. He felt certain that sexual selection was ‘the main agent in forming the races of man’.
The idea was relatively simple. Animals, he said, possess many trifling features that are developed only because they contribute to reproductive success. These features have no adaptive or survival value. The classic example is the male peacock that develops large tail feathers to enhance its chances in the mating game even though the same feathers actively impede its ability to fly from predators. The female peahen, argued Darwin, chooses the most well-adorned mate and thereby passes his characteristics on to the next generation. It was a system, he stressed, that depended on individual choice. In The Descent of Man Darwin devoted nearly half the book to establishing the existence of this sexual selection in birds, mammals and insects. Wallace disagreed with him on several substantial points, particularly the purpose of protective coloration in birds and insects.
Darwin then extended the idea to explain the divergence of early humans into the racial groups that physical anthropologists described. Preference for certain skin colours was a good example. Early men would choose wives according to local ideas of beauty, he suggested. The skin colour of an entire population would gradually shift as a consequence. ‘The strongest and most vigorous men… would generally have been able to select the more attractive women… who would rear on average a greater number of children.’7 Societies would have dissimilar ideas about what constituted attractiveness and so the physical features of various groups would gradually diverge. In effect, humans would make themselves. The same argument applied to mental characteristics, pushing some groups away from the tribal life towards more ‘civilized’ values and patterns of behaviour.
Darwin ventured on to thorny ground when he applied these notions to human culture and behaviour. His naturalism recast the notion of human diversity into strictly evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing nineteenth-century beliefs in racial superiority, where whites rested comfortably at the top of the scale. He also revealed that he believed in innate male superiority, honed by aeons of hunting and fighting. Whereas he felt that much of the animal kingdom was governed by female choice – that female birds choose their mate according to display, song or nestbuilding behaviour – he regarded advanced human society as patriarchal. In civilized regimes he felt it was self-evident that men, because of their well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial capacities, ruled the social order and that they would do the choosing. In this way he applied biology to human culture and saw in every society a ‘natural’ basis for male-centred behaviour. After publication, early feminists and suffragettes bitterly attacked this doctrine, feeling that women were being ‘naturalized’ into a purely biological, submissive role. Many medical writers understood Darwin to be supporting the assumption that women’s brains were smaller and less evolutionarily developed than men’s, or that the female body was especially prone to disorders if the reproductive functions were denied.
The rest of the book tackled hot topics such as the development of human morals from animal emotions and the onset of speech (which drew Darwin into more debate with Friedrich Max Müller). Darwin needed to show that language was not a fundamental dividing line between mankind and animals. Unlike Müller, Darwin thought that speech emerged from imitating natural sounds. ‘It does not appear altogether incredible, that some unusually wise apelike animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of a language.’8 Darwin was daring when dealing with the religious sense, proposing that this was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on inexplicable natural events.
He also discussed likely fossil intermediaries between ape and human and mapped out a provisional family tree, in which he took information mostly from fellow evolutionists like Haeckel and Huxley. Even though there were by then a few isolated fragments of Neanderthal skulls available for study in European museums, these had not yet been identified as from ancestral humans. Huxley, for instance, regarded the original puzzling fragment from the Neander river valley as part of the thickened skull of a congenital idiot. The real advances in understanding fossil mankind were to take place several decades after Darwin’s death. Nevertheless, Darwin put forward a proposal. At some point, Darwin suggested, anthropoid apes descended from the trees, started walking erect, began using their hands to hold or hunt, and developed their brains.
The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail… our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad spot. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.9
The book closed with a flourish. At the end, he echoed Huxley’s battle with the Bishop of Oxford at the British Association some ten years previously by saying that he would rather be descended from a brave little monkey than from a savage who delights in torturing his enemies.
Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not accept evolution continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed. Wallace was generous about the book, praising it in letters and in reviews. Most reviewers noted Darwin’s evident sincerity and depth of learning. Nevertheless there must have been a sense of déjà vu. The animal–human boundary, the human soul and the divine origin of human morals had been the main topics of debate for ten or twelve years. Young rationalist thinkers like Leslie Stephen spoke for many of the coming generation by saying ‘What possible difference can it make whether I am sprung from an ape or an angel?’
With The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which appeared a year later, Darwin completed the account of evolution he began with Origin of Species. None of his other later writings had anything like the same public effect, although several of his final pieces, for instance on mental processes in infants, stimulated researchers. His last book was on earthworms (1881), one of the most popular books he ever published, full of natural history observations made on worms from his own garden, a symbolic and peaceful occupation that provided him with much pleasure in his fading years. Towards the end he slowed down, preferred to work on plants, and be with his family. In his seventies he enjoyed writing a little autobiography, not intending it for publication. In it he reviewed his life with great charm and modesty. Yet what a life it had been. Few men reach such heights of intellectual power or have their views discussed so widely and with such vigour. Even if people did not think that they were descended from apes, they talked about it ceaselessly.
For those who did believe, Darwin became a kind of prophet, a secular saint. From the middle of the 1870s his life took on many of the trappings of celebrity culture, rather as Charles Dickens, opera singer Jenny Lind or other famous figures in the Victorian period discovered to their cost. Darwin’s portrait was circulated in illustrated magazines, he received requests for autographs, free copies of his books, money and advice, and his home was visited by sightseers, keen to catch a glimpse of a man whose work had so notably contributed to nineteenth-century debate. The years of controversy generated extraordinary fame. Young scientists increasingly asked to be admitted to his presence for a kind of personal benediction, either to eat lunch with the family, or to enter his study, which became in people’s minds an inner sanctum, the place where great thought had taken place.
Loved by his family, appreciated and admired by his friends, an intellectual beacon to many, in turn respected and reviled, Darwin came to the end of his life knowing that he had brought about an extraordinary transformation in scientific thought. His identity had become subsumed in that of his book. ‘If I had been a friend of myself, I should have hated me,’ he remarked with some humour to Huxley at the height of the controversy. ‘I wish I could feel all was deserved by me.’
CHAPTER 5
Legacy
Twenty-three years after publishing the book that made him famous, Darwin died at home, aged seventy-three. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in London, the more usual location for state funerals, royal marriages and national celebrations. Such a burial site for the author of On the Origin of Species was ironic in many ways, for the nation was well aware of Darwin’s reputation for having undermined church authority. By the time of his death, however, Darwin was fêted as a great scientific celebrity, a grand old man of science, someone who had looked further and seen more than others, of an intellectual rank as great as Newton, and certainly deserving to be honoured in the country’s primary commemorative setting. Professors, churchmen, politicians, medical luminaries, aristocrats and members of the public crowded the Abbey to see him to the grave. ‘Happy is the man that findeth wisdom’ sang the choir. It is hardly possible nowadays for us to guess whether Darwin died a happy man but he was certainly revered for his achievement and personal character, the very model of what a man of science ought to be.
However, despite this reverence, the cultural world was entering a different phase, recognizably more modern in tone. The fierce religious controversies of earlier days were subsiding. By regarding the Bible as an allegorical text filled with spiritual meaning, it became possible for Christian believers to retain their belief in the truth of God’s message while also appreciating scientific findings as a different kind of truth. Moreover, the power of the Church itself was on the wane. Many of these changes were retrospectively attributed to the Origin of Species. Honours paid to Darwin at his funeral liberally acknowledged his important role in constructing the modern frame of mind.
His scientific legacy, though, was not nearly as secure. As fresh areas of research opened up in the biological sciences, and new kinds of professionals took up a wider range of problems with more sophisticated techniques, the original thesis of natural selection was modified almost beyond recognition. There was dispute about the central concepts of competition, success and ‘fitness’, particularly in the way these interlaced with contemporary political ideologies. Alternative evolutionary systems based on direct responses to the environment came into play. Indeed, it is frequently said that Darwinism was eclipsed by other systems of evolutionary thought towards the end of the nineteenth century, not to be restored until a ‘new synthesis’ was put forward in the 1940s.
Much of this eclipse rested on fresh critiques of the main struts of Darwin’s original proposals. Social Darwinism was criticized as it climbed to pre-eminence in political thought around 1900. Wallace came to reject the competitive aspects of Darwinian biology as applied to human society and supported utopian socialist principles. Elsewhere J. Keir Hardy argued that progress took place via group selection in which individuals felt sympathy for one another. In Russia, the prevailing ideology was that the main struggle for existence was not species against species, but species against the environment. The émigré Russian Prince, Peter Kropotkin, pushed this furthest in Mutual Aid (1902), arguing that evolution’s main driving force was cooperation, exactly the reverse of competition. Socialist thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw insisted on the moral superiority of Lamarckian ideas, where the effects of the environment were believed to be more important in shaping human character than inbuilt biological properties. J. B. S. Haldane confidently declared ‘Darwinism is dead’.
The operating mechanism of selection was criticized too, encouraged by the work of the young critic and writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902). Butler’s Evolution Old and New (1879) downplayed Charles Darwin’s scheme in favour of those of Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. Butler proposed that Charles Darwin was merely one in a long line of evolutionary thinkers, and that Origin of Species misdirected biologists to seek struggle and mechanistic answers where older schemes had far more to offer in recognizing that organisms might respond adaptively to the environment. Butler and Darwin had argued fiercely in the last years of Darwin’s life over the text of a biography of Dr Erasmus Darwin, a quarrel that had begun in an unfortunate breach of etiquette on Darwin’s part and quickly came to represent a clash between generations and world systems – for Darwin was unable to control Butler as he was accustomed to control his other disciples. It ended in complete personal estrangement. This quarrel intrigues historians because of the way it reveals cracks opening up in the Darwinian edifice. Butler’s views chimed neatly with increasing debate over the relative roles of heredity and environment, not only in biological theory but also in understanding human mental development from child to adult and the structure of society. Galton’s catchphrase of ‘nature or nurture’ (biology or environment) became an issue of considerable concern.
Furthermore, even though there was great enthusiasm among naturalists for reconstructing the history of life on earth, it soon appeared to be the case that non-Darwinian, pre-directed paths of evolution were more attractive. Palaeontologists took a lead in this area, probably because of the spectacular fossil discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the American West. The American palaeontologist Theodore Eimer claimed that evolutionary history had not taken the shape of a Darwinian branching tree but proceeded in a straight line. In his eyes, natural selection was powerless except to weed out obviously deleterious trends. A much-discussed example was that of the Irish Elk, which was thought to have become extinct because of the dramatic over-development of its antlers – the suggestion was that the antlers had acquired a momentum of their own and eventually became a liability not an advantage.
Alpheus Hyatt, another noted fossil expert, similarly argued that adaptive trends almost always carried on beyond their usefulness. Ultimately, he said, a species would be driven to ‘racial senility’ and extinction. His colleague, Edward Drinker Cope, alternatively felt that evolution roughly followed the same course as the embryo of an individual, sometimes accelerating, sometimes dropping back. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the world’s greatest natural history museums, and a committed Darwinist, believed that each group of organisms experienced a period of rapid diversification at the start of its history, which then stabilized into several steady lines of development. Like Eimer and Cope he did not see in the fossil record any of the multiple branching described by Darwin. Indeed, he claimed entirely different animal groups might progress along roughly the same routes, in the development of horns for example.
Such straight-line evolutionary histories, with their subtexts of inbuilt senescence or death from over-specialization, lent authoritative support to increasingly pessimistic views about the human future. Primitive cultures could now be regarded as in the ‘infancy’ of their development. More advanced societies might be set on lines of development that led them through the heights of civilization to corruption or decay. Those who transgressed society’s conventions, such as criminals, homosexuals or the mentally deranged, could be categorized as ‘throwbacks’ to some racial past. As optimism in continued progress drained away, such concerns were vividly expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction. H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) took a traveller into a future where humans had deteriorated into two species, the brutal underground Morlocks and the effete overground Eloi, a parable of the political and social divisions that Wells discerned in his own day. Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) played on largely the same themes, while Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy drew powerfully on the idea of hereditary degeneration and the inflexible pull of biological forces on humanity.
By the start of the twentieth century much of the developed world was caught up in eugenic and hereditarian systems of thought on a wider scale. Eugenic movements reached a peak in 1912 with the first International Eugenic Congress, held in London. Long before then, Francis Galton and others in Britain caught the pessimistic mood of the times and pointed to the poor quality of army recruits for the Boer War to illustrate the decline of the nation’s biological fitness. Other signs of ‘degeneration’ seemed to abound in the eyes of the elite: increased criminal behaviour, a loosening of moral values with a consequent rise in prostitution and venereal diseases, a growing political restlessness among the workers, unionization and the threat of strikes or demonstrations. Huge publicity surrounded the legal case brought against Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. Even the cause of women’s suffrage and the political prominence of the ‘new woman’ (women who worked, who wished to be educated and to vote, and perhaps bicycled and smoked cigarettes) were taken as symptoms of a nation in decay. Whereas in Darwin’s day eugenics was mainly expressed in fears about the maintenance of biological fitness, in the early twentieth century it expanded through Europe and the Americas into significant political movements seeking to change government policy with public health measures for the masses, birth control and enforced restraint from breeding. At root, the old system of Malthusian checks that Darwin had applied to biology was reapplied to political economies with compelling biological support. The poor, the deranged, the weak and diseased came to be regarded as biological burdens on society. For the good of the nation, it was said, policies should be introduced to prevent them from reproducing their kind.
Many of these initiatives took an institutional form. A National Eugenics Laboratory was established in University College London with a bequest from Galton to investigate deteriorating family lines, principally gauged by the incidence of hereditary mental disorders. It was headed by Karl Pearson, an idealistic eugenicist and Darwinian biologist with marked socialist leanings. Psychiatrists identified degenerative ‘types’ among their inmates using the new medium of photography, and criminologists such as the Italian writer Cesare Lombroso proposed that there were physical stigmata to be seen in social deviants. These were sometimes linked explicitly with apish bodily features. He also popularized the word ‘atavism’, meaning a reversion to some ape-like ancestral type. Conditions such as epilepsy or gross deformity categorized yet others again as undesirable. It was thought that such unfit individuals could be identified by ‘signs’ and then removed from society. In 1888 the Parisian detective Alphonse Bertillon did exactly this by introducing a system of physical signs and measurements to identify any individual who came through the French criminal system, including the technique of taking fingerprints, the basis of all modern identification procedures. The same threat of physical and moral degeneration was taken up in dazzling fashion by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) where Jekyll’s other self, the evil Hyde, progressively became more apelike as his murderous deeds increased.
Urban decay, industrial squalor and a wish for interventionist public health measures such as vaccination and the regulation of prostitution, filled the public journals. Upper- class fears in Britain about being overrun by a depraved and criminal underclass (the ‘mob’) became widespread. The Eugenics Education Society, soon to be the Eugenics Society, was established in Britain from 1907, and rapidly filled up with earnest professional people wishing to improve and control the masses. Its president from 1911 to 1925 was Leonard Darwin, one of Charles Darwin’s sons. An important outcome in Britain was that the Mental Deficiency Act was passed in 1913 to identify mentally impaired individuals and segregate them in an institution or asylum where they would be prevented from reproducing. Other European governments, particularly in Scandinavia, moved decisively in the same area, although some of these laws were never put into practical operation. All too often it turned out that the poorer sections of society contained the larger proportion of unfit individuals. Procedures were peremptory. Asylums, orphanages and prisons became dustbins for undesirables.
In America, too, eugenics flourished in the early twentieth century. In 1910 the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor was founded and efforts were made to trace traits such as insanity, feeble-mindedness and criminality back through the generations. The first task was to identify those who should not reproduce. Hereditary forms of mental disorder became the main target. Among the most notorious eugenicists, Dr Henry H. Goddard, of Vineland, New Jersey, adopted the French system of intelligence testing to compute the mental age and ability of mentally defective children, which were quickly converted into tests for IQ (intelligence quotient). Goddard coined the terms ‘feeble-minded’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘moron’ to describe specific levels of impairment and proposed that such people should be permanently separated from the rest of the population. He did not carry out sterilizations, although some medical bodies recommended that this should take place. He did, however, provide the government with a quantitative framework – a test – for identifying the biologically unfit in society. Later, Robert Yerkes tested the adult male population called up for service in the First World War (some 19,000 servicemen). He calculated that most of them possessed a mental age of thirteen years old. His IQ tests further indicated that African- Americans and others of recent European origin had even lower mental ages. Prostitutes and the Polish were lowest of all.
These tests were evidently biased in favour of literate middle-class whites familiar with North American culture, a fact made further apparent on Ellis Island. Tired, traumatized and usually unable to speak colloquial English, many hopeful immigrants to the USA were incorrectly categorized as imbeciles and turned away. Goddard’s statistics deeply shocked the American government. Charles Davenport, the director of the Eugenics Record Office, advocated the introduction of state programmes to restrict marriage, enforce segregation and compulsory sterilization. During the period 1900 to 1935, no fewer than thirty-two states passed sterilization laws. Most of the 60,000 people known to have been sterilized under these regulations were mental asylum patients or prisoners. It is not recorded how many were of African descent.
Eugenic doctrines around 1900 were invariably coupled with other ideological extensions of Darwinism. Several biologists and eugenicists working within the Darwinian system threw their support behind Germany’s claim to be Europe’s leading nation, particularly Haeckel who proposed a materialist philosophy of life called ‘monism’ in which spirit and matter were different aspects of the same underlying substance. His Monist League promoted German supremacy in the decade before the First World War and indirectly contributed to the rise of fascism afterwards. Embedded in these biologized aspects of society and visions of national ascendancy, Germany’s rulers reached furthest of all with their eugenic law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny (1933). Some 300,000 people were sterilized under this edict until 1939 when it was replaced by the wartime ‘euthanasia’ programme for the extermination of the Jews.
Race science, sometimes known as racial science, reflected the most extreme prejudices of the day and this too drew on Darwinism. It should be said, however, that racism and genocide predated Darwin. Nor were they solely confined to the West. Nevertheless, evolutionary views, and then the new science of genetics, gave powerful biological backing to those who wished to partition society according to ethnic difference or promote white supremacy. The American author Joseph Le Conte spoke for many when he justified the subjugation of blacks in the post-Civil War South by saying that ‘the negro race is still in childhood… it has not yet learned to walk alone in the paths of civilization’. Some racial scientists believed that different ethnic groupings were completely separate species, although this was always a minority view. Carl Vogt’s theory, for example, was that each race had evolved from a different ape: whites from the chimpanzee, blacks from the gorilla, and orientals from the orang-utan. In Europe and North America these and other racial scientists debated human interbreeding, made pruri ent ethnological investigation into sexual behaviour and initiated studies of mixed breeding in former slave-owning regions. Universities and museums accumulated collections of skulls from all over the world for scientists to measure cranium capacity (thought to be an indicator of intelligence) and deviation from a supposed ideal Caucasian type. These collections, a relic of long-superseded theories, are now an embarrassment to national institutions and are never put on display.
Armed with the naturalist Gregor Mendel’s notions about the transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next, a fresh generation of theorists turned the study of human evolution into a science of racial fixity that legitimized contemporary prejudices.
For Americans, the race question not only highlighted the problems created by slavery and difficulties encountered with emancipation after the Civil War but also precipitated academic warfare between social scientists and biologists, the former favouring cultural explanations of racial differences, the latter inbuilt physical and biological parameters. Franz Boas, one of the founders of anthropology, who argued for the unique and equal nature of every culture, suffered at the hands of a powerful race lobby within American biology during the 1920s that endorsed the existence of stages through which every society must pass in its development. Across the Atlantic, at much the same time, the Nazis claimed that the Aryan was a distinct and superior form of humanity destined to rule over ‘sub-humans’. Subsequent horror at the Nazis’ drive to eliminate the Jews challenged the ideology of racial science, although much still exists.
Racial theory of a lesser kind was also put to use by early twentieth-century palaeo-anthropologists who started to suggest that there had been multiple lines of human evolution, with some of those lines, including the Neanderthals, being driven to extinction by more successful races at various stages in the process. As traces of fossil humans began to emerge, scholars became convinced that there must have been a series of intermediary animal-man forms. In retrospect it is intriguing to see how much naturalists wanted to make these intermediaries apelike in shape and character, especially insisting on the small size of their braincase. The so-called ‘human’ characteristics were thought to appear quite recently in geological history, almost all together in a rush with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Eugene Dubois was famed for his exciting discovery of ‘Java Man’ in 1891, an ape-man that he named Pithecanthropus. The discovery of another species, to be named ‘Pekin Man’, arrived in the 1920s. Raymond Dart’s ‘Taung baby’ added a South African species named Australopithecus. The prize of becoming known as the cradle of mankind generated bitter national rivalries for fifty years or more. Soon, an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History displayed reconstructions of three types of extinct mankind, Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (very close to present-day mankind), arranged as a progressive series towards the white, civilized form of today.
This fascination with ape-men perhaps accounts for the ease with which a notorious fraud was accepted by the academic community. The remains of an early human skull and jaw were found by an amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, in a quarry near Piltdown in East Sussex in 1912, and described as a new species of intermediate hominid, Eoanthropus dawsonii (Dawson’s dawn man). These bones fitted well with the hypothetical line of human evolution then in favour. Sir Arthur Keith, for example, one of the leading investigators of early mankind in Britain, regarded the remains as from a lower type, with no close relationship to the other humans known to have existed at the same time. Keith had little doubt about what happened when higher and lower forms came into contact: warfare between the races was a natural part of the prehistory of human evolution, he confidently declared, in the same way as the terrible 1914–18 warfare of his own time had resulted in victory for the British, the survival of the fittest. Gradually, however, the Piltdown skull came to be seen as increasingly anomalous. In the 1950s it was exposed as a hoax: an ape jaw had been attached to an ancient human skull and the teeth filed down to produce a human pattern. Dawson was probably not the main culprit. Other maverick amateurs have been suggested, each one with a grievance against the scientific establishment.
Across the globe fundamental shifts were taking place in the way scholars thought about the natural world. Modernism was on its way. Growing numbers of biological scientists started turning away from the problem of how species existed in the wild or the history of the evolutionary tree to direct their attention down into the living body, seeking the mechanisms of inheritance, hybridization, mutation and variation. At the time of Darwin’s death many already believed that inheritance held the key to life. By the last decade of the nineteenth century their aim was not to cata logue dead animals and plants but to understand the inner workings of living, breathing bodies – a self-conscious conceptual break with the past. This new attitude to biology reflected a major move away from observational natural history towards a more experimental, laboratory-based form of investigation, a move that can be seen taking place in almost all of the sciences at this time. Traditional natural history, of course, did not stop; it became sidelined, sometimes regarded as the province of amateur naturalists, or otherwise reconstituted as new sciences of animal behaviour, ecology and environmentalism. Like physics and chemistry, biology was becoming something that was primarily practised indoors, in a lab, under controlled conditions, and increasingly with the financial aid of government agencies.
These new experimental biologists made many astonishing discoveries in a relatively short period of time. Some pressed deep into the building blocks of the living body, investigating the cell and early stages of embryonic development. Others explored remaining gaps in Darwin’s theories by studying variation and inheritance. Galton’s speculations about innate inherited traits seemed to answer some of Darwin’s unanswered questions. But Galton’s proposals were entirely abstract ideas, never quite realizable in a laboratory setting. A group of his followers, clustered around Karl Pearson in the eugenics laboratory at University College London, therefore began to study how inheritance and variation might work in practice. Calling themselves bio- metricians, these men (and a few pioneer female scientists) measured variability in living beings, for example the dimensions of crab shells, and devised many of today’s most common statistical procedures for calculating deviations from the norm in order to show small adaptive shifts in a chosen species. By 1900 they were perhaps the last truly committed Darwinians in existence, for they insisted on Darwin’s original system of slow, gradual changes in populations.
In other parts of life, biometricians were quick on the draw. For five years or more, they quarrelled violently with a rival group of biologists at Cambridge University under the eye of William Bateson (1861–1926), himself an excellent field naturalist and experimental hybridizer. The Cambridge group was adamant that evolution proceeded by jumps and starts, and that columns of statistics produced in London were not going to tell anyone anything about how animals and plants varied or transmitted their characteristics to offspring.
This controversy has often been understood as the foundation of modern genetics for it provided the context in which Mendel’s work on peas was rediscovered. Three noted European experimentalists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, each independently working on the variation of plants, and individually keen to disprove the bio- metricians’ arguments, one by one encountered Mendel’s paper in the early months of 1900 and brought it to public attention. As they put it, the essence of Mendel’s experiments was to show that the heritable characteristics were self-contained and not able to blend – in Mendel’s research, the peas in the pod were green or yellow, smooth or wrinkled, never anything in between. These self-contained characteristics tended to reassort (rearrange) themselves during the reproductive process and appeared in fixed proportions in subsequent generations, say three wrinkled peas for every smooth one. Moreover, the characteristics could be either dominant or recessive: that is, some were visible in the body of the offspring while others remained hidden. Mendel had no notion of the modern ‘gene’ and yet his work strikingly anticipated the key concept of twentieth-century genetics that most physical characteristics, every pair of brown eyes, could be linked to a single particulate entity that was sorted and transmitted independently from generation to generation.
Nor could Mendel have anticipated how his results would be used. Bateson enthusiastically appropriated Mendel’s findings, turning his group at Cambridge into the first Mendelians in the world. Their approach was decidedly non- Darwinian, in the sense that they believed Mendel’s results supported the idea that evolution operated by jumps based on relatively sudden variations or ‘mutations’ in organisms. To them, the continuous tiny changes stipulated by Darwin and so carefully measured by the London biometricians were irrelevant, a waste of good scientific time. Within a few months, the transformation was complete. Bateson named his new science ‘genetics’ – the study of heredity – and claimed that mutation theory supplied the answer to the origin of new species.
Indeed, the science of genetics at the start was somewhat anti-Darwinian. For more than twenty years its practitioners proposed that mutations were the source of new and favourable kinds of organisms – happy accidents that would introduce an entirely different kind of being into the natural world. These early geneticists had no need for natural selection. It took a lot of dedicated work in the 1930s and 1940s to see how Mendelism and Darwinism might be brought together.
Meanwhile, close attention was paid to identifying the inheritable material and how it was transferred from generation to generation. At that time, it was not at all obvious how chromosomes might be involved. In 1893 August Weismann proposed that there must be an invisible substance that carried all the hereditary information from parent to child. He called this ‘germ plasm’ and claimed it could not be affected by the environment. This germ plasm played a useful interpretative role until expanded by Wilhelm Johannsen’s definition of the ‘gene’ in 1911. Even Johannsen was unsure if the gene really existed until Thomas Hunt Morgan, the outstanding geneticist of Columbia University, New York, demonstrated that genes were, so to speak, real entities strung along the chromosomes like pearls on a necklace and that they definitely contained the heritable material. Morgan’s famous experiments depended on one particular experimental organism, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which happened to have large and easily visible chromosomes. By breaking or otherwise manipulating the chromosomes, Morgan’s laboratory team produced a succession of mutant flies, for instance with red eyes or fused wing covers. The work proceeded with such sophistication that the team could locate which part of the chromosome was specific to each mutation. The results were summarized in The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915), now regarded as a milestone in modern genetics, and for which Morgan received the Nobel Prize. His book was completely non-Darwinian. With a fine new theory of chromosomal mutations and the gene to answer every question, Morgan discarded Darwin’s ideas of variation, adaptation and selection.
The influence of the Origin of Species was subsiding elsewhere too. Other geneticists favoured environmentalist ideas of inheritance. Soviet communist governments were generally hostile to the capitalist implications of Darwinian theory in the twentieth century and endorsed a revised form of environmentalism brought into state policy by Trofim Lysenko in the course of the 1930s. Lysenko’s achievement had been to demonstrate the adaptation of wheat to prevailing climate conditions (‘vernalization’, in which the seeds were exposed to cold so that they would germinate earlier the following year). Lysenko claimed this property could be inherited and thus new breeds of wheat could be produced suited to the short growing season in Russia. Stalin adopted Lysenko’s findings, forbade alternative genetic research and instigated a purge of leading geneticists, notably Sergei Chetverikov and Nikolai Vavilov. Some fled to the West, such as N. W. Timoffeef- Ressovsky and Theodore Dobzhansky, and there contributed extensively to the rise of new genetic ways of thought. Others simply disappeared. Under this regime, reports of amazing (and impossible) agricultural successes were issued until the middle years of Khrushchev’s power, when Lysenko was denounced by the physicist Andrei Sakharov. It was the mid-1960s before Russian science gradually opened up to Darwinian ideas of evolution and the new genetics.
By the 1930s, in fact, it was difficult to see exactly where Darwin’s theory might still be relevant. Molecular biology was beginning; chemistry and physics were increasingly used to explore the inner structure of living matter; and laboratory techniques were making substantial advances in understanding the workings of the cell and mapping the genetic basis of heredity. Field naturalists felt themselves to be left behind in the academic contests of big biology. From today’s perspective it is almost unimaginable to envisage a world of biological research without the concepts of adaptation and natural selection, the intellectual tools that underpin so much of modern biomedicine, the environmental sciences, theories of human behaviour and psychology. So what might have stimulated a mass revival of Darwinism in the middle years of the century?
Historians agree that three diverging lines of research were forcibly brought together by a group of inspired young naturalists in the 1940s, a group including the writer and biologist Julian Huxley (Thomas Henry Huxley’s grandson), Ernst Mayr, an émigré field naturalist and philosopher-biologist from Germany, Sewell Wright, the American geneticist, George Gaylord Simpson, a vertebrate palaeontologist and
G. Ledyard Stebbins, an up-and-coming botanist and geneticist. The story of twentieth-century Darwinism lies with these figures who struggled to give it new meaning and integrate it with cutting-edge experimental disciplines. Putting the situation somewhat starkly, the field and observational naturalists who continued to feel themselves directly connected to Darwin’s own work had to reinvent themselves. Although they scarcely intended this to coincide with any other event, the ‘modern synthesis’ was in place just in time for lavish centenary celebrations of the publication of the Origin of Species in Chicago in 1959.
An important first step was the reconciliation of Darwin’s original proposals with early twentieth-century genetics. In effect, it was necessary to turn the external process of animal and plant evolution into changes in the frequencies of genes. Repeated small mutations in the chromosomes were consequently reinterpreted as building up the fund of variability needed for the raw material of selection. Every trait, it was now realized, exhibited a continuous range of variation, so that in a large population there would be plenty of differences circulating through the gene pool on which selection could work. One of the leading figures in this movement was the Cambridge statistician Ronald Aylmer Fisher, who created a mathematical model to show how the frequency of a favourable gene could increase in a population. Fisher devoted a significant portion of his resulting textbook to discussing the human implications: inspired by Pearson he was an ardent eugenicist as well as a liberal Christian who claimed to see God’s hand in biological progress. Another significant figure was J. B. S. Haldane, a larger-than-life individual who contributed notably to British public education in the inter- war period. Like others at the time, Haldane looked enthusiastically to Marxism. He campaigned against Fisher and eugenics. Haldane ultimately resigned his professorship at University College London in protest at Second World War militarism and went to teach in India.
The man who turned it all into a theory of population genetics was Sewell Wright at the University of Chicago. By 1920 Wright had developed a powerful mathematical procedure to explore the flow of genes in small populations of laboratory guinea pigs and hooded rats. He investigated natural populations in the 1930s and proposed that similarly small groups in the wild must be subject to what he called ‘genetic drift’. Wright’s metaphors of an adaptive landscape with mountain peaks and valleys proved an effective way of thinking about the extension or contraction of small knots of particular variations inside a larger population, each little group ready to rise or fall in numbers according to changing conditions. Wright’s work was made more widely available through successive editions of Theodore Dobzhansky’s landmark textbook, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937).
Inspired by the fresh ideas in population biology, Ernst Mayr settled down at Harvard University to integrate his ornithological field studies with genetics. Of all the biological thinkers of the twentieth century, Mayr was perhaps unique in his grasp of both practical detail and philosophical vision. Like Darwin, he concluded that a new species might develop if a variant group of organisms was geographically isolated in some way from its parent population. Dobzhansky added to Mayr’s proposals by suggesting that there were probably other isolating mechanisms as well, such as behavioural characteristics or different breeding times, all of which would prevent two or more populations from merging. At the same time, G. G. Simpson reinterpreted the fossil record, smoothing out its stops and starts to accommodate the idea of continuous variation. He argued that transitional forms would be rare and therefore infrequently preserved, giving to the fossil record a false appearance of sudden big changes. Then Stebbins showed how a plant’s occasional doubling and trebling of the chromosomes could explain the sudden origin of dramatically different species in the plant world. All three managed to unite the apparent discontinuities of the living world with a genetically-aware reinterpretation of Darwin’s small and gradual steps. Julian Huxley brought them all together in a popular book published in 1942 called Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.
The only thing this group did not have was proof. Ever resourceful, and in much the same way as Morgan had found a Nobel prize in fruit flies, the newly reconstituted Darwinians turned with delight to the Galápagos finches and then the peppered moth, Biston betularia. The Galápagos finches subsequently became the best-known example of evolution in the world – not through renewed attention to Darwin’s writings, it must be said, but through the work of David Lack, a schoolteacher and amateur ornithologist.
Lack had come to Julian Huxley’s attention in 1938 and visited the Galápagos Islands soon afterwards to observe finch behaviour for an entire breeding season. After ten years’ further work in museums, he concluded that the beaks held the key to their evolution. Each species had become adapted to a particular foodstuff, thereby allowing diversification into many different niches. His book, Darwin’s Finches (1947), described the birds as an example of evolution in action. Featuring in countless biology textbooks, nature documentaries and popular evolutionary accounts, ‘Darwin’s finches’ rapidly became synonymous with the new Darwinism. The work carried out by Peter and Rosemary Grant from the 1970s in the Galápagos Research Station still provides the most influential field study of evolution ever conducted.
The peppered moth was equally successful. It became an iconic example of natural selection just in time for the 1959 centenary celebrations of the Origin of Species, although the case afterwards became surrounded by unsubstantiated accusations of fraud. The study was made in Britain by Bernard Kettlewell under the guidance of the pioneer Oxford University population biologist Henry Ford. The moth itself could hardly have seemed a better demonstration organism. In nature it exists in two forms, one a speckled black and white, the other a black mutation, called melanic. On ordinary oak trees, the first form is almost invisible. This advantage is reversed in polluted industrial areas where the black form is better camouflaged on darkened tree trunks. Kettlewell released quantities of both sorts of moth in two wooded sites, one near Manchester, where the trees were blackened by soot, the other in clean countryside in Dorset. He demonstrated that birds ate the most visible form, thereby operating a Darwinian selective pressure that allowed one kind of moth to survive and increase in number at the expense of the other. It categorically showed that selection could alter the frequency of particular genes (in this case the melanic gene) in a population. One summer, the famous animal behaviourist Niko Tinbergen spent a few days with Kettlewell filming wild birds picking the moths from a tree trunk. Now a natural history film classic, the old black and white film was shown on early television screens, a perfect way to display black and white moths against their black and white backgrounds. In recent years, government-controlled reductions in pollution have reduced the black form in Britain to the point that biologists now find it difficult to repeat Kettlewell’s observations.
A huge step in the unification of the biological sciences had been achieved. The modern synthesis transformed the old notions of selection and adaptive change and breathed fresh life into Darwin’s ideas. Biologists also took a new interest in Darwinian themes that emphasized observation and practical field studies. Many biologists at this interesting time looked back directly to Darwin himself. The centenary of publication of the Origin of Species, which was coincidentally also the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, was an occasion for much celebration and revivalism amidst the rhetoric of future scientific advance. Some biologists wrote biographies of Darwin, others edited for publication his Beagle journals and notebooks, and others again made moves to preserve his house as a memorial and museum in which the significance of modern evolutionary science could be appreciated and explained. In their eyes, evolutionary biology was at last a recognizable scientific discipline. Darwin was elevated into its founding father.
The new generation of Darwinians also addressed the question of human ethics. Most of them were convinced that science confirmed the absence of any underlying plan or divine purpose built into the universe. G. G. Simpson, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, pointed out that it was impossible to regard the human species as the predetermined goal of random shifts in gene frequencies. Amusingly, he said that mankind was the result of a process that never had him in mind. The modern synthesis, in fact, was much less readily compatible with spiritual belief than any previous, more flexible, theistic evolutionary theory. From the 1950s, there was an increasing tendency for practising scientists to be disbelievers, at the very least when inside their labs. The essence of modern science, it was commonly said, was to seek answers in the world of evidence and proof, not to call on the divine or other supernatural factors.
A few found spiritual consolation in continued ideas of social progress. Scientific naturalism could take on the mantle of a religion, as once preached by Thomas Henry Huxley in his ‘lay sermons’ or articulated by philosophers William James and Charles S. Pierce. The evolutionary mysticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man (1959) was also popular among those seeking spiritual guidance in evolutionary processes. The world of living beings, he suggested, was enclosed by a sphere of mental unity, called ‘Noosphere’. This predated the idea of cyberspace by some twenty years, and Teilhard de Chardin is primarily remembered now for influencing the engineers of silicon valley. Julian Huxley was generally sympathetic to these views and promoted a philosophy of humanism, rejecting the idea of a transcendental creator, but drawing on older nineteenth- century idealism to stress the human race’s responsibility to foster moral progress. As it happened, most biologists were willing to believe that humans were still special. Human intelligence, adaptability and social characteristics were still seen as indications of a higher level of development than in animals. Humanists felt that the human race was capable of moving onwards from biology to make a better world based on pacifist, altruistic social policies.
After the brutality of the Second World War, however, there seemed little point in glossing over the harsher side of animal behaviour. The founder of modern ethology, Konrad Lorenz, demonstrated the innate aggressive behaviour of animals and warned that humans, too, were endowed with similarly destructive basic instincts. The message was reiterated by Robert Ardrey in his work on the ‘territorial imperative’ and by Desmond Morris in a widely distributed popular text, The Naked Ape (1967). Soon the terminology of primate studies was spreading from science into common public usage. Advertising moguls enjoyed a particularly inventive time with their slogans about ‘alpha-males’. To be human, it seemed, was to be brutish.
Such an image of human nature as fundamentally selfish and aggressive did not go unchallenged during the peace demonstrations and love-ins of the 1960s. The grand old man of palaeo-anthropology, Louis Leakey, encouraged three female scientists to pursue actual observations of apes in the wild, the first time that this had ever been achieved to modern scientific standards. He placed Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream Reserve, near Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, to observe chimpanzees, and Biruté Galdikas in Sumatra for the orang-utans. Last, he put Dian Fossey to work in a gorilla reserve in Rwanda from 1967. These studies of apes in their natural habitat showed them generally to be family-oriented, loyal to their troop, and not aggressive unless frightened. As a result, there was renewed willingness to take seriously a closer mental and emotional relationship between apes and mankind. With wide connections to the public through magazines like National Geographic, these alert observational scientists were also among the first to stimulate political awareness of conservation issues.
Tension between such notions has never subsided. Discussion of the thin boundary lines between animals and mankind, between science and human values, has most recently taken its cue from Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) in which animal and human behav- iour patterns are located in the genetic framework of each species. Wilson argued that all organisms are genetically programmed to guarantee the most reproductive benefit to themselves: males tend naturally to spread their ample sperm around as far as possible and females to conserve their valuable eggs. Males do not stick around to look after the baby, females search for the best, most committed father. All behaviour patterns could be linked more or less back to the genes’ drive to survive. In claiming this, Wilson did not deliberately intend to suggest that human lives are completely biological, although he did say that ‘the gene holds culture on a leash’. Nor did he propose that humans are little more than a bundle of genes. He agreed that societies are mostly constrained by political institutions, economic limitations and social convention.
Yet to critics, this deterministic approach, rooted in an unyielding science of genes, is difficult to distinguish from dangerously ideological uses of genetics. Sociobiology could easily be used to support claims for inbuilt differences in intellectual ability, ethnicity or gender roles. Religious thinkers resent the notion that moral values apparently derive from biological utility: that a mother cares for her child in order to ensure that her genes are successfully passed to the next generation. Left-wingers fear that such ideas might be taken up by the political right to justify conventions like the nuclear family or to avoid civic improvements and medical care because it seems easier (and cheaper) to believe in unalterable, hereditary, biological traits. People from the humanities decry a continuing reduction of human attributes to mere biology. This cultural and scientific argument continues unabated through the twenty-first century.
In 1976 a widely read text by Richard Dawkins called The Selfish Gene brought many of these issues to the fore. Dawkins explained the world of genes metaphorically, as if every living organism, every songbird or chimpanzee, was merely the gene’s way of making another gene. Behaviour patterns were little more than useful devices for ensuring the reproduction and spread of genes in a population. His lively terminology caught the imagination. Like Wilson, Dawkins has often been criticized. Whipped up by sensationalist headlines in the mass media, the public now tends to think that science proposes a gene for every human characteristic (an ‘intelligence’ gene, a ‘homosexual’ gene, an ‘adulterous’ gene) in the same way that there might be a gene for cystic fibrosis. Geneticists consequently find it hard to make clear that no single gene for anything ever exists, and that individual personalities or medical conditions rest in the interaction and expression of many genes via proteins in the cells and in relation to local environmental conditions, social structures and upbringing.
Few of these modern debates over gorillas, selfish genes and biologically programmed behaviour patterns, however, have generated religious controversy about the accuracy of the actual knowledge being produced. Even Pope John Paul II issued a letter in 1996 to Catholics acknowledging that the result of scientific work carried out independently all over the globe ‘leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis’. The most unexpected of all recent developments, therefore, is the resurgence of creationist literature and proliferation of a whole new range of anti- Darwinian theologies in the West. Possibly it is one further expression, among many, of a cultural reaction to the relaxation of moral codes since the 1960s and 1970s. New creationists perhaps blame the rise of secular ideas for modern decadence and the loss of traditional family values. To attack evolutionary theory would therefore be to attack both a symbol and the alleged cause of the rot. Seen from outside, the tone of this movement is proscriptive and conservative. Whereas the anti-Darwinians of the nineteenth century never managed to bond in concentrated battlelines, and lost much of their effectiveness as a consequence, the fundamentalists of late twentieth-century America have acquired an impressively united voice and high public profile.
Many of these modern movements echo themes brought out at the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, where politicians and theologians attempted to drive Darwinism from public education. The legislatures of six southern states had already proposed anti-evolution laws during 1923 when two lesser bills were passed. In 1925 the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill making it a crime ‘to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal’. When the American Civil Liberties Union declared that it would defend any Tennessee schoolteacher willing to defy the law, John Scopes, a young science teacher from Dayton, accepted. The trial itself began as a publicity stunt, but soon gave the lawyer Clarence Darrow an opportunity to expose biblical literalism as foolish and harmful, principally through the answers he elicited from William Jennings Bryan, a champion of Christian values and leading opponent of evolution in schools. Most neutral observers declared the trial a draw. In 1960 the Scopes trial was turned into a popular film, Inherit the Wind, after which millions of Americans abandoned religious opposition to evolutionary theory.
The rise of similar creationist ideas today can perhaps partly be explained by the securities it offers in an increasingly turbulent world, fed by frustration at the growing divide between experts and populace, and a dislike of science performed behind closed doors. Deriving mostly from the prolific writings in the 1930s of the Seventh Day Adventist science teacher George McCready Price and revived in the 1960s by Henry Morris, a Southern Baptist preacher, ‘young earth’ creationists, ‘flood geologists’ and other believers in the literal truth of the Bible assert that the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that the fossil record was laid down all at once during Noah’s flood. As Morris indicated in his Genesis Flood (1961), the Bible provides insufficient time for any kind of evolution. Morris’s views are today promoted by the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, from whence he and his followers denounce Darwin and offer a scientific-sounding alternative called creation science, publicized widely through school textbooks, brochures and revivalist meetings, and apparently supported by scientific ‘facts’ such as the finding of pieces of the Ark. Much of the distribution of information nowadays is electronic, for creationists have capitalized on the power of the internet to press home purported flaws in Darwin’s reasoning and undermine modern Darwinism – a promotional device that reaches far more people than the academic profession’s densely worded publications. Even though religious instruction is barred from American public schools, creationists make a constitutional case for including creation science on the American school science syllabus. Darwin’s theory is only a theory, they say. Creation theory is claimed to be equally valid.
Influenced by the ‘religious right’ of Ronald Reagan’s America, in 1981 the states of Louisiana and Arkansas passed bills to enforce ‘equal-time’ treatment in schools. Once again the American Civil Liberties Union brought an action against the Arkansas Board of Education that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Steven Jay Gould, one of the scientists called to serve as an expert witness for Darwinism in that case, felt himself almost to be appearing in a replay of the original 1925 court scenes in Dayton. His deposition makes fascinating reading. In a magazine article afterwards Gould reflected on the mismatch of definitions that occurred between judge and scientist:
We define evolution, using Darwin’s phrase, as ‘descent with modification’ from prior living things. Our documentation of life’s evolutionary tree records one of science’s greatest triumphs, a profoundly liberating discovery on the oldest maxim that truth can make us free. We have made this discovery by recognizing what can be answered and what must be left alone. If Justice Scalia heeded our definitions and our practices, he would understand why creationism cannot qualify as science. He would also, by the way, sense the excitement of evolution and its evidence; no person of substance could be unmoved by something so interesting.1
The court’s final decision, made in 1987, was to ban the teaching of any creation science in publicly financed schools in Arkansas on the grounds that creationism was a religious concept and not a scientific one. Daunted but not neutered, many creationists have since gone on to establish independent Christian schools and colleges where creation science can be taught.
Today, across the United States, heated debates and lawsuits reflect rising support for the provision of alternatives to evolution in the state educational system. The Kansas Board of Education, for example, in August 1999, decided to make evolution optional in the criteria it issues for science teaching. Hence evolution is no longer covered in standardized tests for Kansas schoolchildren. Kentucky has deleted the word ‘evolution’ and substituted ‘change over time’. These shifts in public opinion deeply worry scientists. Certainly, many scientists feel that an understanding of religious traditions has a relevant place in every child’s education, not least in lessons on history and the development of diverse modern societies. Yet this is different from advocating a devotional standpoint as a real truth in science classes.
Even though the concept of the separation of Church and State lies at the heart of the American constitution, the United States is a uniquely Protestant country where the Bible still plays a crucial role. Partisans for a new variant, called Intelligent Design, argue persuasively for presenting this as an alternative to Darwinism in school classrooms. Intelligent Design does not generally refute evolution but suggests that some biological processes are far too complex to have originated in the step-by-step manner proposed by Darwin. Recalling many of the controversies immediately following publication of the Origin of Species, the biochemist Michael J. Behe proposes in his book Darwin’s Black Box (1996) that protein reactions must have been designed by a superior intelligence. This is basically the old argument as put forward by William Paley or Asa Gray, brought up to date with new examples.
The new millennium has consequently begun with Westerners as divided as ever over the implications of a natural origin of species. Despite these challenges, the modern synthesis stands firm at the heart of biological science. No biologist would dream of disregarding the evidence. As Theodore Dobzhansky said in 1973, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’.
History seldom tells of simple triumphant advances, but it can tell of the extraordinary impact of a single book. While many of the ideas and themes addressed by Darwin in 1859 were not new, and his writing style was mild in the extreme, the Origin of Species was clearly a major publishing event that spectacularly altered the nature of discussion on the question of origins. This interplay between one man, one book, and the diverse social, religious, intellectual and national circumstances of his audiences and the broader currents of historical change is what made Darwin’s Origin such a remarkable phenomenon in its own day and which continues to absorb and instruct modern readers. Old texts are frequently remade by new forms of attention, and it appears that Darwin’s Origin was both resilient in the survival of its main proposals and malleable in the hands of its devotees. His book can therefore be seen, not as a solitary voice deliberately defying the traditions of the Church or the moral values of society, but as one of the hubs of transformation in Western thought.