THE RETURN OF CHARLES DARWIN VIA POP!

Evolution was controversial well before Darwin published the Origin. Even onboard the Beagle Darwin clearly saw that evolution would undermine the simple Biblical notion of ‘the stability of species’.

But the notion of ‘stable’ or immutable species was always more than just a scientific idea. It was a scientific idea that lent primary support to the notion of a stable natural, religious, and social order. Thus, once Darwin published his closely reasoned defense of evolution, an entire cultural perspective was challenged. Immediate impacts were felt in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States – where controversies have continued to this day.

But the implications of evolution have been so consequential for belief systems and for diverse visions of human society that responses comprise a prodigious, international, cross-cultural assemblage. Too often both the breadth, complexity and the richness of these controversies have been ignored. Too often the cultural impact has been simplistically understood as a binary and parochial conflict between evolutionists and one form of Christianity or the appropriation of Darwin by “negative eugenicists” or totalitarians. Given these responses, it seems arguable that Darwin’s theory may well be the one scientific idea that modern humanity has taken most seriously.

In the Responses section we will seek to present a wide spectrum of the world’s religious and political reactions to evolution, from left to right, from atheist to devout, from European to Asian. At launch, we begin with a short but unusual offering from the AMNH Library’s holdings, a pamphlet by William Jennings Brian that throws light on the political underpinnings of his religious opposition to evolution.

A major scientific theory does not stand permanently as a fixed Law of Nature. A robust theory changes and grows, serving as a framework for debate, while maintaining its continuity and identity. By these criteria, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, having been vigorously debated and richly elaborated since 1859, counts as a very strong theory indeed.

We will first treat the immediate contributions in Darwin’s day – the formation of a nucleus of primary supporters cultivated before the publication of Origin (T.H. Huxley, J.D. Hooker) as well as Alfred Russel Wallace’s distinctive brand of Darwinism. In the earliest decades significant scientific challenges were raised regarding blending inheritance, the age of the earth, the role of isolation and patterns of speciation. The debate was enriched by a growing paleontological record, including hominid fossils. In France, Germany (notably Ernst Haeckel), Italy, Russia and the United States distinctive national evolutionary and anti-evolutionary schools emerged. Certainly, evolution as historic process became well established, but Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection was seriously challenged.

By the end of the 19th century numerous questions were raised and historians speak of an “eclipse of Darwin”, a trend strengthened in the short run by the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance. But by the 1920s the evidence of cytogenetics (T.H. Morgan’s school) seemed to reconfirm Darwin’s emphasis on small individual variants as the raw material for selection. By the 1930s the evolutionary synthesis, which cast Mendelism into mathematical models (R.A. Fisher, S. Wright, J.B.S Haldane) and sought to unite the evidence of genetics (T. Dobzansky), systematics (E. Mayr), paleontology (G. Simpson), ecology, and biogeography into a coherent story held together by the reinterpretation Darwin’s central ideas into modern terms.