University of Iowa

From the SelectedWorks of David J Depew

2010

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting David J Depew, University of Iowa

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ArticleTitle Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting Article Sub-Title Article CopyRight Springer Science+Business Media B.V. (This will be the copyright line in the final PDF) Journal Name Science & Education Corresponding Author Family Name Depew Particle Given Name David J. Suffix Division Organization University of Iowa Address Iowa City, IA, USA Email [email protected]

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Abstract This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: the Wilberforce- Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-century debates about the heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin’s Origin of Species; adaptationism and its critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, technical- scientific, and personal-religious spheres of discourse. Over most of them falls the shadow of eugenics. The main lesson is that the history of Darwinism cannot be told except by showing the mutual influence of the different norms of discourse that obtain in the personal, technical, and public spheres. Nor can evolutionary biology successfully be taught to citizens and citizens-to-be until the fractious intersections between spheres of discourse have been made explicit. In the course of showing why, I take rival evolutionary approaches to be dynamical historical research traditions rather than static theories. Accordingly, I distinguish Darwin’s version of Darwinism from its later transformations. I pay special attention to the role Darwin assigned to development in evolution, which was marginalized by twentieth-century population genetical Darwinism, but has recently resurfaced in new forms. I also show how the disputed phrases “survival of the fittest” and “social Darwinism” have shaped personal anxieties about “Darwinism,” have provoked public opposition to teaching evolution in public schools, and have cast a shadow over efforts to effectively communicate to the public largely successful technical efforts to make evolutionary inquiry into a science. Footnote Information

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Queries and/or remarks Section/paragraph Details required Author’s response Dembski (1995) has been changed to Dembski (1999) so that this citation matches the list. Barkow et al. (1992) has been changed to Barkow et al. (1991) so that this citation matches the list. Di Gregorio (1990) has been changed to Di Gregorio and Gill (1990) so that this citation matches the list. Stauffer (1973) has been changed to Stauffer (1975) so that this citation matches the list. Browne (1995) has been changed to Browne (1996) so that this citation matches the list. Desmond (1989) has been changed to Desmond (1989a, b) so that this citation matches the list. Beer (2000) has been changed to Beer and Kegan (2000) so that this citation matches the list. Richards (2008) has been changed to Richards (2008a, b) so that this citation matches the list. Please check the page range in reference citation Secord (2000) in text. Desmond (1994/1997) has been changed to Desmond (1994/1996) so that this citation matches the list. Weismann (1893) has been changed to Weismann (1893a, b) so that this citation matches the list. Numbers (1996) has been changed to Numbers (2006) so that this citation matches the list. References Darwin (1859), Gilbert (2008), Jablonka (1995), Ruse (2009), Kohn (2009), Lucas (1978), Lennox (1994), Ghiselin (1979), Hofstadter (1944), Bannister (1979), Crook (2000), Moore (1979), Desmond and Moore (2009), Richards (2009), Mayr and Provine (1981), Gilbert (2008) are cited in text but not provided in the reference list. Please provide references in the list or delete these citations. References Adams (1994), Chambers (1994), Darwin (1964), Desmond (1997), Desmond and Moore (2008), Fisher (1930), Gould and Lewontin (1979), Gray (1963), Kohn (1985, 2007), Mayr (1988), Moss (2003), Richards (1992, 1997), Ruse (1991), Ruse and Richard (2009), Spencer (1865), West-Eberhard (2003), Wilson (1975) are given in list but not cited in text. Please cite in text or delete from list. Please update the complete details of the references Brook et al. (2001), Halliday (1971), Kohn (2007), Smocovitis (2000). Please check and confirm the updated reference Dennett (1997). Please check and confirm the edit in reference Lewontin (2009). Please provide editor names for this reference Spencer H (1852).

Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Sci & Educ DOI 10.1007/s11191-009-9202-x 1

2 Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical 3 Recounting

4 David J. Depew Author Proof

5 6 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

7 Abstract This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research 8 tradition: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-centuryPROOF debates about the 9 heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural 10 selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and 11 eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin’s Origin of Species; adaptationism and its 12 critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and 13 current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public 14 memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, 15 technical-scientific, and personal-religious spheres of discourse. Over most of them falls the 16 shadow of eugenics. The main lesson is that the history of Darwinism cannot be told except by 17 showing the mutual influence of the different norms of discourse that obtain in the personal, 18 technical, and public spheres. Nor can evolutionary biology successfully be taught to citizens 19 and citizens-to-be until the fractious intersections between spheres of discourse have been made 20 explicit. In the course of showing why, I takeECTED rival evolutionary approaches to be dynamical 21 historical research traditions rather than static theories. Accordingly, I distinguish Darwin’s 22 version of Darwinism from its later transformations. I pay special attention to the role 23 Darwin assigned to development in evolution, which was marginalized by twentieth-cen- 24 tury population genetical Darwinism, but has recently resurfaced in new forms. I also show 25 how the disputed phrases ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ and ‘‘social Darwinism’’ have shaped 26 personal anxieties about ‘‘Darwinism,’’ have provoked public opposition to teaching evo- 27 lution in public schools, and have cast a shadow over efforts to effectively communicate to 28 the public largely successful technical efforts to make evolutionary inquiry into a science. 29

30 1 Spheres of Discourse

31 Scholars of the communicative practices of modern societies distinguish three previously 32 conflated butUNCORR now well-differentiated ‘‘spheres’’ in which discursive interaction takes

A1 D. J. Depew (&) A2 University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA A3 e-mail: [email protected] 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

33 place. Each sphere is governed by characteristic norms of appropriate exchange and 34 success. Dialogue (‘‘turn-taking’’) governs the personal or interpersonal sphere, debate the 35 public or political sphere, and demonstration the technical or scientific sphere (Goodnight 36 1982). Typically, controversy about an issue grows more intense as it approaches the 37 boundaries between spheres. It can turn into a conflagration when the boundaries are 38 crossed. Of no issue is this truer than of evolutionary theory, especially the brand of 39 evolutionary theory associated with the name of Charles Darwin. 40 Darwinians have labored long and hard to safely confine their inquiries to experts who 41 aspire to take what they regard as their rightful place among other scientists (Ruse 1999). Author Proof 42 Like physicists and chemists, they hope didactically to inform the public of their results 43 without a lot of back talk. But no such luck. The public debates and personal anguish that 44 greeted the Origin of Species have never ceased from the November day in 1859 when it 45 was first published to the present. ‘‘It’s just a theory,’’ say politicians who court the votes of 46 citizens who then as now see Darwinism as a direct threat to their personal religious beliefs 47 and who wish to remove it, or at least its monopoly, from schoolrooms. ‘‘Of course it’s just 48 a theory,’’ reply evolutionary biologists. ‘‘So is quantum mechanics or plate tectonics.’’ 49 Neither party pauses to notice that ‘‘theory’’ may have different meanings in personal, 50 public, and technical spheres of discourse, and may vary from discipline to discipline 51 within the technical sphere itself. PROOF 52 In this essay, I will review the history of Darwinism with an eye to recounting recurrent 53 tensions between Darwinism as a scientific research tradition, as a loaded term that cir- 54 culates in the public sphere in connection with politics, law, and education, and as a word 55 that evokes strong personal reactions about life-guiding values. I will take as my guide the 56 historiography of Darwinism that has flourished along with other areas of science studies in 57 recent decades. I will pay special attention to a number of debates about Darwinism that 58 have left a lasting impression on public memory precisely because their participants are 59 thought to have transgressed discursive boundaries: the exchange between Thomas Henry 60 Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in 1860; the 1894 debate between 61 Herbert Spencer and August Weismann, the father of neo-Darwinism, about the heritability 62 of acquired characteristics; the Scopes trial of 1925; the misperformance of Julian Huxley, 63 Thomas Henry’s grandson, at the DarwinECTED centennial of 1959; the bitter debate in the 1970s 64 about Sociobiology and later Evolutionary Psychology; and the recent dust-up about 65 Intelligent Design. My aim throughout will be to throw light on overly heated Darwinian 66 controversies in the hope of helping cool them down.

67 2 Natural History, Evolution, Darwinism

68 It is important to clarify key terms and concepts before proceeding. 69 First, it should be recognized that evolutionism (transmutation of species and higher 70 taxa) is only one interpretive framework for natural history. Some other frameworks are the 71 Aristotelian notion that species are eternal and the wide array of creationist accounts of 72 organic kinds. It might be thought that creationism is exclusively a product of Judeao- 73 Christian-Islamic thought. But there is some reason to think that there were ancient Greek 74 creationists as well, and that Aristotle was consciously reacting to them (Sedley 2007). 75 Second, DarwinismUNCORR names only one of several research traditions within the evolu- 76 tionary branch of natural history. Darwinism has three distinctive aspects, all of which 77 were already present in the Origin: (1) The descent of all organisms on earth and the kinds 78 into which they fall—species, genera, families, classes, and so forth—from a single 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

79 common ancestor (‘‘unity of descent’’); (2) the gradual transformation of sub-specific 80 ‘‘varieties’’ and ‘‘races,’’ as Darwin called them in his subtitle, into true species; and (3) 81 adaptive natural selection, a process Darwin identified as the pre-eminent but not the only 82 cause of transmutation of species and common descent (his co-discoverer, Alfred Russel 83 Wallace, was inclined to think it the only cause). The effect of the Origin was to shift 84 professional and much of public opinion away from creationism toward common descent 85 (Waters 2009). It is crucial to point out, however, that this was as much a victory over 86 earlier evolutionists as it was a challenge to creationists. Most evolutionists before Darwin 87 postulated multiple independent beginning points for life, not unity of descent.1 The ten- Author Proof 88 dency since 1859 in both public and personal sphere discourse to use ‘Darwinism’ and 89 ‘evolutionism’ interchangeably reflects the general acceptance since then that life on earth 90 had one simple beginning point. This was, in some sense, Darwin’s most lasting 91 achievement. Still, this does not mean that other evolutionary traditions were not already 92 up and running prior to 1859 or afterwards were unable to adjust to Darwinism. On the 93 contrary, rival evolutionary research traditions have been able now and again to put 94 Darwinism on the defensive by reframing themselves in ways that acknowledge unity of 95 descent, but challenge natural selection, gradualism, or both. 96 We can identify three non-Darwinian approaches to evolution. 97 At the end of the eighteenth century the aged Immanuel KantPROOF reacted strongly against 98 the evolutionary speculations of his former pupil Johann Gottfried Herder (Zammito 2002). 99 Even his authority, however, did not prevent Herder’s intuition that Mother Nature is like a 100 womb, giving birth to new kinds in a way that parallels the ontogeny of individual 101 members of those kinds, from entering into the foundation of German evolutionary thought 102 and giving it its characteristic focus on embryology. 103 Meanwhile, there were Lamarckian evolutionists before Darwin and neo-Lamarckian 104 evolutionists after him. They took themselves to be developing Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s 105 hypothesis, first expressed at the end of the eighteenth century, that life evolves progres- 106 sively by an inner drive that fine tunes itself to changing environments by the heritability of 107 characteristics acquired in an organism’s lifetime. Lamarckism is a rival theory of adap- 108 tation to Darwinian natural selection. In Lamarckism, efforts made by organisms to adapt to 109 environmental challenges can be directlyECTED passed on and added up along the way. In natural 110 selection, by contrast, active adapting is more an effect of the process of adaptation than its 111 cause. Adaptations are made out of heritable variations that arise independently of their 112 utility in improving reproductive rates. Over multiple generations, variations that at first 113 merely happen to have a positive effect on reproduction under competitive conditions are 114 gradually shaped into adaptations. Natural selection thus shifts the locus of causality more 115 completely than Lamarckism from inner drives to interactions between organisms and 116 environments. All that remains of inner drives is the inertia-like tendency to reproduce. 117 Post-Darwinian neo-Lamarckians accepted unity of descent, as Lamarck himself did not. 118 But their account of adaptation continued, even exaggerated, his stress on an inner drive 119 toward complexity that is inherent in life itself. Neo-Lamarckians did so in order to discount

1 When multiple starting points are applied to anthropology room is made for treating human races as separate species. This idea played a role in southern defenses of slavery in the run up to the American civil war. Accordingly, Desmond and Moore (2009) have recently argued that the motivational source of Darwin’s insistence on aUNCORR single beginning point for human races was his and his family’s ardent opposition to slavery. The Wedgwood clan, of which Darwin was a scion, was indeed ardently anti-slavery. On the view of these authors, the famous question ‘‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?,’’ asked rhetorically on the pottery medallions representing Africans that were produced and distributed by Darwin’s grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, was now to be backed by Darwin’s claim that humans, and indeed all organisms, have same family tree. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

120 the considerable element of contingency that Darwinian natural selection introduces into 121 evolution’s trajectory. In their view the fact of evolutionary progress was not embedded 122 deeply enough, or at all, into Darwin’s paradigm. 123 Finally, there also arose versions of evolutionary saltationism—from a Latin word 124 meaning ‘‘leaps’’ or ‘‘jumps’’—that put an evolutionary spin on Etienne Geoffroy Ste. 125 Hilaire’s pre-evolutionary ‘‘structuralist’’ view that all of life is based on a single ‘‘unity of 126 plan’’ constantly modified and diversified by developmental reorganization. Darwin took 127 up Geoffroy’s unity of plan, but rejected his saltationism. ‘‘My theory would break down,’’ 128 he wrote, ‘‘if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not Author Proof 129 possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications’’ (Darwin 1859, 130 p. 189). Saltationism went into the late making of nineteenth century ‘‘mutation theory,’’ 131 from which genetics developed. While neo-Lamarckism contests Darwinian natural 132 selection, mutationism contests Darwinian gradualism. 133 The history of evolutionary theory requires keeping Herderian, Lamarckian, Geoffroy- 134 ean, and Darwinian elements separate precisely in order to see the myriad ways in which they 135 have been and continue to be intertwined. In doing so, one must constantly bear in mind that 136 what the term ‘Darwinism’ means in a particular context is deeply affected by what it is 137 contrasted with on that occasion: species fixity? common descent? inner drives? gradualism? 138 There is a good deal of diversity within the Darwinian tradition.PROOF In the course of 139 articulating its selectionist core the Darwinian approach to evolutionary natural history has 140 produced and is still producing a wide variety of distinct research programs. In general, 141 what is most characteristic of the Darwinian research tradition is its proven ability to 142 generate, often in the nick of time, new programs that have succeeded in reducing its initial 143 burden of proof and in solving the problems that it must confront (Depew and Weber 144 1995). The primacy of Darwinism among contemporary evolutionary traditions is justified 145 entirely by its track record. It could falter. That’s one of the reasons it is so interesting. 146 Even more interesting is that so far it has not. 147 The most salient example is the following. Even if they had had access to then scarce 148 data about the history of life, the faithfully Darwinian ‘‘biometricians’’ of the late 149 nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose efforts to mathematize adaptation by 150 natural selection gave Darwinism its firstECTED real foothold in the technical sphere, were not 151 up to the job of explaining speciation. So true is this that by the turn of the twentieth 152 century mutation theory, a saltationist approach to speciation by sudden large genetic 153 mutations, was threatening to consign evolutionary gradualism, and Darwinism with it, to 154 its ‘‘deathbed’’ (Kellogg 1907).2 Within 30 years, however, genetics and natural selection 155 had been unified, taking the former out the exclusive control of mutationists and tying it 156 to gradual changes in the genetic composition of populations brought about largely by 157 natural selection (Provine 1971). Eventually, this unification led to what we may call 158 Darwinism’s ‘‘New Deal:’’ the emergence in the 1940s of what its makers proudly called 159 ‘‘The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis.’’ The Synthesis at last gave Darwinians the 160 standing within professional scientific communities that their ‘‘biometrician’’ predeces- 161 sors had sought, but had compromised by their eugenic enthusiasms (Ruse 1996, 1999). 162 The makers of the Modern Synthesis gained this respect both by dissociating themselves

2 The phrase ‘deathbedUNCORR [Sterbelager] of Darwinism’ was introduced by the German evangelical biology teacher Eberhard Dennert. His 1902 book of that title was translated into English in 1904 (Dennert 1904). It contains most of the anti-Darwinian commonplaces, including the accusation of materialist bias, that still circulate in American anti-evolutionary circles. Kellogg (1907) critically reviews these arguments, but treats saltationist genetic mutationism rather than creationism as a likely alternative. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

163 from eugenics and by identifying their population-based conception of the gene with the 164 scientific prestige of the molecular gene, whose chemical structure was discovered by 165 James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. This theory is enshrined in biology textbooks 166 to this day. 167 At the celebration of the centennial of the publication of the Origin in 1959 hopes ran 168 high that the consensus that had been reached among professional evolutionary biologists 169 would lead at long last to widespread public understanding and acceptance of evolution on 170 largely neo-Darwinian terms (Smocovitis 2000). In spite of an inability to penetrate very 171 deeply into the public mind, these efforts met with some success. In the last quarter of the Author Proof 172 twentieth century, however, developments within genetics, which was assumed in the 1960s 173 to provide an unimpeachable basis for the Modern Synthesis, have increasingly resulted in 174 discoveries that have called its general adequacy into question. The burning question on the 175 occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin is no longer speciation, as 176 it was at the 50th anniversary, but the origin of the basic body plans that mark off the older, 177 deeper divisions in the history of life. Discoveries about the internal dynamics of the 178 genome and its responsiveness to changes in the environment in the developmental cycle 179 have led to reframed discussions of macro-evolutionary processes. Doubts about genetical 180 Darwinism’s ability even to recognize, let alone utilize, an emerging picture of the genome 181 very different from the one that became fixed in textbooks in thePROOF 1960s have led to revived 182 neo-Herderian, neo-Geoffroyean, and neo-Lamarckian styles of thinking about this issue 183 (Gilbert 2008; Goodwin 1994; Jablonka 1995). 184 Just as at the beginning of the twentieth century, rumors of the imminent demise of 185 Darwinism circulate at the dawn of the twenty-first century. These rumors rest on the 186 dubious presumption that the entire Darwinian research tradition stands or falls with the 187 adequacy of the Modern Synthesis. On this presumption Intelligent Design theorists have 188 flooded the public sphere with books, magazine articles, newspaper reports, and websites 189 that cite stresses and strains within current evolutionary theory as strong enough to justify a 190 return to pre-Darwinian styles of thought about living beings (Behe 1996; Dembski 1999). 191 The very idea seems utterly crazy to genocentric Darwinians. They think that their revised 192 formulation of the Modern Synthesis—organisms and traits are for the sake of genes, not the 193 other way around—has actually perfectedECTED it. Now that it has been anchored in the bedrock 194 of molecular genetics, genocentric Darwinians argue, natural selection has shown itself to 195 be powerful enough to explain higher taxa as chock full of species that are themselves chock 196 full of adaptations (Dawkins 1989, 1996). Contemporary Darwinian adaptationists take 197 themselves not only to have consolidated evolutionary science around natural selection 198 working on and for the sake of self-replicating genes, but at last to have brought the human 199 sciences within the charmed circle of the natural sciences. An example is Evolutionary 200 Psychology, a successor research program to 1970s-style Sociobiology. It treats our beliefs 201 and inclinations as expressions of mental modules that independently evolved because they 202 were adapted to the early human environment (Barkow et al. 1991). 203 As we might imagine, adaptationist Darwinians of a more or less genic reductionist cast 204 are as hostile to the new creationists as the new creationists are to them.3 But they are not

3 Intelligent Design proponents will doubtless take offense at my repeated characterization of them as ‘‘new creationists.’’ They do everything they can to separate themselves from the Bible-based ‘‘scientific crea- tionists’’ who precededUNCORR them and so avoid the term ‘creationism’ altogether. Nor, unlike creationists, do they object to Darwinism as ‘‘just a theory.’’ On the contrary, they take natural selection to exist. They simply don’t think that it constitutes anything like a general theory of evolutionary processes, contra today’s triumphalist Darwinians. I have no qualms about so characterizing them, however, since my co-author Bruce Weber and I locate research programs, both evolutionary and non-evolutionary, within larger historical 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

205 much less hostile to technical-sphere developments within evolutionary science itself that 206 stress development, not population genetics, as the causal locus of evolutionary dynamics. 207 These they dismiss as non-Darwinian, as if that settled the matter. The result of this three- 208 way squabble is, on one hand, a huge gap between public and technical sphere discussions 209 of evolution and, on the other, contestation among evolutionists for control of the technical 210 sphere itself. Attuned as they are to the rhetorical norms of public debate, the new crea- 211 tionists are quick to exploit differences among scientists to cast doubt on the efficacy of 212 natural selection and often the reality of evolution itself. 213 The public enactment of this contestation is not a thing of beauty to behold. The new Author Proof 214 creationists take genocentric adaptationists at their word when they claim that their work is 215 the culmination and justification of the entire Darwinian tradition. Richard Dawkins’s 216 notion that we were created by and for the sake of our genes, and not for any higher purpose 217 (Dawkins 1989), leads the new creationists to take Darwinism from start to finish, and not 218 just contemporary hyper-adaptationism, to be little more than a secular religion, and thus 219 undeserving of the protection the courts have accorded it in the public schools. Because the 220 new creationists want to affect educational practices, however, they must recruit 221 large publics to exert political and legal pressure. In the course of doing so, they 222 re-circulate in ‘‘debates’’ about evolution commonplace objections to the Origin that evo- 223 lutionists had resolved to their satisfaction a long time ago—aboutPROOF missing links, for 224 example, or sudden versus gradual morphological change. Lurking not far below the surface 225 of public memory, these commonplaces are easy to invoke and exploit. They are sites where 226 the scar tissue of earlier cultural traumas still irritates the body politic. In this context, 227 emotions springing from personal sphere anxieties spill over into political discourse, 228 challenging the privatization of religious beliefs that characterizes pluralist democracies as 229 well the value-neutrality of scientific expertise, another feature of modern democratic life. 230 To be sure, the Discovery Institute, a prominent new-creationist think tank, takes itself 231 to be sticking up for the value-neutrality of scientific inquiry when it attempts to discredit 232 the testimony of contemporary evolutionary scientists on the ground that they have 233 compromised their empirical value-neutrality through prior commitment to philosophical 4 234 materialism and atheism (Ryland and BeheECTED2004). But its partisans undercut their own

Footnote 3 continued research traditions (Depew and Weber 1995). In this longer perspective, intelligent design theorists are as much in the creationist tradition as was James Hutton, who took his cues from Bible, and their own predecessor, William Paley, who did not. 4 The Discovery Institute’s cover was blown when its so-called Wedge Strategy document was leaked to the internet. It reads in part: If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a ‘wedge’ that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the ‘thin edge of the wedge,’ was Phillip Johnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work (Behe 1996). We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic con- victions.’’ RetrivedUNCORR from http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html, May 21, 2009. In spite of pretenses to the contrary, the new creationists argue entirely within the modes of public sphere discourse, including making debaters’ points and, as this passage shows, conducting public relations campaigns. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

236 argument when they argue that conceptual shifts that would confer standing on 237 explanations appealing to conscious design are as scientific as empirical discovery. On 238 this over-reading of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, philosophy and science 239 would not differ as much as they in fact do. Understandably, their opponents see this 240 line of argument as little more than a political attack on modern science (Mooney 241 2005). 242 Advocates of genocentric Darwinism, meanwhile, tend to operate on the principle that 243 the best defense is a good offense. Typically, they insist not only on the victory of 244 Darwinism over other theories of evolution, but on the near completeness and certainty Author Proof 245 of Darwinism’s most recent version. This claim underestimates the element of contingency 246 of which every informed historian of Darwinism is acutely aware. Still, the fantasy of a 247 final theory has been abundantly in play in recent celebrations of the sesquicentennial 248 of the Origin and bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, provoked no doubt by an acute desire to 249 oppose the wide circulation of new creationist themes in the public sphere (Lewontin 2009, 250 p. 21). Historically considered, however, this is risky behavior. No good theory has ever 251 proven to be anywhere near the end of inquiry. Moreover, genocentric Darwinians do 252 nothing to achieve their goal when they attack the religious and political beliefs of their 253 opponents and sometimes loudly profess the very materialism and atheism of which they 254 have been accused (Dennett 1995; Dawkins 2006). PROOF 255 ‘‘Ultra-Darwinians,’’ as Niles Eldredge has called them (Eldredge and Grene 1992), 256 have been taking to in-your-face rhetoric of this sort ever since they observed what hap- 257 pened when the late Stephen Jay Gould, one of the finest popular science writers ever, let 258 the public in on contemporary discussions among evolutionists. Gould’s accounts of these 259 controversies vividly contrasted with the professions of confident consensus about the 260 Modern Synthesis being projected by other Darwinians (not least in the court testimony 261 some of them offered against neo-creationist efforts to halt, balance, or qualify teaching 262 evolution in the schools). So true is this that Gould was willfully misunderstood by evo- 263 lution’s enemies to be suggesting that Darwinism was in such trouble that it might plau- 264 sibly be abandoned for a new version of the creationism it displaced. Darwinians of all 265 stripes were disgusted by this reaction. Far from coming to his defense, however, many of 266 Gould’s fellow Darwinians attacked himECTED instead. Prominent genocentric adaptationists 267 suggested that Gould, who strongly questioned their own aprioristic adaptationism and 268 gradualism, was not a Darwinian at all. They also implied that he talked too much in public 269 about what the Modern Synthesis could not explain. Some even intimated that he was 270 actually a secret creationist.5 271 Both the new creationists and the new Darwinian atheists inadvertently reveal a certain 272 ‘‘lost-in-time’’ sensibility, as if we were still in the nineteenth, or even the eighteenth, 273 century. The bedrock religious loyalties of the new creationists belie their claims to be 274 speaking as scientists even if they happen to have biology degrees. This fact alone might 275 be enough to discredit neo-creationism if its opponents were not continually fanning the

5 The public dispute between the evolutionary naturalist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Gould got nasty after Gould called Dennett a ‘‘Darwinian Fundamentalist.’’ See Gould (1997a, b) and Dennett (1997), with a reply by Gould. The evolutionary psychologist of language Stephen Pinker joined Dennett in denouncing Gould. See KalantUNCORR et al. (1997), with a reply by Gould. Gould seems to have enjoyed denouncing both of them right back. The ground on which Gould was accused of secret creationism was his ‘‘two magisteria’’ account of the relation between science and religion (Gould 1997c, 1999). They are consistent because as discourses and practices they have so little to do with each other. This concession to religion bothered ‘‘the new atheists,’’ whose view of religion is much more Voltairean in spirit. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

277 flames with their own provocations, provocations that for the most part merely recycle 278 Enlightenment commonplaces. Both sides bear a certain amount of responsibility for 279 sustaining a public debate that should not be happening at all, as well as for screening off 280 from public view the wonderful new discoveries and hypotheses about evolution that are 281 springing up everywhere these days in expert communities. Darwinian reductionists and 282 their religious opposites, I suggest, keep each other in business by blocking the vital flow 283 of technical knowledge into the public sphere. 284 My aim in this essay is to help break that cycle by enlarging the historical per- 285 spective from which evolution must be studied if it is to evade the repetitive and arid Author Proof 286 confrontations whose sorry recent history I have just sketched. To do so, I will go more 287 carefully over the ground of which I have taken an aerial photograph in this section by 288 reviewing the major controversies in which Darwinism has been entangled. For the most 289 part, I will do so by reviewing contemporary scholarly discussions of these contro- 290 versies. There are, I believe, implications for science pedagogy, which I will mention at 291 the end.

292 3 Darwin’s Darwinism: The Origin of Species PROOF 293 Contestation about Darwinism inevitably gathers around the body and soul of Charles 294 Darwin. Because he has for so long served as a cultural icon for both friends and 295 enemies, it is hard to realize that serious study of Darwin’s life and works took off only 296 in the 1960s. Prior to that time Darwin’s positive image—I will explore his negative 297 image in the following section—was pretty much what he himself had made it out to be 298 in the moving Autobiography he addressed to his grandchildren (Barlow 1958). This self- 299 portrait, judiciously censored by his family and selectively amplified by the decorous 300 Life and Letters that his son Francis published in 1887, cast Darwin as the perfect 301 Victorian gentleman. On this reading, Darwin was pained to the core by discoveries that 302 had been forced on him by raw empirical facts that his highly scrupulous moral sense 303 compelled him to make public almost against his will when an article by Wallace 304 proposing something very close to the theoryECTED that he had secretly held for about 20 years 305 came to his attention in 1858. 306 The so-called ‘‘Darwin industry’’ has undertaken a sustained effort to publish the 307 Autobiography as it was written (Barlow 1958), to edit Darwin’s early Notebooks, mar- 308 ginalia, and drafts of what ultimately became the Origin (Barrett et al. 1987; Di Gregorio 309 and Gill 1990; Stauffer 1975), and not least to collect and publish the entire Correspon- 310 dence of Charles Darwin [henceforth CCD]—one of the great, still unfinished projects of 311 late twentieth century scholarship (Burkhardt et al. 1985). This effort has corroborated 312 some parts of the received picture. The first full-length biographies to be written on the 313 basis of these sources have confirmed that Darwin was a perfect gentleman and that he was 314 pained to make public his rejection of the fixity of species. Merely confiding his doubts to 315 his close friend Joseph Hooker caused him to feel as if he were ‘‘confessing a murder’’ 316 (Darwin to Hooker, January 11, 1844; CCD 3:1). 317 Admittedly, the authors of these biographies differ about the source of Darwin’s 318 reluctance to publish until he was ‘‘forestalled,’’ as he put it in a letter to his mentor Charles 319 Lyell, by WallaceUNCORR (CCD 7, 107). Janet Browne, who begins her biography by noting that 320 Darwin was ‘‘born into Jane Austen’s England,’’ finds the roots of his reluctance in the 321 contrast between the wild ideas he had always allowed his mind to entertain, which his 322 Notebooks clearly reveal, and his deep involvement in his family’s highly decorous 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

323 personal-sphere values, first under the influence of his sisters, then of his wife Emma, on 324 whom he doted (Browne 1996, p. 3). Adrian Desmond and James Moore, by contrast, find 325 the sources of Darwin’s inner struggle in a conservative man’s worries about the threat of 326 social and political disorder that abandoning the fixity of species might bring in train 327 (Desmond and Moore 1991). Desmond and Moore’s public-sphere diagnosis is supported 328 by the fact that ‘‘the development hypothesis,’’ as Herbert Spencer called evolutionism in 329 1852, still had about it a whiff of French revolutionary politics and anti-clerical materi- 330 alism. As Desmond has shown, blends of Germanesque, Lamarckian, and Geoffroyian 331 evolutionism had come to Britain in the 1820s, in part by way of one of Darwin’s own Author Proof 332 teachers at Edinburgh, Robert Grant (Desmond 1989a, b). Significantly, Darwin took 333 considerable pains to dissociate himself from Grant when he returned from the Beagle 334 expedition (1831–1836) and set out to become a respected and respectable ‘‘gentleman’’ 335 naturalist like his role model Lyell—who truly did fear the social effects of abandoning 336 species fixity. 337 In recent years, some Darwin experts have downplayed both private and public sphere 338 accounts of ‘‘Darwin’s delay,’’ citing a third, technical-sphere set of considerations. Fear 339 also plays a role in this approach. But it was fear of his fellow naturalists, who might 340 discount his theoretical novelty if his empirical credentials were not in order (Ruse 2009, 341 pp. 7–9). Following Hooker’s advice, accordingly, Darwin setPROOF out in 1846 to classify all 342 the world’s barnacles in order to increase his professional standing and authority before he 343 addressed the larger question. It just happened to take a very long time—nearly 20 years. 344 As soon as the job was done Darwin turned to writing his ‘‘big species book.’’ This was 345 several years before Wallace’s paper arrived. 346 According to David Kohn, the tedious work on barnacles was not just a question of 347 acquiring scientific authority. Darwin had long worried whether there is enough actual 348 variation in species to fuel natural selection and thereby support his theory. He did not 349 cease worrying until he found wide variation in his barnacles. His appreciation of this point 350 also firmed up his conviction that marking off species from varieties is not only arbitrary, 351 but comes at the cost of underestimating variability. ‘‘If the naturalist’s observations be 352 widely extended,’’ Darwin wrote in Origin, ‘‘he will in the end generally be enabled to 353 make up his own mind which to call varietiesECTED and which species; but he will succeed in this 354 at the expense of admitting much variation’’ (Darwin 1859, p. 51). Darwin, Kohn argues, 355 got down to writing as soon as he was confident on this point, which plays a prominent role 356 in the argument of the Origin (Kohn 2009, pp. 102–103). 357 Whether Darwin’s reasons for delay were dominantly personal, public, or technical, one 358 thing is clear. He expected resistance. The underlying reason is that Great Britain had long 359 placed the argument for species fixity by intelligent design at the center of an ideology that 360 was at once political, religious, and scientific. The notion that species are directly created 361 as natural kinds by a designer God was a keystone of the self-proclaimed moderate the- 362 ology and politics which, starting at the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 363 more or less contemporaneous founding of the Royal Society, British elites had hatched up 364 in order to hew to a middle way between the fanatical providentialism of the Puritans, who 365 had killed a king in order to bring about a New Jerusalem, and the deism that Britons 366 suspected of being disguised atheism and tended to associate with France. Accordingly, 367 political correctness and personal piety went hand in hand in a view of God’s care for the 368 world that didUNCORR not lean on latter-day superstitions, but on the revelations and miracles of 369 Jesus to which the Gospels credibly testify as well as on the natural miracle that is the 370 functional organization of living things and their mutually sustaining relationships. No 371 blind material law could have created that organization, argued a long line of broad-church 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

372 ‘‘natural theologians’’ culminating in William Paley’s Natural Theology (Paley 1802). So 373 we can be assured every time we walk through the woods that God has left unmistakably 374 empirical signs (vestiges or footprints) of his benevolent presence in his world. This was to 375 British minds a kind of science (Brooke 1991). To be sure, the Bible was to be taken 376 seriously. But interpretations were not to stray too far from signs of providential care that 377 every person of good will and normal intelligence could observe in the natural world. 378 Revealed religion was to build on natural religion. At the same time faith was to be 379 constrained by natural religion in order to keep it from falling into fanatical Protestant 380 ‘‘enthusiasm’’ and Roman Catholic superstition. Author Proof 381 In effect, Darwin undermined (or perhaps transformed) this broad-church belief system 382 by showing how natural processes might well explain the very features about living things 383 that natural theologians ascribed to an intelligent designer. He felt bad about it because he 384 had internalized a great deal of this belief system himself, especially during his years at 385 Cambridge, when he was ostensibly training to become an Anglican priest. Against this 386 background, it was reasonable for Darwin to fear that no matter how differently or how 387 well he might argue for the transmutation of species his ideas would inevitably be 388 assimilated to opinions that respectable people viewed as the materialist fantasies of 389 demagogues seeking to bestir the working class to do a little evolving itself. He might not 390 have feared social change as much as Desmond and Moore allege,PROOF but he certainly did fear 391 threats to his professional reputation and to his family’s standing. 392 Darwin had already seen what could happen when a well-written summary of Conti- 393 nental evolutionary ideas, combining Lamarckian mechanisms with belief that the 394 ontogeny of each individual recapitulates the history of organic kinds, was published in 395 1844. In spite of his efforts to encase his work in the conventional idea that God could use 396 ‘‘secondary causes,’’ such as the laws of physics, to work his natural miracles, the anon- 397 ymous author of Vestiges of Creation (the Scots journalist and publisher Robert Chambers, 398 as it turned out) met with a negative reception from the clerical-scientific elite, even though 399 his book was greeted with enthusiasm by readers a bit further down the class structure. The 400 most hostile review was written by Darwin’s own mentor at Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick 401 (Sedgwick 1845). 402 The ‘‘sensation’’ provoked by VestigesECTED, its contributing role in deterring Darwin from 403 going public, and the essential correctness of his fear that his view of evolution would be 404 conflated with that of Chambers, with which he decidedly did not agree (Darwin 1859, 405 p. 3)—all these topics have been well canvassed in James Secord’s Victorian Sensation 406 (Secord 2000). Secord’s method of carefully researching how diverse audiences read 407 texts through differently colored lenses and how the process of reception constantly 408 reconstructs the socially distributed meanings of texts themselves sidesteps the efforts of 409 many in ‘‘the Darwin industry’’ to pin down Darwin’s elusive intentions, personal 410 beliefs, and the sources of his creativity in the hope of making him out to be a heroic 411 genius, even a secular saint. Darwin is no less sympathetic a figure when we view him as 412 both inviting and struggling against the constructions that others placed on him and his 413 work. 414 Secord’s stress on reception over intention allows us to see how Darwin’s theory was 415 appropriated by its friends as well as its enemies. Both, as we will shortly see, inter- 416 preted it badly. This pattern, begun during Darwin’s lifetime, continued unabated after 417 his death. AsUNCORR late as the 1960s, accounts of Darwin’s Darwinism were still encrusted 418 with neo-Lamarckian and mutationist elements that had accumulated in the course of a 419 century of controversy, a process that had started when Darwin himself began tinkering 420 with his 1859 text in sometimes backtracking responses to objections that were 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

421 incorporated into later editions.6 Ernst Mayr, one of the fathers of the Modern Evolu- 422 tionary Synthesis and until his death in 2005 Director of Harvard’s Museum of Com- 423 parative Zoology, deserves credit for publishing in 1964 a facsimile edition of the 1st 424 edition of the Origin (Darwin 1859). Using this edition as well as some of the archival 425 material mentioned above, Mayr painted a portrait of Darwin’s theory that focused on its 426 selectionist core, which had been severely compromised by the Lamarckian cast of the 427 widely circulated 6th edition. In the ‘‘Preface’’ to the 1st edition, Darwin makes it clear 428 that when he criticized the notion of a Lamarck-inspired ‘‘impulse … advancing … the 429 forms of life’’ he was referring to Chambers. This idea, he said, ‘‘left the co-adaptations Author Proof 430 of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life untouched and 431 unexplained’’ (Darwin 1859, pp. 3–4). 432 As Mayr ceaselessly pointed out, the simple fact that for Darwin variations are not 433 hatched up because they fill an adaptive need had the effect of shifting the locus of 434 causality from Lamarckian inner drives to environmental forces that impinge on the 435 physical and organic conditions of living beings’ existence (Mayr 1991; Sober 2000; 436 Depew and Weber 1995). Natural selection brings these stresses and strains into dynamic 437 equilibrium by spreading adaptations across co-evolving ecological communities. In this 438 way, Darwin explicitly made the emergence of the functional organization that Paley saw 439 as miraculous analogous to the workings of a Newtonian planetaryPROOF system—the very image 440 of respectable British science by appeal to ‘‘secondary causes’’ (Darwin 1859, p. 491; 441 Schweber 1985; Depew and Weber 1995). This shift enabled Darwin to disavow evolu- 442 tionary teleology in the grand sense of a process that unfolds like an embryo ‘‘from monad 443 to man,’’ as a popular phrase put it, because it is aimed at an overall goal. 444 In other respects, however, Mayr’s portrait of Darwin’s Darwinism was unfortunate. 445 Mayr’s aim was to paint a picture of Darwin’s theory that conflicted as little as possible 446 with the population genetical approach of the Modern Synthesis, thereby slyly and 447 anachronistically projecting the scientific credentials of the latter onto an impossibly 448 judicious and prescient founder. Relying only selectively on the archival material, Mayr’s 449 Darwin remained studiously neutral about the causes of the variation that provides the fuel 450 of natural selection so that, much later, molecular genetics could fill in the details (Mayr 451 1991). In addition, Mayr took DarwinECTED to be a full-fledged ‘‘population thinker,’’ who 452 portrayed natural selection as a creative power that makes adaptive use of the wide array of 453 variation that the reproductive apparatus, however, it works, is always spontaneously 454 generating. Since natural selection is such a resourceful fount of adaptations, Mayr has 455 Darwin resorting to Lamarck-style inheritance of acquired characteristics only occasion- 456 ally and intimates that Darwin, if he were still alive, would have been relieved when 457 August Weismann ruled it out altogether in the late 1880s. In sum, Mayr gives us a 458 Darwinian tradition whose smooth continuity and cumulative improvement affords

6 An illustrative example is Eisely (1958). Darwin never said that Lamarckian adaptation is impossible; it is, he thought, merely less important than natural selection. In response to various objections about the slowness of natural selection, Darwin began assigning use inheritance, a particular sort of Lamarckism, a more dominant role in later editions of the Origin. Conceptually, however, as well as empirically, it was to be subordinated to natural selection. This was a key respect in which Darwin’s theory differed from Spencer’s, withUNCORR which it was often conflated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—in part because Spencer himself assimilated ‘natural selection’ to his own more pronounced Lamarckism. August Weis- mann’s turn-of-the twentieth-century ‘‘neo-Darwinism’’ was called ‘‘neo’’ precisely because it rejected the very possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics of any kind. The persuasiveness of his argument did in Spencerism and made it necessary to reinvent Darwinism. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

459 grounds for the confidence that he, like the philosopher–historian Michael Ruse, is sure can 460 still be placed in it today (Mayr 1991; Ruse 2006, 2008). 461 In recent decades, the industriousness of the Darwin industry has qualified this account, 462 uncovering a picture of Darwin’s Darwinism that contrasts with the genetic Darwinism of 463 the Modern Synthesis more than Mayr suggested. Of particular importance is growing 464 appreciation by scholars of the fact that Darwin’s work was deeply embedded in the 465 developmental or ontogenetic perspective that the makers of the Modern Synthesis set 466 aside when they turned to population genetics, but that is once again coming to the fore. 467 Darwin not only had views about variation and inheritance, but these views were insep- Author Proof 468 arable from his convictions about ontogeny, which in turn were inseparable from his 469 convictions about natural selection and evolution. 470 While he admitted that ‘‘laws governing inheritance are quite unknown’’ (Darwin 1859, 471 p. 13), Darwin was nonetheless what Jonathan Hodge has called ‘‘a lifelong generation 472 theorist’’ (Hodge 1985). The Notebooks and sketches for the Origin reveal that he thought 473 that spasms of variation, albeit neither directed nor directional, occur only when the 474 ontogenetic process is disrupted by environmental stress. He took the difficulties zoo 475 animals have reproducing as an example and as evidence, but thought the problem is more 476 general (Olby 2009, p. 34). All organisms are typically forced to live at the ragged, stress- 477 filled edge of Malthusian resource crises, and so experience similarPROOF difficulties. Still, he 478 thought that over time natural selection could re-equilibrate a disrupted generative process 479 if the relevant variation happens to be available. 480 Darwin also had a view about how re-equibrilation worked. Stress-induced variations, 481 he thought, are normally inherited at the same point in the developmental process at which 482 they first occur. Variations that in the first generation happen to confer ‘‘an advantage in 483 the struggle for life’’ can over time become adaptations because, recurring as they do at the 484 same point in subsequent generations, they repair the very breaches in the developmental 485 process that caused the spasm of variation in the first place. Since large variations disrupt 486 development too much to allow the organism to develop or reproduce, Darwin argued that 487 it is small variations that gradually turn into adaptations, losing their pure fortuity in the 488 process. Adaptations are purposive traits that are built up over trans-generational time by 489 cumulative natural selection. These enableECTED organisms to exploit the new sources of 490 nutrition (and hence of generative power) that environmental change opens up, in the 491 process becoming new varieties, races, and species. The protraction of this process over a 492 very long time, Darwin argued, accounts for the Linnaean classification system by 493 historicizing it. 494 It is true that by the time he wrote the Origin Darwin had come to see that natural 495 selection results only in relative adaptedness, not the perfect adaptedness he had originally 496 projected as a naturalistic alternative to phenomena he took Paley and other natural 497 theologians to have described, even if not explained, correctly (Ospovat 1981). In part 498 through working on the problems of variation in and classification of the barnacles, 499 however, he slowly came to realize that relative adaptedness implies more slack between 500 environmental stress and adaptive response than he had originally supposed, leaving much 501 room for the interposition of chance between the stress-caused generation of variation and 502 the emergence of overall direction in natural history. This realization continued to sink in 503 after the publication of the Origin, moving Darwin toward greater and greater appreciation 504 of the wondersUNCORR of nature precisely because the growing good of the world arise out of sheer 505 contingency. 506 This topic is the main subject of Darwin’s extended, frank, and at times poignant 507 correspondence with the American botanist Asa Gray. Gray endeared himself to Darwin by 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

508 being an insightful reader in a sea of bad interpreters, who in consequence managed 509 Darwin’s case in America with aplomb. In exchanges over several decades, Darwin 510 increasingly expanded the sway of chance between the availability of variation and its 511 utility while Gray tried to leave room for a revised natural theology. Gray understood 512 natural selection well enough to know that by itself it could not guarantee that the history 513 of life has an ultimate purpose. So he supposed instead that God guided the flow of 514 variation on which selection worked (Gray 1860, pp. 413–414). Darwin, for his part, 515 instinctively recoiled from this suggestion: 516 …

Author Proof I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design You lead me 517 to infer that you believe ‘that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines.’ I 518 cannot believe this. I think you would have to believe that the tail of the fantail 519 [pigeon] was led to vary in the number and direction of its feathers in order to gratify 520 521 the caprice of a few men (Darwin to Gray, November 26, 1860, CCD 8, p. 496). 522 Darwin’s repulsion from the anthropocentrism he found in natural theology, used as a 523 trump argument in this passage, had driven much of his thinking since youth. It led him 524 more and more toward seeing the goods adaptive natural selection brings about as local and 525 contingent on a host of circumstances. This growing sense of the wondrous contingency of 526 natural purposiveness has a bearing on the religious indifferencePROOF that his correspondence 527 with Gray betrays, to which he eventually confessed in his Autobiography. Wags have 528 sometimes remarked that Darwin did not have a crisis of faith because there was not all 529 that much to lose in the rationalist broad-church creationism he inherited. True enough. 530 What he did regret losing, however, was the Romantic sensibility that in his youth had 531 served him as his guide to nature’s wonders and, if truth is to be told, as something of an 532 imaginatively and passionately held religion (Barlow 1958; on Darwin’s Romanticism: 533 Manier 1978; Kohn 1996; Sloan 2001; Richards 2002). His love of nature, nurtured in his 534 Shropshire youth by the poetry of Wordsworth and then on his long sea voyage by the 535 writings of the Romantic German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, led Darwin to believe 536 that humans are not diminished by their natural estate (Beer and Kegan 2000). 537 In this respect, whether or not he remained a theist or even a deist of some sort, Darwin 538 was not and for a very long time had not beenECTED an orthodox Christian. He was a card-carrying 539 member of the Romantic movement of his youth. His habitual tendency to attribute to nature 540 the good that others could see only in religion led him to invite readers of the Origin to 541 conceive of natural selection as exercising a benign agency that exceeds that of plant and 542 animal breeders and approaches that of the deity (Depew 2009). Indeed, Darwin’s fasci- 543 nation with decoding complex adaptations—in orchids, for example, and even earth- 544 worms—seems to have grown even keener as he aged (Lennox 1993). The more contingent 545 their existence the more wondrous organic life-forms seemed to him. Accordingly, the loss 546 of intense emotional accompaniments to his intellectual inquiries to which Darwin testified 547 in old age should perhaps be taken the same way we take Wordsworth’s regret that he no 548 longer felt ‘‘the splendor in the grass and the glory in the flower.’’ The very sense of loss 549 testifies to the persistence of a deep-seated attitude toward the world. 550 In spite of his growing sense of the chanciness of the world, however, Darwin stead- 551 fastly clung to his conviction that disruptions of the ontogenetic process are the source of 552 variation and the locus of adaptation. He never came close to separating development from 553 the study ofUNCORR how variation arises and becomes adaptive, as twentieth century population 554 genetical Darwinians did. Nor did his belief that the developmental process conserves a 555 record of past adaptations that are available for new uses in changed environments ever 556 weaken. So true is this that Darwin himself thought it odd that his British reviewers tended 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

557 to overlook the chapter in which he argued that embryology is the richest vein of evidence 558 for evolution (CCD 7, pp. 431–432). Having in Chapter 9 downplayed paleontology 559 because the fossil record is so imperfect—this acknowledged deficiency has been a 560 commonplace thrown in Darwin’s face by opponents ever since—Darwin turned in 561 Chapter 13 to embryology to make his case. The developmental sequence was for him a 562 record left by the process of phylogeny. It may not recapitulate that process in the crude 563 way Chambers and other Lamarckians imagined, as if babies in the womb were succes- 564 sively fish, amphibians, and primates before they are finally human. Nor would it be quite 565 right to say that phylogeny is the mechanical cause of ontogeny, as Haeckel did. But Author Proof 566 recapitulate it did in some way that mirrors the general-to-specific pattern of the Linnaean 567 classification system.7 568 The embryological locus of Darwin’s thought affords useful clues to why the initial 569 reception of the Origin was so vexed. Recent studies of the archival material suggest that, 570 while Darwin strategically addressed the Origin to British public-sphere readers who had 571 been formed by its distinctive tradition of natural theology, his professional life had long 572 been oriented to the embryological researches of French and especially German biologists. 573 There is a link between the Romanticism of Darwin’s youth and his understanding of the 574 German-style embryology on which he placed an evolutionary interpretation (Richards 575 2002). Darwin’s most ardent disciple, the German biologist ErnstPROOF Haeckel, got the point 576 immediately and immediately repatriated it, albeit in crypto-materialist form, as Darwi- 577 nismus (Richards 2008a, b). The comparative anatomist Richard Owen, who was steeped 578 the same tradition, also got the point, saw the threat of materialism, and promptly declared 579 himself Darwinism’s, and indeed Darwin’s, enemy. 580 On the other hand, Darwin’s clerical and semi-clerical mentors, who might plausibly 581 imagine that the Origin was addressed to them, were entirely innocent of the embryo- 582 logical perspective. Not seeing it, they thought Darwin was making chance the sole author 583 of functional organization, all the better to dismiss his book out of hand. Gray, to Darwin’s 584 great relief, saw that this was not true. But as a naturalist he, too, was blind to the 585 developmental side of Darwin, and in consequence was haunted by the problem of whether 586 the element of chance conflicts with overall purposiveness. In some ways Darwin and Gray 587 were arguing at cross-purposes in theirECTED long, warm correspondence. 588 The anti-clerical liberals who were Darwin’s most sympathetic early readers did pick up 589 on Origin’s developmentalism. Indeed, the great novelist George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] 590 reported to her partner, the philosopher-critic George Henry Lewes, that the Origin, which 591 she had begun to read early in 1860, ‘‘expresses thorough adhesion … to the Doctrine of 592 Development’’ (Secord 2000, pp. 512–130). Eliot associated this phrase with her friend 593 Spencer’s progressivist theory of evolution, which preceded Darwin’s by 7 years, and with 594 Chambers’ Vestiges, to which she alludes later in the same letter. It is through the lens of 595 these authors that Darwin influenced Eliot’s own novels. In thinking that Darwin was 596 advancing pretty much the same theory as his evolutionary predecessors, however, Eliot

7 There is considerable debate about this subject today. Robert Richards has argued that Darwin was a strong recapitulationist, and had to be if he was committed to the heritability of variation at the same point in development in which it occurs in the first generation. He even implicates Darwin in the claim that there is an overall teleology that culminates in human moral sense and sensibility (Richards 2002, 2009). This analysis contrastsUNCORR with the received interpretation. According to the latter, Darwin was following the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer’s idea that what gets recapitulated are only the early, common stages of development, not species-specific adult forms. A way of splitting the difference has been proposed by Nyhart (2009). In my view, any solution must preserve the shift away from inner drives that is fundamental to the very concept of natural selection. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

597 missed how differently he had argued for it. In the process she and her circle read the idea 598 of progress too deeply into the idea of natural selection, opening the Origin to the same 599 battery of objections that the clerical and semi-clerical elite were by then accustomed to 600 more or less automatically firing off against evolution. Darwin’s first French translator, 601 Clemence Royer, frustrated Darwin by framing the Origin the same way. It was just what 602 he had feared and hoped he had taken steps to prevent. 603 In spite of strenuous efforts by neo-Darwinians such as Mayr to discount it, liberal 604 developmentalist progressivism persists to this day in the public understanding of 605 Darwinism. I imagine that it was implanted there, however, more through the influence of Author Proof 606 popular works of literature like Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies (1863) than by learned 607 reviews in the quarterly journals or by Eliot’s subtle ‘‘novels for grown-ups.’’ Kingsley, a 608 liberal minister whose public support Darwin appreciated enough to mention it in later 609 editions of the Origin, had great success with a children’s tale in which an orphaned 610 chimney sweep regresses down the evolutionary ladder to share a delightful watery life with 611 other rather embryonic beings, the water babies. The book was a coded protest against 612 industrial air and water pollution. It was also full of overt references to German biologists 613 like Haeckel. Kingsley’s story reveals what middle-class popular culture found thrilling 614 about the idea of evolution. Abrogating the supposedly fixed bounds of species encourages 615 transgression, mostly imaginative, of the fixities of psychosexualPROOF and economic life in an 616 overly demanding social order. This is perhaps what many people still find disconcerting 617 about Darwinism.

618 4 How Darwinism Got a Bad Name: The Descent of Man and the Politics 619 of Human Evolution

620 In spite of his conscious avoidance of the topic of human evolution in the Origin, Darwin’s 621 image as a nihilistic materialist was first intimated in a notorious public debate that took 622 place at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford 623 in June, 1860, scarcely 6 months after the book’s publication. Darwin, who intentionally 624 avoided the event, had been right. TakingECTED their cues from Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of 625 Oxford, speaker after speaker rose from the floor to throw the same objections against the 626 Origin that had been hurled at Chambers 15 years earlier. 627 Exhibiting the widespread tendency to assimilate Darwin to Chambers and Lamarck of 628 which I have already taken note, Wilberforce asked, ‘‘Is it really credible that a turnip 629 should strive to become a man?’’ Having engaged earlier in the week in a preliminary 630 skirmish on the topic with Wilberforce’s ally, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, 631 Thomas Henry Huxley, a rival comparative anatomist, rose to speak in Darwin’s defense. 632 Wilberforce rejoined by asking Huxley whether as a Darwinian he thought he was related 633 to an ape on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side. Muttering under his breath, ‘‘The 634 Lord hath delivered him into my hands,’’ Huxley famously replied in something like the 635 following words: 636 I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather [than] a man highly endowed 637 by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs those 638 faculties forUNCORR the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific dis- 639 cussion. I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape (Huxley to Frederick 640 Dyster, September 9, 1860. See Jenson 1988, p. 168; Desmond 1994/1996, p. 279; 641 642 Browne 2002, pp. 118–125). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

643 It was the perfect squelch. It allowed Darwin’s friend Joseph Hooker, by his own 644 account at least, to follow up with arguments that swayed the audience in the crowded, 645 swelteringly hot hall to side with Darwin (Hooker to Darwin, July 2, 2002, CCD 8, p. 270; 646 Huxley to Dyster, September 9, 1860). From that day to this Huxley’s riposte has posi- 647 tioned Darwinians, at least in their own minds, as defenders of free inquiry against clerical 648 obscurantism. 649 In fact, the reality was a bit more complicated. Huxley thought the Lord had delivered 650 the Bishop into his hands not because the latter had made a scientific misstep, but because 651 he sensed (perhaps wrongly) that Wilberforce had committed an impropriety by even Author Proof 652 mentioning the possibility that Victorian women could have bestial origins or, by impli- 653 cation, inclinations. He sought to discredit the Bishop by throwing his tasteless joke back 654 in his face (Lucas 1979). It was Huxley, not Wilberforce, who was now playing the 655 rhetorician. Wilberforce was not, moreover, the anti-scientific mossback that Hooker, in 656 particular, took him to be. He was, after all, the son of the man who had persuaded 657 Parliament to outlaw the slave trade; William Wilberforce’s efforts had been backed by 658 Josiah Wedgwood’s money and applauded by Darwin’s entire family. There is no reason to 659 think that the Bishop was being disingenuous when he wrote in a review of the Origin 660 anonymously published in The Quarterly Review 5 weeks earlierPROOF that he had 661 no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any 662 inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what 663 it appears to them is taught by Revelation. We think that all such objections savor of 664 a timidity that is really inconsistent with a firm and well-entrusted faith (Wilberforce 665 666 1860, p. 256). 667 Wilberforce’s remarks to the British Association drew on his review. For him the issue 668 was not religion versus science, but a choice between two modes of doing science: the 669 ‘‘science in a theistic context’’ that ever since Newton had incubated most of British 670 knowledge about the physical world or the new secular science of which Huxley, partly on 671 the basis of the legend of his debate with the bishop of Oxford, soon became the very 672 model (Brooke et al. 2001; Brooke 2001). Both in his review and his remarks, Wilberforce 673 urged that in view of the observed stabilityECTED of species and the tendency of hybrids to revert 674 to type Darwin’s argument was as hypothetical as Chambers’s (it was to testify to this 675 stability that members of the audience rose to speak). Thus the presumption remained in 676 favor of natural theology’s approach to natural history, placing a burden of proof on the 677 Origin that in Wilberforce’s opinion Darwin had failed to meet. Wilberforce’s success in 678 making this argument left Huxley and Hooker having to assert, with more bravado than 679 backing, that the Origin was not hypothetical. Yet Darwin himself thought Wilberforce’s 680 review had scored a hit on this very point. ‘‘I have just read the Quarterly,’’ he wrote to 681 Hooker. ‘‘It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts and 682 brings forward well all the difficulties’’ (Darwin to Hooker, July 20, 1860, CCD 8, p. 293).8

8 More might be said about shadowy role played by the tightly wrapped Owen in the proceedings at Oxford. Hooker accused him of coaching Wilberforce the night before the debate (Hooker to Darwin July 2, 2002, CCD 8, p. 270). But if there was any influence it had to have been exerted before then; the Bishop refers positively to Owen’s views in his review, which had been written almost 2 months earlier. One source of Owen’s frostyUNCORR hostility to Darwin—Darwin reported with pain that as far as he knew Owen was the only person of his acquaintance who truly hated him—is that he thought of himself as slowly leading the British public toward an evolutionary, if not exactly a transmutationist, view. He was angry that he had been forestalled by Darwin and a pack of vulgar materialists. Owen’s evolutionism, if such it be, employed the same idealist conceptual framework that Asa Gray’s opponent Louis Agassiz used to oppose it. He 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

683 What gave this event its high emotional charge was that it happened to take place just 684 when the Anglican Church was in the throes of one of its greatest crises. It took place, 685 moreover, at the very site where the crisis was most agitated. It was at Oxford that 686 evangelicals had been contesting with the crypto-Catholic ‘‘Oxford movement,’’ squeezing 687 between them the traditional Anglican via media that Wilberforce was trying to reassert. 688 The Bishop’s approach to the Origin was, in effect, an effort to keep his unruly flock of 689 rebellious clerical academics together by repeating the trusty old commonplaces of 690 moderate theism. If Huxley and Hooker left the field of battle feeling that they had become 691 local heroes, it was in part because many of the Oxford clerics who were in attendance Author Proof 692 sided with them not because they agreed with Darwin but because they were happy to see 693 their Bishop taken down a peg (Hooker to Darwin, July 2, 2002, CCD 8, p. 270). It was not 694 about science. It was about whether the church would go backward toward semi-Cathol- 695 icism or forward toward secular liberalism (Lucas 1978; Brooke 2001). 696 To the general public, moreover, it was Wilberforce who got the last laugh. While 697 Huxley’s rejoinder may have gratified Darwin’s defenders, his failure to make Darwin’s 698 actual claim clear forever fixed in most peoples’ minds the notion that Darwin thought of 699 humans as directly descended from contemporary apes and monkeys, rather than from 700 extinct, less differentiated ancestors of both, and that he thought, too, of humans as in some 701 sense nothing but slightly modified apes.9 So much for the ideaPROOF that man was made in the 702 image and likeness of God. As a result, Darwin’s explicit effort to frame the Origin in a 703 way that might attract support from liberal churchmen went nowhere. Some clerics who 704 had argued in a book published in March, 1860 that Biblical interpretation should be 705 adjusted to science generally and to evolution in particular were tried for heresy and 706 convicted by the state church. Broad minded as it may have thought of itself, there seem to 707 have been limits after all to what the Anglican establishment would count as respectable 708 scriptural interpretation, particularly when its traditional broad-church center was weak- 709 ening under the influence of opposed theological trends whose shared discontents with 710 modernity were loaded onto Darwinism’s back. 711 By contrast, almost as soon as the Origin was published, its author was lionized by 712 social theorists like Spencer, biologists like Huxley, and physicists like John Tyndall, all of 713 whom wanted to get religion out of professionalECTED science, education, and policy-making by 714 secularizing the state, liberalizing the economy, and privatizing religious belief. These 715 ‘‘radicals,’’ as they were called, saw Darwin’s respectability as affording them leverage. It 716 is still contentious whether Darwin jumped into an alliance with them or was pushed 717 toward it by his diffidence, his need for whatever allies he could find, or by the real offense 718 he took at dismissals of his argument by his former clerical mentors and by the Church of 719 England itself. Whatever the reason, Darwin did cast his fate with the so-called ‘‘X Club’’

Footnote 8 continued conceived of comparative anatomy as the temporal working out of ideas, archetypes, that are eternally present in God’s mind. He may have been too subtle (or manipulative) even for the Bishop. In his review of Origin, Wilberforce praised Owen for sticking to traditional natural theology. 9 The same imaginative failure undergirded the confusion between living relatives and extinct ancestors and the counter-examples that Wilberforce and members of the audience raised against Darwin at Oxford. One can think that the fact that grains of wheat found in Egyptian tombs still breed true as refuting Darwin only if you have a severely constricted, even Biblical, conception of time. So too in thinking of man as an ape. A similar imaginativeUNCORR failure caused even intelligent people at the end of the nineteenth century to grow despondent when they learned about the inevitable heat death of the earth. It’s not, after all, as if this event is lurking just around the corner. Stephen Jay Gould constantly pointed out that Darwin had a sense of ‘‘deep time.’’ I think this sense came from an intensification of Lyell’s enlarged conception of time caused by Darwin’s engagement with the Romantic sublime. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

720 that Huxley assembled to advocate ‘‘Darwinism.’’ This plunge, however, brought with it its 721 own kind of grief. The members of the X Club interpreted the Origin through the eyes of 722 their own pet evolutionary theories and political agendas, proving themselves not much 723 better readers of the Origin than its clerical critics, making it even harder for the book to 724 get a proper hearing. 725 Huxley, for example, an eminent comparative anatomist, ardently defended unity of 726 descent, but retained a large neo-Geoffroyian saltationist streak that compromised not only 727 his acceptance of natural selection, but his understanding of it. ‘‘How very stupid of me not 728 to have thought of that,’’ he reports himself as saying about natural selection when he first Author Proof 729 read the Origin. Truth be told, though, Huxley never really did think coherently about 730 selection as he went about defending Darwinism qua common descent. 731 Darwin’s Darwinism also differed from Spencer’s pre-Darwinian, but no less British, 732 evolutionary theory. Like Darwin, Spencer had made extensive use of Malthus’s claims 733 about population growth always tending to exceed food supply. For Spencer, too, adap- 734 tations arise from the pressure exerted on organisms forced to compete for scarce 735 resources. But Spencer was so committed to a particular form of the heritability of acquired 736 characteristics—he thought competition molds embryos and even adults to fit environ- 737 ments and that successful molding is heritable—that he, too, misinterpreted natural 738 selection. In contrast to Darwinism, which holds that organismsPROOF develop, populations 739 adapt, and species evolve, Spencerism makes it possible, indeed necessary, to say that in 740 principle even in a single generation organisms by developing adapt and by adapting 741 evolve. In public, Darwin professed to be merely puzzled by Spencer’s tendency toward 742 abstraction. In private, he was probably contemptuous of him. 743 Neither Spencer or Huxley was of much help, then, in rebutting the most common early 744 misreading of natural selection—an attempted reductio ad absurdum much favored by 745 clergy on both sides of the Atlantic according to which adaptation by natural selection is 746 merely the chance preservation of accidents by what John Herschel called ‘‘the law of 747 higgledy-pigglety’’ (Darwin to C. Lyell, December 10, 1859, CCD 7, p. 421). This charge 748 arose from framing the Origin as a re-run of Vestiges and then, having noticed that an inner 749 drive toward progress is missing, trying to account for the difference. The difference, they 750 thought, was that for Darwin the historyECTED of life is just one big series of meaningless 751 accidents. Spencer could not help correct this impression because his Lamarckism led him 752 to believe in overall direction. Huxley could not help because he was a determinist, and so 753 underestimated the objective, even if subordinate, role of chance. Nor did Darwin get any 754 help from his mentor Lyell, who shilly-shallied in support of his basic idea. 755 To make matters worse, his co-discoverer Wallace’s version of Darwinism came 756 increasingly to differ from his own. Wallace turned out to be even more selectionist than 757 Darwin. He had no truck at all with Lamarckism. But for Wallace the units between which 758 selection discriminates are not individuals, but varieties (Kottler 1985). Whether in con- 759 sequence of this group-oriented assumption or its cause, Wallace’s politics were socialist, 760 not liberal. His refusal to assign individual-level competition the central role in human 761 affairs led him, to the dismay of his fellow Darwinians, to refuse to apply natural selection 762 to man at all, and, even more to their dismay, to become a spiritualist. Only Gray, it seems, 763 got natural selection according to Darwin right. But Gray’s support was compromised by 764 his theological preoccupations and his indifference to embryology. With good reason, 765 Darwin’s correspondenceUNCORR during the years following the publication of the Origin shows 766 him to be an anxious, hurt, frustrated, physically fragile, and often quietly angry author. 767 In this rhetorically unstable situation, Darwin’s deference to the opinions of the X Club 768 had a large and lasting consequence. Through Wallace, its members advised him to respond 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

769 to the objection that ‘‘natural selection’’ implies a mystical agent who competes with the 770 Creator, and so is no more scientific than intelligent design, by substituting Spencer’s 771 proposed phrase ‘‘survival of the fittest,’’ which refers only to the post facto results of 772 competition (Wallace to Darwin, July 2, 1866, CCD 14, p. 227). Darwin initially resisted. It 773 meant retreating from the Origin’s normative claim that ‘‘daily and hourly …natural 774 selection is scrutinizing … every variation, even the slightest, and rejecting that which is 775 bad, preserving and adding up all that is good’’ for organisms themselves (Darwin 1859, 776 pp. 83–84). It was on this value-laden claim that Darwin had pinned his hopes of attracting 777 clerical support; natural selection, he had wanted to show, is as oriented to the good of Author Proof 778 individual organisms as an intelligent designer, perhaps even more (Lennox 1994; Depew 779 2009). This hope having evaporated, Darwin half-heartedly complied with the X’s Club’s 780 suggestion. Without subtracting ‘natural selection’ from the text, in later editions of the 781 Origin he added ‘‘or survival of the fittest’’ here and there and as a subtitle of Chapter IV. 782 Soon the new phrase was living a life of its own. Predictably, it had the chilling effect of 783 leading readers away from Darwin’s creative view of adaptation and away, too, from his 784 Romantic, value-laden sense of nature, according to which animals have emotional, 785 imaginative, and mental capacities previously ascribed only to human beings, who in turn 786 should be flattered by their kinship with all living things (Beer and Kegan 2000). In a 787 context in which attention was turning to human evolution, a topicPROOF Darwin had deferred in 788 the Origin, the slogan ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ drew the public instead back toward Wil- 789 berforce’s widely disseminated notion that Darwinism reduced humans to viciously 790 competing beasts. Huxley’s The Place of Man in Nature (1863) did nothing to discourage 791 that impression. 792 In the Descent of Man, which appeared in 1871, Darwin was already trying to steer 793 readers away from the dog-eat-dog conception of human nature that was beginning to 794 circulate in his name, thanks to Spencer’s use of ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ in linking his own 795 theory with Darwin’s in his Principles of Biology (1864). Descent articulates a project 796 Darwin had been mulling over since the 1830s. The ‘‘moral sentiments’’ of which British 797 philosophers had long made so much, in which Darwin steadfastly believed, had evolved 798 through a kind of natural selection that differentially selects for the altruistic properties of 799 organisms considered as members ofECTED groups. Group selection remains a valid, and 800 increasingly validated, idea to this day (Sober and Wilson 1998). Closely entwined with 801 group cooperation, Darwin posited a rather gallant form of sexual selection. Together, 802 group and sexual selection spread instinctive sympathy through in-groups. Moreover, 803 Darwin argued that through wars and other forms of contact—commercial exchange, 804 surprisingly, is not mentioned, as Spencer surely would have done—the circle of in-group 805 solidarity keeps expanding throughout our single species: 806 When two tribes of primeval men living in the same country came into competition … 807 if the one tribe included a great number of courageous sympathetic, and faithful 808 members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, and to aid and defend 809 each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other (Darwin 1871, 810 811 p. 199). 812 Darwin’s identification of morality with sympathy diffused by group selection does not 813 fit easily with the idea that when we behave altruistically we are simply calculating our (or 814 our genes’) long-termUNCORR advantage. To the extent that we are moral at all, Darwin believed, 815 our morality is genuine (Richards 1987; Sober and Wilson 1998; contra E. Wilson 1978; 816 Ghiselin 1979; Ruse 1984; Ruse and Wilson 1985). Still, in Descent Darwin conceded that 817 ‘‘lower’’ races remain in the process of evolving this moral sense and, if they fail to do so, 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

818 are likely to exterminated by rival tribes that have learned how to cooperate by identifying 819 emotionally with each other. The point was easily extended to races, in part through its 820 equivocal meaning. Without quite meaning to do so, Darwin thereby lent his prestige to the 821 ‘‘white-man’s-burden’’ justification of the imperialism on which Britain was by then well 822 embarked. 823 In addition, Darwin conceded to his half cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, 824 that when ‘‘we civilized men … do our utmost to check the process of elimination’’ by 825 building asylums and hospitals, supporting welfare laws, vaccinating ‘weak members’ 826 against smallpox, and taking similar measures, we are to that extent lowering the fitness of Author Proof 827 ‘the race of men’’’ (Darwin 1871, p. 206). Unfortunately, it was these implications that 828 became for many readers the lesson taught by The Descent of Man and, through retro- 829 spective contamination, the Origin. Darwin’s admonition that even at some cost to fitness 830 we have no choice but to exercise the sympathetic moral sense that makes civilized 831 societies the vanguard of the species was ignored. His natural kindliness, as well Huxley’s 832 belated horror in his famous 1893 essay ‘‘Evolution and Ethics’’ at what the eugenics 833 movement was proposing by way of ‘‘applied Darwinism,’’ meant little in comparison to 834 what readers thought to be the logical upshot of what they identified as Darwinism (Paradis 835 and Williams 1989). If nature achieves the good by leading superior races to eliminate 836 inferior ones, then nature blesses their efforts. Indeed, naturalPROOF history might benefit from 837 giving human history an imperialist shove. This inference is, in brief, how Darwinism 838 began to get a bad name.10

839 5 The Problem of Social Darwinism

840 Scholars have looked long and hard into the idea of ‘‘Social Darwinism.’’ The use of this 841 term to name biologically based defenses of laissez-faire economics in the face of the 842 growing organization of labor sprang belatedly from the pens of two American historians, 843 William Langer and Richard Hofstadter (Langer 1935; Hofstadter 1944). Upon closer 844 examination, the social theorists they took to have supported robber-baron capitalism, 845 including Spencer himself, actually opposedECTED it. Spencer’s view was that competition is the 846 mother of cooperation, and that grabbing for what one can get is more characteristic of 847 societies that prop up counterproductive policies of social support than of economically 848 liberal ones (Richards 1987). By the same token, apologists for robber-baron capitalism 849 like William Graham Sumner, as well as some robber barons themselves, such as Andrew 850 Carnegie in his The Gospel of Wealth, made little or no appeal to evolutionary theory to 851 justify their free-market ideas (Bannister 1979, 1988; Crook 2007). 852 As refutations of Hofstadter (and implicit defenses of Darwinians as responsible sci- 853 entists) these points may be telling. They do not, however, dispose of the issue. Even if one 854 cannot find many biologists who explicitly made the arguments later ascribed to them, 855 what matters for our inquiry is how emotionally charged slogans with a ‘‘survival-of-the- 856 fittest’’ edge began to circulate in the public sphere, not whether what was disseminated 857 was remotely accurate ad litteram. Circulate they indeed did, especially through the new

10 The fact thatUNCORR Darwin was ceremoniously buried beside Newton in Westminster Cathedral is usually ascribed to one or more of the following factors: a secular sea change in British thought, a neo-Lamarckian, progress-oriented reading of Darwin that had been encouraged by Darwin’s own rewrites of the Origin, and the machinations of the X Club. To these I would add the sanctimonious, Kiplingesque imperialist ideology that was at its height when Darwin died, of which he could be considered a patron saint. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

858 channel of the mass circulation newspapers that turned journalists into amplifiers of the 859 noises made by politicians. It was imperialism, however, not monetary or labor policy, that 860 was the signal in this noise. Lord Salisbury, when he was British prime minister, spoke of 861 ‘‘imperial instincts’’ in justifying the scramble for empire. An interviewer described the 862 imperialist adventurer Cecil Rhodes as ‘‘A Darwinian in Search of God’’ (Crook 2007, 863 pp. 162–163). Theodore Roosevelt associated imperialism with masculinity and mascu- 864 linity with fitness in a sense that, whether he meant it or not, was surely read as biological. 865 A more interesting question is how popular audiences acquired the negative connota- 866 tions that ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ still bears. This critical attitude did not spring full blown Author Proof 867 from the pen of Richard Hofstadter. One might be surprised to learn that it was already 868 widespread before World War I—an event that, as Paul Fussell argued, radically changed 869 European and North American sensibilities (Fussell 1975). A fortiori, these negative 870 attitudes were well entrenched before the Holocaust so tragically validated earlier suspi- 871 cions and worries. The primary reason is that late nineteenth and early twentieth century 872 socialists and left liberals, not to speak of novelists like Joseph Conrad in his Heart of 873 Darkness, easily saw through the high-mindedness with which men like Rhodes and 874 Roosevelt deluded themselves about their tutelage of inferior peoples. Popular Marxism, 875 which at the time served as a powerful tool for galvanizing the working class by providing 876 it with a worldview and a counter-culture—a socialist candidatePROOF received almost a quarter 877 of the votes in the American presidential election of 1912—served as a means for dis- 878 seminating deconstructed accounts of what the pieties of the rulers really meant, with labor 879 organizers and left-leaning journalists serving as points of dissemination. 880 This fact goes some way toward explaining how and why Hofstadter shifted the accent 881 of social Darwinism from imperialism to class conflict. Darwinism of a Spencerian slant 882 had been always been judged negatively by the anti-Malthusian socialists whose tradition 883 Hofstadter inherited and recycled. Marx himself thought the Origin legitimated capitalism 884 by naturalizing it. He took Malthus’s population principle as a slur on the working class. 885 To such people the fact that most apologists for empire were actually against free market 886 capitalism would have posed no barrier to interpreting them as social Darwinians in 887 Hofstadter’s sense. Like Lenin, who advocated ‘‘applied Marxism’’ as the antidote to 888 ‘‘applied Darwinism,’’ most socialists andECTED left liberals like J. A. Hobson regarded impe- 889 rialism as ‘‘the highest stage of capitalism’’ and at its root merely deflected or off-loaded 890 class warfare. Social Darwinism in Hofstadter’s sense was an interpretation based on a 891 theory that, by dint of much effort, had long been disseminated by intellectuals and labor 892 organizers to large numbers of working people. The incredulity with which scholars have 893 greeted this interpretation in recent decades is merely a sign of the near disappearance of 894 this once powerful discursive and political tradition. 895 This analysis implies that imputations of ‘social Darwinism’ can be judged rightly only 896 when they are placed within the interconnected network of issues that were actually 897 agitating the European and North American public spheres at the turn of the twentieth 898 century: violent conflicts between labor and capital, both attempting to bring the power of 899 the state to their side; imperialism’s wars against presumed lesser races; worries about 900 intermarriage between whites and other races; the immigration of presumedly inferior 901 populations into America; debates about whether war keeps populations fit; and, not least, 902 eugenic proposals designed to do something about these problems by encouraging those 903 who were assumedUNCORR to be fit to multiply and be fruitful and forcibly preventing those 904 deemed unfit from having offspring by segregating and sterilizing them. 905 In this wider context we can readily find social theorists whose arguments were based 906 on explicitly biological notions of competition and differential survival. Typically, 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

907 however, such authors differed from Hofstadter’s Marxist model by distinguishing what 908 should happen at home from what should happen abroad. In his influential 1894 Social 909 Evolution, for example, Benjamin Kidd followed Darwin’s lead on group selection (Kidd 910 1894). He wanted a socially protectionist state. But he wanted it in order to strengthen the 911 in-group solidarity that would be needed in order to prevail in battles with inferior races. In 912 Hofstadter’s sense, Kidd was arguing against social Darwinism. In fact, however, he 913 should count as an almost paradigmatic social Darwinian both because his views were 914 close to Darwin’s own and because he explicitly appealed to natural selection to justify 915 imperialistic policies of the sort that Roosevelt, for example, was about to pursue on Author Proof 916 largely geopolitical (and sexist) grounds (Crook 1984). 917 Following Robert Young, I might even be persuaded to call Darwin himself a social 918 Darwinian (Young 1985). I would do so, however, only if I could also point out the 919 difference between Darwin, who merely noted that in-group solidarity is connected to out- 920 group hostility, and Kidd, who before he repented of his youthful imperialism advocated a 921 policy based on that supposed fact. Darwin was never an ‘‘applied Darwinian’’ of the sort 922 that, much to Huxley’s belated dismay, proliferated at the fevered fin-de-sie`cle. Darwin 923 foresaw the growing good of the species emerging from the violent encounters between 924 races. His avatars seemed more concerned with preventing races and nations on top from 925 being dragged down by their presumed inferiors. PROOF 926 Accordingly, eugenicists will handily count as social Darwinians by our emerging 927 standard. Indeed, John Halliday and Paul Crook, discounting the Marxists for whose 928 interpretive schema I have just shed a tear, have argued that eugenics was the sum and 929 substance of what social Darwinism actually amounted to (Halliday 1971; Crook 2000). 930 This is an especially compelling assessment insofar as at the turn of the century many 931 eugenicists were turning from the quirky, voluntary eugenics of Galton to actually using 932 state power to prevent the unfit from contaminating the protoplasm pool. They were 933 doing so, moreover, precisely because they feared that individuals, families, and 934 ‘‘races’’ of an inferior sort were a drag on the national social solidarity that Kidd, 935 among others, championed. Hitler, it should be recalled, came of age in just this 936 intellectual milieu. 937 The question of who by this standardECTED was not a social Darwinian is more complicated. 938 The ranks of anti-social Darwinians certainly included the band of ‘‘peace eugenicists’’ 939 who under the leadership of Peter Chalmers Mitchell in Britain and of David Starr Jordon 940 and Vernon Kellogg in America argued in the run-up to World War I either that modern 941 war eliminated the strong, not the weak, as so is dysgenic, or that the concept of natural 942 selection does not apply to modern warfare at all, since there is a big difference between its 943 indiscriminate slaughter and the differential survival of the heroic that results from warfare 944 in societies that remain closer to nature (Crook 1994, 2007). 945 There were, however, liabilities in this view. It presupposes the very Darwinian 946 framework that its politics contests. For this reason, Mitchell drifted toward the anarchist 947 Prince Kropotkin’s notion that evolution is not generally driven by intra-specific, or even 948 inter-specific, competition, but largely by competition with nature itself (Crook 1994). 949 Mitchell was sufficiently sure that even this mitigated sort of competition, which Darwin 950 himself mentioned, was Malthusian enough to remain within the Darwinian tradition. In 951 this respect, he differed from Kropotkin himself and from the long-lived ecological tra- 952 dition he inspired.UNCORR Like other Russian evolutionists, as well as the Marxists whose per- 953 spective Hofstadter inherited, Kropotkin thought of Malthusianism as the benighted 954 essence of Darwinism and forthwith rejected it (Todes 2000). In our own time, the 955 respected biologist Lynn Margulis stresses the role of mutualism and symbiosis in the 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

956 history of life by dissociating herself from the Darwinian legacy for similar reasons 957 (Margulis and Sagan 2002). 958 The anti-social Darwinian party also included writers who, in explicating what ‘nurture’ 959 meant in early episodes of the nature-nurture controversies that have recurred throughout 960 the twentieth century, were turning to the new concept of culture that was being developed 961 by anthropologists like Franz Boas and his students. Sociologists like the American Frank 962 Lester Frank Ward were also anti-social Darwinian. In rebutting William Graham Sum- 963 ner’s defense of laissez faire, Ward attempted to perform radical (and life threatening) 964 surgery on Spencer’s individualist social ontology, and its attendant Malthusianism, in Author Proof 965 order to ensure that the cooperative utopia that Spencer wrongly saw arising from free 966 market capitalism would have half a chance of actually coming to be. ‘‘Dynamic biology,’’ 967 Ward wrote, 968 is a department distinct from dynamic sociology … The fundamental principle of 969 biology is natural selection. … The survival of the fittest is simply the survival of the 970 strong, which implies the destruction of the weak. The fundamental principle of 971 sociology is artificial selection … Man progresses through the protection of the weak 972 973 (Ward 1897, p. 135). 974 One other option is worth mentioning emerged in these turn-of-the-centuryPROOF debates. It 975 was also possible to think of oneself as an explicitly Darwinian opponent of social Dar- 976 winism by dissociating Darwin from Spencer. This possibility was explored by a group of 977 evolutionary psychologists and philosophers of mind who had learned from William James 978 to reject Spencer’s stress on the passive molding of embryos and infants by the Malthusian 979 pressures impinging on them. Spencer, James insisted, did not pay enough attention to the 980 agency of humans, or to the evolution of our capacity for anticipating changes in our 981 environment and taking steps to circumvent them or exploit them. The attractiveness of 982 this line of thought increased after the basic coherence of Spencerism fell apart in Spen- 983 cer’s ill-fated 1894 debate with August Weismann on the possibility of inheriting acquired 984 characteristics. John Dewey and fellow child psychologist James Mark Baldwin were 985 henceforth free to use the name Darwinism to identify the etiology of specifically human 986 adaptedness in the selective reinforcementECTED by parents and others of socially beneficial 987 spontaneous variations in the behavior of infants and the elimination of other behaviors. 988 It was this spontaneous-variation-and-differential-retention model that these early 989 evolutionary psychologists identified as distinctively Darwinian.11 990 Unlike John B. Watson, who inherited Dewey’s legacy at the University of Chicago, 991 and even more Watson’s student B. F. Skinner, who took behaviorist reinforcement as only 992 a cultural analogue of natural selection, Dewey argued that cultural environments are in 993 fact the natural, biological environments of humans, and so constitute the site of a kind of 994 adaptive natural selection (Dewey 1898). Having done so, Dewey generalized his model of

11 Dewey was probably influenced by Baldwin’s (and the British ethologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s) notion of ‘‘organic selection.’’ Much later called ‘‘the Baldwin effect,’’ the basic idea is that social inheritance of reinforced behaviors could go on indefinitely without violating Weismann’s strictures against somatic influences on germ plasm. It was having your Lamarckian cake and eating it too. Eventually, socially transmitted behaviors would come to be facilitated, but not replaced, by inherited factors that every now and then coincide withUNCORR what had already been stabilized by learning and social transmission (Richards 1987; Weber and Depew 2003). Genetic Darwinians who are sympathetic to this line of reasoning identify adaptations with the genes that facilitate or replace the relevant behavioral tendencies. Dewey remained blithely indifferent to the genetic revolution, most of which took place at the same Columbia University where he taught, in part, I believe, because he identified adaptedness at the behavioral, not the genetic, level. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

995 child development to adult social interactions, applauding democratic societies because 996 their free institutions are able to put in play a wide range of possibilities of collective action 997 and to provide apt institutions for opting among them. Dewey’s differs from the usual 998 conception of democratic deliberation by construing it as social experimentation and 999 construing social experimentation as a process of testing policies that meet or fail to meet 1000 the exigencies of particular situations. This is what Dewey meant by ‘‘instrumentalism,’’ 1001 his particular brand of pragmatism: so-called because it conceived of ideas not as having 1002 theoretically or observationally identified referents, but as tools or instruments for adap- 1003 tively transforming environments. Not for nothing was pragmatism known by its philo- Author Proof 1004 sophical opponents as ‘‘the biological account of knowledge’’ (Woodbridge 1940, p. 791). 1005 In a well-known essay entitled ‘‘The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,’’ Dewey 1006 prophesied that Darwinism would transform philosophy because its elimination of species 1007 essentialism—change within as well as between species—forced a shift from the theo- 1008 retical to the practical and the general to the specific (Dewey 1910). Yet Dewey would 1009 have been and by the end of his long life probably was disturbed by the effect, or rather 1010 lack of it, that Darwinism actually did have on twentieth century philosophy. This 1011 aloofness was no accident. Philosophers in Britain, notably G. E. Moore and Bertrand 1012 Russell, hoping to protect their discipline from the imperialist and militarist bluster that 1013 surrounded them, denied that evolutionary arguments are everPROOF materially relevant to eth- 1014 ical, social, or political choices. Their argument was foundational for twentieth century 1015 analytic philosophy. 1016 The argument was Hume’s. You can never validly get from a mere fact to a moral 1017 injunction. Darwinism’s most pronounced effect on philosophy, accordingly, was to have 1018 stimulated a school of analytic philosophy that was studiously indifferent to the philo- 1019 sophical consequences of Darwinism. With help from a talented generation of refugees 1020 from Hitler, who were even more upset by what happened when philosophy became 1021 biologized ideology in Germany and Austria, the analytic school transformed American 1022 philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. It did so in part by constantly 1023 re-enacting its contempt for Dewey. Only in recent ‘‘post-analytic’’ decades has there been 1024 a return of naturalism, even evolutionary naturalism, among American philosophers. 1025 Darwin’s and Dewey’s names are heardECTED once more in the land. However, the discursive 1026 continuity with and disciplinary memory of these iconic figures had been forgotten for so 1027 long that much of what contemporary philosophical avatars of Darwinian psychology put 1028 into their minds and mouths is riddled with anachronistic projections of their own views 1029 onto the past (Hollinger and Depew 1995). 1030 There has never, I believe, been a more thorough, nuanced, and many-faceted public 1031 debate about Darwinism than the one that unfolded at the fin de sie`cle. Our own fin de 1032 sie`cle debate uncannily recapitulates it and often unconsciously repeats it. It can only hope 1033 to be as good as it.

1034 6 Darwinism and Religion in America: The Road to the Scopes Trial

1035 The denouement of turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about evolution was much more 1036 dramatic for religion and theology than for philosophy, especially in the United States. 1037 Religion broughtUNCORR emotionally charged personal, even existential, considerations into 1038 public-sphere contestations about evolution that stood, and indeed still stand, in severe 1039 contrast to scientific approaches to evolution. Throughout the course of the twentieth 1040 century, American Protestants who were liberal about Biblical interpretation morphed in 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1041 great numbers into politically liberal secular humanists. Slowly abandoned in this way by 1042 its intellectuals, populist Protestantism, which had played the leading role in the nineteenth 1043 century articulation and expansion of democracy in America, was left to stew in the acidic 1044 juices of loss and resentment, caused in part by its inability to adjust to a culturally diverse 1045 immigrant and to a liberated African–American population. 1046 The split in white American Protestantism between ‘‘Mainline’’ churches, which 1047 accepted non-literal readings of Genesis because they accepted evolution and accepted 1048 evolution because they accepted non-literal readings of Genesis, and Fundamentalists, who 1049 did not accept such readings, put an end to the widespread agreement among late nine- Author Proof 1050 teenth-century theologians that creation and common descent are mutually consistent. 1051 James Moore, John Hedley Brooke, and Ronald Numbers have chronicled the many ways 1052 in which there was not nearly as much conflict between religion and evolution in late 1053 Victorian Britain as arose in the twentieth century (Moore 1979; Brooke 1991; Numbers 1054 1998). This consistency had been all the easier to forge because it was based on neo- 1055 Lamarckian rather than Darwinian theories of heredity and evolution. According to the 1056 paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and his pupil Henry Fairfield Osborn, among others, 1057 the entire evolutionary process was directed by an inner urge toward complex organisms 1058 and the emergence of human beings. In this way the goal-directed or teleological assur- 1059 ances that were once afforded by Paley’s natural theology werePROOF preserved simply by letting 1060 them unfold in time. This happy view was difficult to maintain, however, after neo- 1061 Lamarckism’s dependence on the heritability of acquired characteristics came under 1062 attack. Coincidentally or not, it was just then that Fundamentalism arose to challenge 1063 liberal theology’s way of reading the Bible. 1064 The term ‘Fundamentalism’ is not nearly as old as most people assume. It derives from 1065 a set of religious tracts, The Fundamentals, which began to appear in 1910—the year 1066 Dewey published ‘‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.’’ These booklets opposed 1067 evolution as a consequence of their more central rejection of modern Biblical criticism. 1068 Evolution was collateral damage in the war over scriptural hermeneneutics. In the not- 1069 uninformed view of the first Fundamentalists, the embrace by liberal theologians of theistic 1070 evolutionism had hastened a process of decline that began with the myth-centered readings 1071 of the Bible that first arose in GermanyECTED in the 1830s. World War I further discredited the 1072 optimism on which late Victorian liberal theology was predicated. Contemporary inheritors 1073 of the early Fundamentalists are convinced that post-modern morality, or the lack of it, is a 1074 direct and highly offensive consequence of this liberalizing drift. In America, they asso- 1075 ciate this degeneration with Darwinism even if they are far less concerned with and 1076 knowledgeable about how class conflict, eugenics, and imperialism once figured into the 1077 rejection of Darwinism that they have inherited. 1078 In America, where the link between populist democracy and evangelical religion was 1079 and remains much stronger than in Britain or indeed anywhere else, these issues came to a 1080 head in the famous Scopes ‘‘Monkey’’ trial, which in 1925 tested a Tennessee law against 1081 teaching in public high schools ‘‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of 1082 man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order 1083 of animals.’’ In this show trial, which (until it was overturned on a technicality) resulted in 1084 the conviction of the part-time high school biology teacher John Scopes, the defense team 1085 attempted to call as witnesses a number of neo-Lamarckian biology and geology professors 1086 who were toUNCORR testify to the consistency of evolution and religion, and so to the impossibility 1087 of violating the state law. When their testimony, which was in any case irrelevant to 1088 Darwinism as such, was ruled irrelevant to the factual issue of what Scopes had actually 1089 done conviction was a foregone conclusion. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1090 The case for the prosecution was made by the three-time Democratic nominee for 1091 President, William Jennings Bryan. Even at the end of his life, when the trial took place, 1092 Bryan was not quite the vainglorious, close-minded glutton that the programmatically 1093 liberal 1953 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind kicks around as a stand in for Senator 1094 Joseph McCarthy. He is a good example of the politician as a nodal point for the dis- 1095 semination of a slogan-centered view of Darwinism that, by way of the phrase ‘‘survival of 1096 the fittest,’’ tied it to imperialism, eugenics, and class conflict. 1097 Bryan first expressed his rejection of Darwinism in the context of his protest against the 1098 conquest and annexation of the Philippines. ‘‘Darwinism,’’ he declared in a 1905 speech, Author Proof 1099 ‘‘is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak’’ (Bryan 1905, 1100 p. 15). He became even more incensed during and after World War I by the eugenics 1101 movement, which had become powerful in the United States in reaction to large-scale 1102 immigration and fears of miscegenation. It seems that Bryan had read a wartime book by 1103 the peace-eugenicist biologist Kellogg that linked the brutality of German policy in World 1104 War I to nihilistic, neo-Nietzschean eugenical thought, a charge that one war later proved 1105 all too true (Kellogg 1917). What brought Bryan to Tennessee in 1925 was his discovery 1106 that eugenics, explicitly linked to Darwin’s name, was being pawned off by self-styled 1107 Progressive elites onto high school teachers in textbooks like George Hunter’s Civic 1108 Biology. This textbook, approved by the Tennessee State BoardPROOF of Education and used by 1109 Scopes in class, stated among other things that 1110 if [feeble-minded] people were lower animals we would probably kill them off to 1111 prevent their defects from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have 1112 the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums and other places and various ways 1113 of preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and 1114 1115 degenerate race (Hunter 1914, pp. 194–196, 405). 1116 Bryan was appalled. He can, I think, be excused for thinking that the difficulty lay in 1117 Darwinism itself rather than in politically motivated distortions of it. Reasons for believing 1118 that scientific Darwinism is not inherently invested in eugenics still lay several decades in 1119 the future. Bryan was long gone by the time the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis arrived on 1120 the scene to break the conceptual linkECTED between natural selection and eugenics. With the 1121 exception of Dewey and his school, most American evolutionists had by the 1920s become 1122 gene-based eugenicists. Like many professional people, they supported laws that prevented 1123 the supposedly unfit from reproducing and placed barriers to immigration from ‘‘races’’ 1124 and nations judged to be a threat to the gene pool. In 1927, we find even Justice Oliver 1125 Wendell Holmes, who later was lionized as a liberal, writing in defense of a eugenic case 1126 that had reached the Supreme Court. ‘‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough,’’ he 1127 famously declared in a majority decision upholding the sequestration of a member of a 1128 supposedly unfit family (Holmes 1927). Under these discursive conditions, Bryan reasoned 1129 that the only way back toward the community-based (white) populist self-government that 1130 he fancied was to oppose Darwinism in all its forms—and to move ever more logically and 1131 fatally toward Biblical literalism of a Fundamentalist sort.12 1132 The power of Bryan’s sort rhetoric to shape public opinion in the United States has 1133 proven to be very resilient. In turning in the next section to the rise of forms of Darwinism UNCORR 12 Bryan himself was not quite a Biblical literalist. He believed in the so-called ‘‘day-age’’ theory, according to which the days of Genesis might be whole geological eras. On the stand in the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow, knowing full well that Bryan could not help but defend the law as written, cleverly pushed Bryan toward Fundamentalism (see Larson 1997). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1134 that have tried hard to redeem Darwin’s good name by becoming good science, we should 1135 ask ourselves whether all such efforts are doomed to fall on deaf ears in a significant 1136 portion of the public sphere in view of the continued power of a traumatic past to block 1137 them out in the personal sphere. The general failure of post-Sputnik efforts at communi- 1138 cating science to the public through science education, which has included strenuous and 1139 no less strenuously resisted efforts to insert the genetical Darwinism of the Modern 1140 Synthesis into biology textbooks, warrants some pessimism on this score.

Author Proof 1141 7 Scientific Darwinism in the Twentieth Century: Genetics, Eugenics, 1142 and the Modern Synthesis

1143 The effort to make Darwinism a science in the same sense that physics is a science began 1144 during Darwin’s lifetime with efforts to validate natural selection as an empirical phe- 1145 nomenon. This task was first undertaken by British ‘‘biometricians,’’ so-called because 1146 they were able to measure changes in populations and correlate them with morphological 1147 changes in organisms. Founded by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, biometrical 1148 Darwinism attracted several generations of talented collaborators, notably Karl Pearson, 1149 Walter Weldon, and E. Ray Lancaster. Their guiding idea was thatPROOF natural selection has the 1150 ability to build adaptations out of very small, but observable and measurable variations 1151 over multi-generational time frames. Most traits, the biometricians held, are adaptations. In 1152 contrast to many other post-Darwinian programs, biometry had a solid claim on Darwin’s 1153 legacy. It was reliably selectionist, adaptationist, and gradualist. 1154 The biometricians met with empirical success in part because the sudden degradation of 1155 the ecology of the British island under the impact of industrialization enabled them to catch 1156 natural selection as it was happening. Thus Weldon showed that the silting up of Plymouth 1157 Harbor caused by industrial pollution had on average changed crabs’ carapaces so that they 1158 could better filter nutrients from polluted water. Later, a twentieth-century school of 1159 evolutionary naturalists centered at Oxford University conducted inquiries of this sort to 1160 striking effect. A prize example is H. D. Kettlewell’s studies of the effects of air pollution 1161 on the coloration of the pepper moth inECTED Britain. The shift to a higher proportion of dark 1162 over light forms is explained by the fact that darker moths are less subject to predation 1163 when the bark of the trees on which they live has been darkened by industrial soot. Further 1164 afield, the role of natural selection in the mimicry of butterflies of one species by another 1165 whose coloration protects them from prey was a particularly striking case study in 1166 co-adaptation. A. J. Cain demonstrated that traits as seemingly functionless as the banding 1167 patterns on snails had adaptive significance. And, yes, Darwin was right about the finches 1168 on the various Galapagos Islands. As David Lack demonstrated in the 1950s, their beak 1169 size is indeed correlated with the different food sources available on the different islands. 1170 It was the biometricians, then, that first gave Darwinism a foothold in the technical 1171 sphere (Ruse 1999). If they had not done so it seems to me likely that Darwinism would 1172 have gone the way of other nineteenth century big ideas and isms, including Spencer’s. It 1173 would have become a mere ideology. Yet the biometrical school was far from the value- 1174 neutrality that we expect from scientific experts. Its members shared a conviction about 1175 how evolutionary theory should affect public policy. Unlike their Oxford cousins, who 1176 studied all creaturesUNCORR great and small with a view to showing that Darwin was a worthy 1177 successor to Paley, the biometricians were eugenicists. From start to finish their inquiries 1178 were motivated by efforts to keep human populations as fit as natural selection would have 1179 made them if the cocooning of humans in modern cultures had not intervened. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1180 The Eugenics Society of London was especially active in these endeavors. Founded by 1181 Galton, and prominently led by Darwin’s son Leonard, the Society encouraged families 1182 with a history of ‘‘hereditary genius’’ to date, mate, multiply, and be fruitful. This was 1183 positive eugenics. It also endowed chairs at two major universities, Cambridge and 1184 London, and supported the journal Biometrika, in whose pages a good deal of modern 1185 statistical methods were developed. Positive eugenics, however, also suggested a negative 1186 counterpart. It suggested that those whose genealogy showed signs of hereditary ‘‘imbe- 1187 cility’’ or ‘‘weakmindedness’’ should be prevented by their betters from breeding. This 1188 program affected legislation in the United States, Scandinavia, and Germany (Weindling Author Proof 1189 1989; Black 2003). Greeted with horror by Bryan, it was embraced with equanimity, 1190 indeed enthusiasm, by most American Progressives.13 1191 Yet in spite of its technical achievements, biometrical Darwinism found itself in serious 1192 technical trouble by the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin in 1193 1909. By the end of the 1890s, as we have already noted, the embryologist August 1194 Weismann had persuaded most people that characteristics acquired in an organism’s 1195 lifetime cannot be directly inherited, thereby shifting natural selection—if it occurs at all— 1196 entirely to inherited traits. The underlying reason is that egg and sperm are sequestered too 1197 early in the developmental process to be affected by any influence coming from somatic 1198 cells. Weismann’s ‘‘neo-Darwinism’’—so-called because it departedPROOF from Darwin’s own 1199 tolerance of use inheritance—made it easier for biometrical Darwinians to distinguish 1200 themselves from Spencer, who to the bitter end was committed to the heritability of 1201 acquired characteristics and was soundly thrashed for his efforts by Weismann in a high 1202 profile debate that unfolded in the pages of the Contemporary Review in 1893 (Weismann 1203 1893a, b; Spencer 1893). 1204 Soon, however, a second shoe dropped that made it difficult to recode biometry as 1205 genetical neo-Darwinism. The challenge came from within the ranks of germ-line hered- 1206 itarians. The Weismann-inspired simultaneous rediscovery by three experimentalists of 1207 Mendel’s laws of heritability in 1900 had shown that inherited traits depend on charac- 1208 teristics that do not blend when they are crossed. The discovery that heredity comes in 1209 discrete units, soon to be called genes, posed a problem for biometrical Darwinians. It 1210 made their worries about the degradationECTED of what we call the gene pool even greater than 1211 before, when they were relying on Galton’s law of regression to the mean, according to 1212 which good traits would be weakened over time if blended with bad ones. Mendelism ruled 1213 out blending inheritance and so regression to the mean. But in so doing it seemed to make 1214 the slow evolution of adaptations not just difficult, and entirely reliant on concerted 1215 negative selection of the unfit, but dependent on the non-selective and entirely fortuitous 1216 occurrence of mutations with large and improbably beneficial effects (Gayon 1998). 1217 To make matters worse, early Mendelians were aware that the biometricians had never 1218 developed an even minimally persuasive account of speciation. The going theory was that 1219 new species arise by geographical isolation. To this day isolation is thought to be a factor 1220 in speciation. What needs explaining, however, is why isolated populations, if rejoined, do

13 After World War II, the strong association between eugenics and Progressivism, which by then was morphing into civil-rights liberalism, was swept under the rug. Eugenics was relegated to right-wing racists, nativists, and anti-Semites like Madison Grant (Grant 1922). Research by Daniel Kevles changed all that. Kevles broughtUNCORR into the open the pervasiveness of eugenics of various stripes among high-minded pre-War Progressives in a series of articles first published in The New Yorker (Kevles 1985). Others have confirmed and internationalized his findings (Paul 1995; Weindling 1989; Black 2003). There was a fair amount of interchange between German and American, particularly Californian, eugenicists right up to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 (Crook 2007, pp. 234–235). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1221 not interbreed. The mutationists had an answer. Whether ‘‘hopeful monsters’’ occur 1222 because isolated populations are under stress or because their occurrence, however, caused, 1223 induces isolation, macro-mutation, largely non-adaptive, was thought to be the proper 1224 cause of species formation. 1225 Popular conflation of Darwinism with mutationism has led to untold numbers of movies 1226 in which monsters (in a sense somewhat different from what was intended) are unleashed 1227 on the world by tinkering scientists. These commonplaces appear in post-World-War-II 1228 Japanese films about the effects of the atomic bomb as well as in recent worries about 1229 genetically engineered ‘‘frankenfood.’’ Thus popular appropriation added mutation to an Author Proof 1230 already long list of problematic images that Darwinism had accumulated over time. 1231 The oddity is that while mutationism was popularly and especially in Fundamentalist 1232 circles thought of as Darwinian because it is an evolutionary idea, in the newly emergent 1233 technical sphere the sudden shift to saltationism by geneticists was generally believed to be 1234 consigning Darwinism to its deathbed (Kellogg 1907). The disequilibrium between spheres 1235 of discourse that has been my constant theme explains why. Since the science of the 1236 biometricians had led other scientists to identify Darwinism with gradualistic adapta- 1237 tionism, the association of Mendelian genetics with sudden change by large mutations was 1238 generally regarded by mathematically adept evolutionary scientists as falsifying Darwin- 1239 ism. This rift between public and technical meanings left plentyPROOF of room for the sorts of 1240 misapprehension and mischief that in our own time characterize the way creationists view 1241 in-house disputes among evolutionists. Those who stood watch at Darwinism’s supposed 1242 deathbed in the early twentieth century were all evolutionists. What they thought was about 1243 to die was natural selection. Anti-evolutionists like Bryan, however, were all too willing to 1244 tell audiences that what was on its deathbed was evolution itself. So it goes even today. 1245 The threat posed by mutationism to adaptationists stimulated a 30-year-long effort by 1246 biometricians to get genetics and natural selection together. Their unification was achieved 1247 by an even more intensive display of mathematical reasoning, and so of technical prestige, 1248 than earlier members of the school had been able to muster. The key was the mathematical 1249 expansion of Mendel’s laws to the level of an interbreeding population by means of the 1250 so-called Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Formula. The entire range of genetic variation in 1251 such a gene pool will continue to beECTED distributed to organisms in the same proportions 1252 unless and until various ‘‘forces,’’ as they were later called, such as mutation, migration, 1253 natural selection, and genetic drift—fixation of genes in a small isolated sub-populations 1254 due to statistical chance—elevate the representation of some genetic variants over others. 1255 In reality, these forces are always in operation. This is a dynamical theory, like Newtonian 1256 physics (Sober 2000). But genetic equilibrium considered as a baseline from which 1257 departures can be calculated had the desired effect of eliminating Galton’s assumption that 1258 the base line is regression to a blended mean. 1259 The population-genetic reframing of natural selection did more than free eugenics from 1260 its captivity to Galton’s framework. It undercut most of the technical objections to natural 1261 selection that had been circulating in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It 1262 proved, for example, that the monsters contemplated in different ways by early geneticists 1263 and moviegoers are equally hopeless—and equally irrelevant to evolutionary science. The 1264 larger the mutation the less likely it is to enhance fitness. More positively, the population 1265 genetic revolution gave substance to Darwin’s undefended intuition that natural selection is 1266 a creative forceUNCORR by treating differential reproduction rates between sub-populations, not the 1267 negative elimination of the typified unfit, as the proper way of measuring selection pres- 1268 sure. This had the happy effect of consigning ‘‘survival-of-the-fittest’’ talk to its deathbed, 1269 at least in the technical sphere, and of making it possible to explain the subtle adaptations 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1270 that British evolutionary naturalists were continuing to discover. It also saved the possi- 1271 bility of sexual selection, which turn-of-the-century mutationists had ridiculed as having 1272 projected onto animals Darwin’s own Victorian aesthetic sensibility. It did so by 1273 re-conceiving sexual selection as a type of natural selection. 1274 Finally, the shift to population genetics had the effect of screening off developmental 1275 from evolutionary processes, a research strategy that for a long time paid high dividends in 1276 liberating Darwinism from the baggage that had collected around ontogeny–phylogeny 1277 parallels. This prohibition has probably now reached the limits of its utility. Still, in its day 1278 it freed Darwinism from the popular imputation that it was so deeply committed to evo- Author Proof 1279 lutionary progress (the early sources of which we encountered earlier in British reform-era 1280 politics) that it could not count as value-free science. 1281 In sum, population genetics saved Darwinism. In spite of widespread instruction in the 1282 rudiments of this new kind of Darwinism in high schools and colleges, however, it largely 1283 failed to affect popular images of Darwinism. When it is taught technically, even if 1284 simplistically, students are not equipped to see that the textbook population-genetic 1285 Darwinism they are learning when they study Mendel’s peas and the eye color of fruit flies 1286 has much of anything to say about the vivid pictures of Darwinism that are stored in public 1287 memory and have been downloaded into their heads outside the classroom. 1288 The story of theoretical population genetics has been toldPROOF accurately enough from a 1289 technical point of view by the historian of science William Provine (Provine 1971; Gayon 1290 1998 shows how big the technical problems actually were). Remarkably, however, Provine 1291 does not mention that R. A. Fisher, who was Professor of Eugenics at University College, 1292 London before being appointed Balfour Professor Genetics at Cambridge and who was 1293 chiefly responsible for reconciling Mendelism and biometry, undertook this effort precisely 1294 in order to put eugenics, to which he was oriented as to the pole star, into a genetic 1295 framework.14 Nor does Provine appreciate an irony that becomes obvious in the more 1296 contextualist, less scientistic approach to the history of science that has come to the fore 1297 since he wrote. The furious effort to justify eugenics that drove Fisher to unify genetics and 1298 natural selection ended by discrediting eugenics altogether. It did so, moreover, just in time 1299 to greet the post-World War II abhorrence of eugenics caused by the Nazis’ fatal embrace 1300 of it. ECTED 1301 This reversal occurred largely because the most seminal thinker of the Modern Evo- 1302 lutionary Synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky, showed that the variations out of which 1303 adaptations are made are only remotely afforded by mutations; chromosomal rearrange- 1304 ments and all manner of similar mechanisms are the proximate matter on which selection 1305 works (Dobzhansky 1937). Moreover, contrary to the assumption of Fisher and his 1306 eugenics-minded colleagues, the relevant forms of variation are spread out across a pop- 1307 ulation, not bunched up at identifiably good and bad ends of a distribution curve. The 1308 ubiquity of variation made it possible for Dobzhansky to amplify the insight that natural 1309 selection is a creative force rather than a merciless executioner of the unfit by making it 1310 impossible to identify the fit and the unfit in the first place. This undermined the very idea 1311 of eugenics and, as inheritors of Dobzhansky’s legacy were soon urging, the very idea of 1312 human races, at least as biological concepts. Differences, Dobzhansky and his successors 1313 insisted, are not necessarily defects. Once he got around to preaching it after the War, UNCORR 14 Provine does mention eugenics in his biography of the American Sewall Wright, who quarreled with Fisher about the role of genetic drift in adaptation as well as about group selection and speciation (Provine 1986). Wright, a skilled animal breeder, was less than enthusiastic about eugenics. His collaborator Theodosius Dobzhansky shared these doubts. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1314 Dobzhansky’s larger message was that populations that encourage genetic mixing 1315 are healthiest in the long run. They retain genetic variation in their gene pool that will 1316 enable them to adapt, as populations, to changed environments. The genes individuals 1317 have, moreover, are developmentally plastic, different environments eliciting different 1318 phenotypes. 1319 To press this case, Dobzhansky fused his ‘‘balancing theory’’ of adaptive natural 1320 selection with cultural anthropology as it had been developed at his own Columbia 1321 University by Franz Boas and his students.15 Boas’s non-hierarchical theory of culture 1322 made it possible for Dobzhansky to argue that Author Proof 1323 mankind is biologically unique, in some ways radically different from all other 1324 biological species. This assertion is repugnant to some scientists – it seems almost a 1325 repudiation of Darwin. Yet without recognition of man’s biological uniqueness no 1326 understanding of his nature is possible. The human species is engaged simulta- 1327 neously in two different evolutionary processes. One is biological evolution … The 1328 other is the evolution of culture, and this is uniquely human… save for diminutive 1329 1330 rudiments found in a variety of animal species (Dobzhansky et al. 1976, p. 22). 1331 Nature itself, it would seem, blesses liberal-pluralist democratic countries that prize 1332 cultural and racial diversity and the agency of everyone luckyPROOF enough to live in them 1333 (Dunn and Dobzhansky 1946, 1952; Dobzhansky 1962; Beatty 1994). The negative form 1334 of eugenics that prevailed in America stimulated post-War repudiation of eugenics lock, 1335 stock and barrel. This repudiation took the form of an increasingly strong scientific vali- 1336 dation of the cultural-pluralist politics whose implications we are continuing to work out to 1337 this day. Dobzhansky and his school made an important contribution to this discussion 1338 when they aligned Darwinism with this project. If it took hold it would go far to erasing 1339 Darwinism’s bad name. 1340 It is difficult to say whether the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis would ever have 1341 appeared as unified as by the 1960s it did if Julian Huxley had not written a book with that 1342 title in 1942. In doing so, Huxley was bringing back to his British colleagues lessons he 1343 had learned from Dobzhansky, Sewall Wright, George Gaylord Simpson, and other 1344 American Darwinians. High among his motivesECTED was to more deeply ground the case he had 1345 been waging throughout the 1930s against the racialist anthropology that had undergirded 1346 the chummy relationship between many British anthropologists and their German col- 1347 leagues (Huxley and Haddon 1935; Crook 2007). Although his culturalism was not nearly 1348 as relativist as Boas’s—like many, he was under the spell of James Frazer’s The Golden 1349 Bough—it was culturalist nonetheless. Indeed, Huxley was the leading influence on the 1350 text of the 1950 UNESCO declaration stating that race is less a biological fact than a social 1351 myth. 1352 As the centenary of the publication of the Origin was about to be celebrated, the Modern 1353 Synthesis was ready to make itself widely known to Americans and even more ready to 1354 begin moving the teaching of biology in public schools toward a rejuvenated evolutionary 1355 perspective. Under the leadership of the anthropologist Sol Tax, a large and very public 1356 commemorative symposium was organized at the University of Chicago in 1959. The main

15 Dobzhansky came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1927 under the sponsorship of T. H. Morgan. WhenUNCORR Morgan soon moved his laboratory from Columbia University to the California Institute of Technology, Dobzhansky went with him. He returned to Columbia in 1940. The post-War link between Columbia-style cultural anthropology and Dobzhansky’s genetic Darwinism was facilitated from the side of the anthropologists by Sherwood Washburn and from Dobzhansky’s side by his colleague and co-author Leslie C. Dunn (see Beatty 1994). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1357 idea was to announce that under the tutelage of scrupulously empirical scientists evolu- 1358 tionary biology was at last able to present itself as an objective science. Not only objective, 1359 but mature. The discovery 6 years earlier of the structure of DNA had at last removed the 1360 greatest objection to Darwinism, namely, ignorance of the ultimate cause of variation. Not 1361 many years would pass before Dobzhansky was proclaiming in The American Biology 1362 Teacher that ‘‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’’ 1363 (Dobzhansky 1973). This pronouncement has since become the rallying of cry the National 1364 Association of Biology Teachers, the National Center for Science Education, and other 1365 professional groups that nip at the heels of neo-creationist incursions into school boards. Author Proof 1366 The plan for the Chicago commemoration went well enough except for a botched 1367 beginning (see Smocovitis 2000 for a full account). Huxley ‘‘preached’’ the opening 1368 ‘‘sermon’’ from the pulpit of the University’s Rockefeller Chapel. He was expected to 1369 repeat the view of human evolution favored by Dobzhansky, Washburn, and Tax. The fact 1370 that nature had delivered a highly unitary human species into the hands of culture, the line 1371 went, implied that the new Darwinism would at last be able to shuffle off its unfortunate 1372 connections to imperialism, racism, and eugenics. Since religion is a central feature of all 1373 cultures, moreover, the new Darwinism would be as religion-friendly as it was a friend of 1374 human rights and human dignity. 1375 Failing to appreciate the delicacy of the American situation,PROOF however, Huxley instead 1376 advocated the rather Promethean humanism he had long cherished. Huxley, it seems, had 1377 shucked off racism in order to free eugenics from unwanted baggage rather than, like his 1378 American colleagues, treating the deconstruction of racism as doing in eugenics as 1379 well. Accordingly, Huxley argued that techno-scientific man must now take God’s 1380 place in directing evolution, thereby freeing humans from any residual need for religion 1381 (Smocovitis 2000; on Huxley’s humanism, Crook 2007; on his difference from R. A. 1382 Fisher, who thought the role of humans in directing evolution by eugenics was part of 1383 God’s plan and consistent with his Anglican faith, see Moore 2007). 1384 So doubly offensive was this speech to the general public, which heard about it from 1385 journalists accredited to the conference, that it stimulated the publication of Henry 1386 M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood (Morris and Whitcomb 1961; 1387 Smocovitis 2000). This book re-circulatedECTED the ‘‘scientific creationism’’ that had first been 1388 articulated by the Seventh Day Adventist George Ready Price in 1923. The fossil record, 1389 Price had argued, can be accounted for by Noah’s flood, mostly by correlating the remains 1390 of organisms found in higher geological strata with capacities, like swimming or climbing, 1391 for surviving the flood’s sudden onslaught a day or two longer than less able-bodied 1392 species. 1393 It was the opening shot in a new anti-Darwinian war after the long post-Scopes truce 1394 (Numbers 2006).

1395 8 When Did the Modern Synthesis Begin?

1396 Regrettably, a context-sensitive historiography of the Modern Synthesis equal to what has 1397 been achieved for many of the periods, figures, and events we have been reviewing still 1398 remains to be undertaken. Working from an assumption that population genetical Dar- 1399 winism is a matureUNCORR science, even if its methods differ from those of physics, historians of 1400 the Modern Synthesis, including evolutionary biologists who have put on historians’ hats, 1401 tend to assume that the Modern Synthesis is a scientific theory (Mayr and Provine 1980; 1402 Smocovitis 1996). They then argue about which version of the theory has the greatest 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1403 empirical validity and generalizability. Sidelined in these debates, or sometimes ascribed 1404 merely to the personal-sphere quirks or residual religious sensibilities of this or that 1405 contributor to the Synthesis (Ruse 1999, 2006), is any concerted focus on the fact that 1406 population genetical Darwinism of every stripe has always been so immersed in issues 1407 posed by Darwin’s bad name that its history has been internally as well as externally 1408 shaped by responses to public sphere debates. It does not seem to me credible, for example, 1409 that Dobzhansky would have pursued his theory of balancing selection if he had not been 1410 aiming to beat back eugenics. 1411 A history written along these lines will draw from the resources of contemporary Author Proof 1412 science studies. It will take the stress Synthesis historians lay on having a powerful general 1413 theory as part of what has to be explained. It will probably note that the logical empiricist 1414 and falsificationist conceptions of scientific methodology that prevailed in university- 1415 dominated post-World War II epistemological ecology provided strong incentives for 1416 evolutionary biologists, along with everyone else, to present themselves as in possession of 1417 a mathematized, predictive theory. If they were not capable of doing that for themselves 1418 philosophers of science were willing and able to do it for them.16 1419 In saying that the deductivist ideal implied in verificationism and falsificationism has 1420 proven to be a dubious guide to the history and practice of science generally and of 1421 evolutionary science in particular, we need not call into questionPROOF the empirical knowledge 1422 that has been produced by means of the conceptual frameworks and methodological tools 1423 developed by twentieth-century population genetics. The stock of knowledge has grown 1424 tremendously under its care. The conceptual frameworks by means of which this solid 1425 empirical knowledge has been acquired, however, and in which it is stored, have much 1426 more complex relationships to the public sphere settings in which they arose and to which 1427 their adherents are eager to address themselves, as the Chicago centennial celebration 1428 shows. They always exceed the evidence that supports them and the cases they explain, and 1429 when they do it is always in the direction of ideology. 1430 Once we have refocused historical inquiry in this way, even a question as seemingly 1431 simple as when the Synthesis began turns out to be weightier and more rhetorically charged 1432 than one might think. That is because the answer dictates a host of present-day ideological 1433 inclusions and exclusions. Advocates ofECTED the genocentic Darwinism that emerged in the 1434 1970s, for example, which asserted that the advent of molecular genetics has now made 1435 possible a new, gene-centered version of the Synthesis, tend to assume that the Synthesis 1436 consists largely of the theory set forth by Fisher in his Genetical Theory of Natural 1437 Selection plus molecular genetics and minus eugenics. What got synthesized on this 1438 account were natural selection and genetics. This would put the beginning point in 1930. 1439 Richard Dawkins, father of the ‘‘selfish gene hypothesis,’’ shares this view of the history 1440 of the Modern Synthesis. He has written that Fisher was the greatest biologist of the

16 The ‘‘under-laborer’s’’ task of showing that population genetical Darwinism meets logical empiricist or falsificationist criteria for mature science gave rise to the field of analytic philosophy of biology. Among those who attempted to supply the required formalizations were Mary Williams, Michael Ruse, and David Hull. Alexander Rosenberg has pushed the enterprise so doggedly that he has become a reliable witness to the widespread consensus among philosophers of biology that the relevant formalizations simply can not be brought to bear on the factual claims that are supposed to be deducible from them (Rosenberg 2007). It follows either that contemporary evolutionary biology is not a science or that it is but has its own standards. Analytic philosophersUNCORR of biology have generally come to agree with the second option. If this is the case, however, evolutionary biology by its very existence constitutes a falsification of the way science as such has been demarcated by the physics-inspired standards encoded into logical empiricism and Popperian falsifi- cationism. No wonder that high priests of physics are inclined to call evolutionary science into question (Weinberg 1992, for example). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1441 twentieth century (Dawkins 1989, pp. ix, 124, 329). From his perspective, this is not an odd 1442 claim. Fisher was as genocentric, gradualist, and adaptationist as Dawkins himself. He, too, 1443 was a Darwinian of the strict observance. If he had known about DNA, Fisher would 1444 probably have approved of Dawkins’s latter-day idea that the phenotypic traits of organ- 1445 isms are merely vehicles for the perpetuation and multiplication of their genes, which are 1446 simply self-replicating chunks of DNA that survive meiotic division by coding for the 1447 distinct traits that protect them. Moreover, Fisher, working closely with Oxford’s E. P. 1448 Ford, inspired the Oxford School, of which Dawkins is heir, to look for adaptationist 1449 explanations of traits that, especially after the rise of mutationism, had been assumed to be Author Proof 1450 non-adaptive. The working assumption of this effort was that until proven otherwise a trait 1451 should be presumed to be an adaptation underwritten by an identifiable set of genes.17 By 1452 giving it a genealogy that reached back to Fisher (rather than to Wright and Dobzhansky) 1453 Dawkins positioned his selfish gene hypothesis as the empirical and logical culmination of 1454 the Synthesis that began in 1930. Having done so, he could argue that anyone who departed 1455 from Fisher-based interpretations of Darwinism was to that extent not a Darwinian at all. 1456 The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, who seasoned his appeals to natural 1457 selection with excessively saltationist supplements to explain the origin of higher taxa—a 1458 topic on which the British adaptationists have had little to say—was excommunicated on 1459 these very grounds. PROOF 1460 By contrast, the Modern Synthesis that Huxley proclaimed in 1942 presented itself not 1461 as a theoretical synthesis of genetics and natural selection—it took that for granted—but 1462 rather as a theory that was able to integrate all the biological disciplines by a judicious use 1463 of the full array of processes that affect the distribution of genes in populations: not just 1464 amplification and fixation by selection, but by mutation pressure, genetic drift, and gene 1465 flow between populations as well (Huxley 1942, p. 1). Interestingly, the idea of unifying 1466 biology around evolution had been undertaken earlier by Huxley’s famous grandfather, 1467 who wrote the first biology textbook. Previously one had studied botany, zoology, phys- 1468 iology, anatomy, and so forth. There were no biology departments because there was no

17 The idea that most evolved traits are adaptations—the adaptationist idea—took root at Oxford in the late nineteenth century not as a materialist, or evenECTED phenomenalist, idea, but under the influence of the philo- sophical idealism of T. H. Green. Its founding figures, Edward Poulton, Frederick Dixey, and Aubrey Moore, were looking for an evolutionary argument from design that did not use Asa Gray’s questionable idea that God rigs the direction in which variation flows (England 2001). They downplayed the element of contingency and chance that had scandalized the pious by treating natural selection as a universally valid natural law. This supposed law could explain the supposed fact of the general adaptedness of organisms. Although they did not think that universal adaptedness proved the existence and providence of God, the members of the Oxford School did think that with a little help from philosophical monism the law of natural selection could also be viewed, if one wished, as divine action. The turn toward population genetics taken by this tradition was facilitated by the working relation between Fisher and Ford. But its old idealist conceptual framework and its natural-theological hermeneutic tended to immunize the Oxford school against Fisher’s eugenics. On the surface, the overtly materialist cast of Dawkins’s work belies the theological and philosophical origin of the adaptationist school that he now leads. Nonetheless, Dawkins still shares with his predecessors a Paleyeque conviction that there is a strong analogy between organisms and artifacts and that natural selection should be viewed as design, albeit without a designer. Hence the intensity of his argument against theism. Although he is a Cambridge man, the arguments of Simon Conwy Morris, the world’s leading authority on the BurgessUNCORR shale fossils, about the consistency of religion and Darwinian evolution have a similar cast to those of the early Oxford school. Protesting against Gould’s saltationist spin on his work, Morris places great weight on evolutionary convergence to explain the universality of adaptation and to validate pro- gressive trends in evolution. Morris, moreover, is at least as open as Aubrey Moore to natural theological musings (See Gould 1982; Morris 2008). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1469 field called biology. The elder Huxley tried to invent one by using evolution to unify the 1470 fields. His grandson followed suit. Aware that neither Fisher nor the Oxford school had 1471 been able to explain speciation, even if they were good at finding and explaining adap- 1472 tations, the younger Huxley made much use of Dobzhansky’s (1937) Genetics and the 1473 Origin of Species, which addressed this topic by using Wright’s analysis of how drift, 1474 selection, and isolation worked together in both adaptation and the formation of new 1475 species. 1476 On this dominantly American view, the Synthesis began in 1937, when the 1st edition of 1477 Dobzhansky’s book appeared. It was defined by its pluralism about the various processes of Author Proof 1478 genetic change and the belief these forces might combine differently at different levels of 1479 the biological hierarchy. Writing at a time when the selfish gene movement and Socio- 1480 biology were exerting influence in America, Gould lamented what he called ‘‘the adapt- 1481 ationist hardening of the synthesis’’ (Gould 1983). He found the roots of this hardening in 1482 the Oxford school’s post-war adaptationist studies. Accordingly, the very innovations that 1483 neo-Fisherians like Dawkins regarded as the culmination of the Modern Synthesis Gould 1484 took be tarnishing and diminishing it. To compensate for this decline Gould argued that in 1485 order to explain the origin of the basic body plans of higher taxa—the task now at hand, 1486 speciation having been fairly well analyzed—the Modern Synthesis would have to be 1487 ‘‘expanded’’ to allow for different combinations of forces operatingPROOF at genetic, cellular, 1488 organismic, demic, specific, and higher levels (Gould 1983, 1997b). In saying this, Gould 1489 was relying on conceptions of the biological hierarchy that Mayr, Dobzhansky, and 1490 Simpson had already advanced in the course of defending the autonomy of evolutionary 1491 biology from the reductionist impulses of molecular geneticists. 1492 It is probably not too much to say that the polemical edge of Gould’s ‘‘hardening of the 1493 Synthesis’’ was an early sign of the steadily growing importation since the mid-1960s of 1494 British population-genetical Darwinism into the American genetic Darwinism that Huxley 1495 had earlier exported to Britain.18 In the process, Dobzhansky’s and Mayr’s shared stress on 1496 the dynamically adaptive states of whole organisms in virtue of the dynamically balanced 1497 suites of co-adapted genes that fit them for constantly changing, usually degrading, 1498 environments began to be displaced by a traditional, more static stress on distinct adap- 1499 tations that are in principle caused by anECTED identifiable set of genes.19 1500 Because fragmentation of the organism into a set of discretely identifiable, separately 1501 optimizable traits was closely linked with Sociobiology, it provoked a notorious protest by 1502 Gould and Dobzhansky’s student Richard Lewontin. Their highly rhetorical 1979 review 1503 essay ‘‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’’ is evidence of 1504 incommensurability between the American and British tendencies strong enough, in my 1505 judgment, to call into question the continuity between what Huxley and Dobzhansky meant 1506 by the Modern Synthesis and what advocates of contemporary genocentric adaptationism

18 William Hamilton’s mathematics of inclusive fitness and kin selection were an important technical stimulus to this shift. 19 Ernst Mayr, the most long lived, prolific, and polemical of the makers of the Modern Synthesis, played an equivocal role in the hardening of the Synthesis. His holistic picture of the genome was similar to Dobz- hansky’s. But he shifted the accent from genotypes—the ground on which Wright and Dobzhansky fought it out with Fisher—to a wholistic conception of organisms in order to bring natural historians, biogeographers like himself, paleontologists,UNCORR and systematists on board the Modern Synthesis. So important was this in Mayr’s view that with more than a little chutzpah he actually dated the origin of the Synthesis no earlier than 1947, when he himself called a conference to seal the deal (Mayr and Provine 1981). Although he was the very opposite of a genocentric reductionist, Mayr was by his own lights an adaptationist. So he offered no resistance to the hardening and did not lift a finger to help Gould when he called it into question. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1507 mean. Gould and Lewontin’s tirade seems, however, to have had little effect. In both 1508 technical and public sphere discourses, genocentric adaptationism, especially as projected 1509 into the human sciences by Evolutionary Psychology, now seems to be the triumphant 1510 culmination of the Darwinian research tradition, provoking renewed protests from the new 1511 creationists. As for Gould and Lewontin, they have been elevated, or rather relegated, to 1512 the questionable status of quirky geniuses and grouchy whiners. 1513 Because they want to stress the continuity of the Darwinian tradition, genocentric 1514 adaptationists seek to attach their own work the scientific prestige that by dint of hard work 1515 accrued to the Modern Synthesis. They position themselves as its culmination. In doing so, Author Proof 1516 however, genocentric adaptationists implicitly and sometimes explicitly characterize the 1517 Synthesis merely as the integration of Mendelian and by extension molecular genetics with 1518 natural selection. This is Whig history with a vengeance. It carries on Fisher’s legacy by 1519 arrogating to itself a name that was originally devised to contest that legacy and for a very 1520 long time effectively did so.

1521 9 Has the Modern Synthesis Ended? The Revival of Evolutionary 1522 Developmentalism PROOF 1523 A second set of open questions about the temporal boundaries of the Modern Synthesis 1524 arises from tensions between current efforts to understand the genetic architecture of basic 1525 body plans and the exclusion at the very moment of its origin of developmental biology 1526 from both tendencies in genetic Darwinism, British and American. There were reasons for 1527 its exclusion. Most of its adepts were hostile to genetics and prone to Lamarckism. Yet the 1528 makers of the Modern Synthesis scored points off embryologists in part to make them- 1529 selves look (to themselves as well as the outside world) more unified than they were and 1530 closer than they were to making population genetics into a universal theory of evolution. 1531 They were especially hard on embryologists who were thinking about genes. Mayr treated 1532 Richard Goldschmitt as a whipping boy. Dobzhansky co-opted Ivan Schmalhausen’s ideas. 1533 He also unfairly marginalized Conrad Waddington, the father of developmental genetics, 1534 when Waddington rightly predicted thatECTED eventually evolutionary genetics would have to 1535 come back from population genetics to more basic questions about how organic form 1536 emerges from two cells (Waddington 1941, 1957; Gilbert 1994; Wilkins 2008). When 1537 population geneticists took that prospect to be so distant that it could safely be ignored, 1538 developmental biologists stood aside and waited for developmental genetics to mature. It 1539 was a long wait. In recent years, however, Waddington’s prophecy has begun to come 1540 true—so true that it is possible to argue that the Modern Synthesis, wherever it may have 1541 begun, has reached a point where it may be giving way either to a new general view of 1542 evolutionary processes or to a more fractious disciplinary pluralism. 1543 To understand why, we must appreciate the enormous changes in the gene concept and 1544 its ontological status across what Evelyn Fox Keller has called ‘‘the century of the gene’’ 1545 (Keller 2000). In 1909, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Origin’s publi- 1546 cation, genes were nothing more than theoretical entities invoked to explain Mendelian 1547 ratios. By the centenary celebration in 1959 they were physical entities—stretches of DNA 1548 located on chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell—that explained phenotypic trait 1549 distributionsUNCORR in populations, presumably by instructed links between DNA, RNA, the 1550 amino acids they code for, and the proteins into which these amino acids fold up. By 2009, 1551 genes were physical entities that can be directly observed and manipulated. Rather than 1552 inferring their existence from phenotypic changes, geneticists are now knocking out bits of 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1553 DNA sequence from model organisms in order to determine their phenotypic effects and 1554 functions. 1555 This process has defeated any expectations that genes would be correlated to most traits 1556 in a linear way. Genes turn out to be complex, mobile, interactive, and highly conserved 1557 across widely separated lineages. The structural genes of which Watson and Crick made so 1558 much, which code for the amino acids that fold up into proteins, account for only a small 1559 percentage of the total genome. A large chunk of the genome consists of now silenced 1560 genes that are relics of pitched battles with viruses and other invaders and parasites in a 1561 long, long history, like the burnt-out tanks that littered the battlefield at El Alamein. These Author Proof 1562 dead adaptations are complemented by regulatory genes that are still fighting, telling other 1563 genes when to turn on and off. 1564 In turning genes on and off, regulatory genes are open to a variety of influences. They 1565 are open, for example, to heritable chemical marking by methylation and other intracellular 1566 influences as well as to influences from the environment.20 Cells seldom use any gene ‘‘as 1567 it,’’ but in connection with micro RNAs, manipulate their stored information so extensively 1568 and in such a context-sensitive way that it is cells, not genes, that seem to be the crucial 1569 agents in biological process as a whole. The mutual interactions among various ‘‘devel- 1570 opmental resources’’ reveal the genome to be not a set of instructions like a card-punched 1571 Jacquard loom or the early computer programs from which thePROOF notion of ‘‘genetic pro- 1572 gram’’ got its inspiration, but rather part of a self-organizing developmental process that 1573 gives us at long last the answer to Waddington’s question about how organic form emerges 1574 and to Gould’s question about the origin of basic body plans. ‘‘The gene,’’ writes Keller, 1575 ‘‘is part and parcel of processes defined and brought into existence by the action of a 1576 complex self-regulating dynamical system in which and for which the inherited DNA 1577 provide a crucial and absolutely indispensible raw material, but no more than that (Keller 1578 2000, p. 71). This does not mean, at least for the most part, that Crick’s updated version of 1579 Weismann’s barrier, according to which information flows from DNA but not into it, is 1580 false. Genes are even more rigid, stable, and heritable than Crick thought. It is rather that 1581 evolution need not wait upon spontaneous changes in the genetic material, rendering 1582 Crick’s once categorical ‘‘Central Dogma of Molecular Biology’’ not false, but irrelevant. 1583 This new, but at the same time veryECTED old, epigenetic picture of organisms and their 1584 relation to evolutionary change threatens to make the Modern Synthesis on any interpre- 1585 tation or appropriation of it either trivially true or false. No matter how enriched our 1586 conception of the organism becomes it will remain minimally consistent with Darwinism 1587 so long as we stipulate that variation, no matter where it comes from, must be differentially 1588 amplified across a series of generations before it can count as either adaptation or evo- 1589 lution. We are not talking about a pending change in which a century of achievement by 1590 genetical Darwinism is shown to be illusory. The problem is that mere consistency does not

20 Methylation of genes has come to be called ‘epigenetics,’ in the sense of something that supervenes on genetics. The use of this term can be confusing. Waddington used the term ‘epigenetic’ to refer to the developmental process as turning inherited genes on and off. The new usage changes that meaning by suggesting that development also involves heritable factors that are not genes. To the extent that this is true contemporary epigenetics harks back an even older, eighteenth century sense of the term epigenesis, which conceived of organismsUNCORR as self-organizing emergent processes, not expressions of a coded genetic program. Because she identifies Darwinism with neo-Darwinism, which was supposed to rule such things out, and because she notes that epigenetical marking and other phenomena are open to exogenous influences, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb sometime talk about ‘‘the Lamarckian dimension’’ (Jablonka and Lamb 1995; see also Gilbert 2008). 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1591 make for very robust explanations and certainly does not make for an adequate general 1592 theory. 1593 The source of the problem, as Waddington realized long ago, is that the metaphor of 1594 mutation, selection, migration, and genetic drift as population genetical ‘‘forces’’ screens 1595 off the peculiarities of organisms as developmental processes (Waddington 1957; Wilkins 1596 2008). In principle, such forces could work on entities of any and all sorts so long as they 1597 exhibit differential retention of heritable variation. Dawkins and Dennett have embraced 1598 that very point explicitly in attempting to tell the public that their versions of Darwinism do 1599 indeed constitute a general theory of evolutionary processes (Dawkins 1996, Dennett Author Proof 1600 1995). Yet answers to the most pressing questions about evolution depend on facts about 1601 organisms qua organism and on having a more processive picture of their nature than the 1602 physics-inspired language of ‘‘forces’’ can possibly provide.21 1603 This has presented a pretty problem to contemporary philosophers of biology. Some 1604 have pointed to the duck-rabbit relativity of explanations in order to make available 1605 evolutionary-developmentalist styles of explanation whose long productive history went 1606 recessive with the emergence of the Modern Synthesis but are again coming into view 1607 (Amundson 2005). Others have worked hard to validate the organism by undermining the 1608 causal relevance of population genetical ‘‘forces.’’ Are not these so-called forces just inert 1609 statistical summaries of events and processes actually occurringPROOF in individual organisms 1610 (Matthen and Ariew 2002)? Are not variations in developmental cycles, rather than their 1611 subsequent distribution in populations, the proper causes of evolution (Walsh 2006a, b)? 1612 Perhaps we can split methodological hairs and say that changes in the self-development of 1613 organic form provide the causes of evolution, but selection provides the explanation. But 1614 what would that mean? These questions carry a certain frisson because if selection is more 1615 or less irrelevant we will be leaving the generous boundaries of the Darwinian tradition 1616 altogether. In these respects, the current situation is somewhat analogous to the situation a 1617 hundred years ago, when under a certain description Darwinism was thought to be on its 1618 deathbed. 1619 At least in part, the resolution of these questions depends, I believe, on which history of 1620 the Modern Synthesis one swears fealty to. ‘‘Evo–devo,’’ as it is called, is flatly incon- 1621 sistent with the currently ascendant genocentricECTED adaptationism. If one has a richly devel- 1622 opmental conception of the organism one cannot credibly assign as large a causal role to 1623 self-replicating genes as Dawkins does. No one knows this better than Dawkins himself. 1624 Thus he has as responded to the return by way of epigenetic inheritance to an older 1625 epigenetic conception of the organism as a self-organizing process by heaping scorn on it. 1626 ‘‘Epigenetics,’’ he writes, ‘‘makes for an unpropitious start, associated as it (no doubt 1627 unfairly) has become with obscurantism among biologists. The term should be reserved for 1628 an historical school of embryology, hard to define except as a nebulous antonym of 1629 preformationist.’’ By ‘‘historical’’ Dawkins means outdated; by ‘‘obscurantism’’ he means 1630 mystically vague and unscientific. The fact that obscurely preformationist elements lurk in 1631 his own theory, which depends on the idea that organisms are the output of genetic 1632 programs, Dawkins does not, of course, mention. 1633 The widespread idea that evo–devo and the Modern Synthesis are mutually exclusive 1634 derives largely from the shared assumption of both parties that genocentric selectionism is 1635 the most advanced, indeed the definitive, articulation of the Synthesis. I have already called 1636 that assumptionUNCORR into question. The assumption can be further loosened by recognizing that

21 This is why developmental biologists, both functional and evolutionary, have tended throughout to encode their views in process ontologies like Whitehead’s. 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1637 in spite of his mistreatment of Waddington in order to assert, without much warrant, that 1638 ‘‘evolution is change in gene frequencies’’ and that in consequence evolution above the 1639 species level is probably reducible to micro-evolution, there are pathways between 1640 Dobzhansky’s picture of evolutionary dynamics and evo–devo. After all, when one reads 1641 Dobzhansky one knows it is organisms he is talking about. He recognized that evolution is 1642 creative because variation is so plentiful. He recognized that it is plentiful because it comes 1643 from all manner of nuclear, chromosomal, cellular and other distinctly organic sources and 1644 processes. The new developmentalists can be construed as advancing this insight. More- 1645 over, Dobzhansky’s insistence on phenotypic plasticity was pretty much lifted from Author Proof 1646 Schmalhausen and Waddington, albeit recoded in a way that enabled him to avoid the 1647 Lamarckian rhetoric that he rather unfairly ascribed to the latter. It would not take too 1648 much to set the record straight. Scott Gilbert, for one, has been doing so for some time 1649 (Gilbert 1994; Gilbert and Epel 2008).

1650 9.1 Creationism Again

1651 The contemporary interface between Darwinism and religion differs from the period of the 1652 Scopes trial, and even the situation in 1959, in part because of post-Sputnik efforts to use 1653 high school and college classrooms to impart a minimal knowledgePROOF of scientific method to 1654 the population. This effort did manage to instill a simplistic version of the logical 1655 empiricist conception of ‘‘the scientific method’’ into a large number of people. But that is 1656 just the problem. When it comes to teaching evolution, this picture of scientific method is 1657 too simplistic to even begin to account for evolutionary processes and the evidence for 1658 them. Accordingly, it favors overly simplified versions of genetic Darwinism that leave 1659 themselves wide open to the clever table-turning of new creationists like the lawyerly 1660 Phillip Johnson or the Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe, who then cheerfully use 1661 logical empiricist, simple falsificationist, and inference-to-the-best explanation criteria to 1662 call Darwinism so described into question. These people are delighted to engage in court 1663 fights aimed at placing neo-creationism into the schools on the arid battlefield of scientific 1664 method. By doing so they deflect attention from the social, political, and theological 1665 contexts that inform everything they say—notECTED least from the fact that changes in their own 1666 claims have demonstrably been and in the future will predictably be driven by whatever 1667 wiggle-room has been left open after the last court decision rather than by anything that 1668 could conceivably count as scientific evidence. 1669 Unfortunately, Darwin’s defenders in these court battles usually collude in playing the 1670 same depressingly inane game. Darwinism, they are always saying, is up-to-date science. It 1671 conforms to the comic book picture of scientific method that is the coin of the realm. It has 1672 been steadily accumulating knowledge in ways that qualify it as a cumulative research 1673 program. Its advocates can dream of a ‘‘final theory’’ as plausibly as physicists can. 1674 If the ups and downs of Darwinism that I have recounted play no role in this genre of 1675 testimony it is because Darwinism’s expert witnesses typically look at the development of 1676 evolutionary theory from the perspective of the disciplinary histories that were part of their 1677 own scientific socialization. If they know its actual history well enough to know better, as 1678 they sometimes do, they will keep what they know to themselves. They have every reason 1679 to do so. Ironically, so well has the folk version of simplistic empiricism about ‘‘scientific 1680 method’’ beenUNCORR internalized into the post-Sputnik public sphere that, rather than reading 1681 Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions as attacking this view of scientific method, 1682 students usually read it as expressing mere skepticism about the scientific objectivity with 1683 whose norms they are already familiar. Nor do many post-Kuhnian social constructionists 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK D. J. Depew

1684 do anything counter this impression. In fact, some of them actually play into it. Under such 1685 conditions, portraying evolutionary science in any way that seems not to fit the model of 1686 well-confirmed science whose rudiments people, including journalists, learned in school 1687 generates in most audiences not a more complex conception of scientific inquiry suited to 1688 an inherently complex subject, but a sense that Darwinism is not really a science at all, but 1689 instead a world view or secular religion. In sum, the strenuous efforts that have been made 1690 to place genetic Darwinism into the schools by enlightening the public about how science 1691 works have backfired. When it comes to evolution they have led to very opposite of what 1692 was aimed at and anticipated. Author Proof 1693 For the new creationists these epistemological follies are an exploitable resource. When 1694 Intelligent Design theorists argue that some traits are too complex to have evolved by 1695 natural selection they do not mean to deny that many other traits have. They merely want to 1696 highlight what they view as materialist hand-waving about the origin of life and early 1697 cellular metabolism (Behe 1996). They should, of course, be held responsible by their 1698 scientific peers for implausibly suggesting that the limitations of one variant of one 1699 research program within the larger Darwinian tradition, which is itself but one of several 1700 traditions in evolutionary natural history, is enough to threaten the general interconnec- 1701 tedness of the natural sciences by transcendental intervention without causing the whole 1702 fabric to fall apart. It is far more plausible to conclude that problemsPROOF about the origin of life 1703 and cellular evolution will sooner or later be solved by new facts, theories, and paradigms 1704 without violating the presumptions of methodological naturalism. 1705 Intelligent design advocates know full well, however, that for the primary audience to 1706 which they are playing the very point is to entertain the fantasy that one small chink in the 1707 armor of evolutionary science will send the whole framework crashing down. Driven as it 1708 is personal-sphere anxieties about the meaning of life and, like the people of Dayton, 1709 Tennessee, by public-sphere resentments that local schools have been colonized by sci- 1710 entific elites, they would like nothing better than to see science reconceived simply as a 1711 large technological apparatus designed to make life better without entailing a rival theory 1712 of the world to the theocentrism they prefer. Would contemporary Intelligent Design 1713 theorists, I ask, be willing to take a stand against those who embrace their writings in this 1714 fideist spirit? I doubt it. They know whatECTED side their bread is buttered on. 1715 One is left to imagine the effect of introducing the new developmentalism into so 1716 unstable and incendiary a rhetorical situation as the one in which we now find ourselves. 1717 Having heard for so long that Darwinism is as empirical, cumulative, and value-free as 1718 other mature sciences, the introduction of new developmentalist discoveries and themes 1719 into college and high school curricula is sure to provide Darwinism’s old enemies with yet 1720 another occasion to call into question its credentials as a science and once again to cast 1721 doubt on the reality of evolution itself. 1722 Would it not be wiser under these circumstances to follow Gould’s lead by thinking 1723 highly enough of the public to let them in on complex account of how controversy within, 1724 between, and across the spheres of discourse? Let me conclude with a suggestion about 1725 how to do this, a suggestion that seems to me almost to follow from the story I have told. 1726 I doubt whether skeptics about evolution can open themselves to the evidence for, 1727 let alone the wonders of, evolutionary inquiry until and unless they have become aware of 1728 and worked through the fraught, even traumatic history of controversies that I have been 1729 recounting inUNCORR this essay. They must learn where their own questions are coming from 1730 before they can fruitfully ask them. Nor will scientists and their programmatically secu- 1731 larist allies, inheritors as it were of the spirit of Thomas Huxley, appreciate the anxieties 1732 that lie behind this skepticism until they do the same thing. If they do not reflectively work 123 Journal : Small 11191 Dispatch : 17-7-2009 Pages : 44 Article No. : 9202 h LE h TYPESET MS Code : SCED453 h44CP h DISK Darwinian Controversies

1733 through the history of evolutionary controversies they will assume that they are being 1734 asked to give empirical proof of evolution by natural selection and will feel puzzled when, 1735 the required proofs having been tendered, the questions and the questioners remain hostile. 1736 I suspect that once the intersections between Darwinism’s public, personal, and technical 1737 sides have been made plain, however, evolutionary biology will be both more teachable 1738 and more learnable. This is not a matter of teaching the controversies as a way of teaching 1739 biology, or worse instead of biology. At the same time, it is not a call simply to teach 1740 biology better, though that is always a good idea. It is instead a call for critical argu- 1741 mentation classes that do not restrict themselves to simple examples of content-neutral Author Proof 1742 techniques, whether formally logical or informally argumentative, but call for deep 1743 engagement at every educational level with subject matters that are genuinely troublesome 1744 to the audiences address, not the least important of which is evolution.

1745 Acknowledgments My thanks to the following for valuable help in preparing this essay: Kostas 1746 Kampourakis, Jim Moore, David Rudge, Stan Salthe, and Bruce Weber. 1747 1748 References PROOF 1749 Adams M (1994) The evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1750 Amundson R (2005) The changing role of the embryo in evolutionary thought. Cambridge University Press, 1751 Cambridge 1752 Bannister R (1988) Social Darwinism: science and myth in anglo-american social thought, 2nd edn. 1753 University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1754 Barkow JH, Cosmides L, Tooby J (eds) (1991) The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the gen- 1755 eration of culture. Oxford University Press, New York 1756 Barlow N (ed) (1958) The autobiography of Charles Darwin. Collins, London 1757 Barrett P, Gautrey P, Herbert S, Kohn D, Smiths S (eds) (1987) Charles Darwin’s notebooks, 1836–1844. 1758 Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1759 Beatty J (1994) Dobzhansky and the biology of democracy: the moral and political significance of genetic 1760 variation. In: Adams M (ed) The evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Princeton University Press, 1761 Princeton, pp 195–218 1762 Beer G, Kegan P (2000) Darwin’s plots, 2nd edn. Routledge, London 1763 Behe M (1996) Darwin’s black box. Free, New York 1764 Black E (2003) War against the weak: eugenicsECTED and America’s campaign to create a master race. Four Walls 1765 Eight Windows, New York 1766 Brook J, Osler M, Van der Meer J (eds) (2001) Science in theistic contexts. Osiris 16 (special issue) 1767 Brooke JH (1991) Science and religion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1768 Brooke JH (2001) The Wilberforce-Huxley debate: why did it happen? Sci Christ Belief 13:127–141 1769 Browne J (1996) Charles Darwin: voyaging. Knopf, New York 1770 Browne J (2002) Charles Darwin: the power of place. Knopf, New York 1771 Bryan WJ (1905) Prince of peace. Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1772 Burkhardt F et al (eds) (1985) The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge University Press, 1773 Cambridge 1774 Chambers R (1994) Vestiges of natural history of creation and other evolutionary writings. University of 1775 Chicago Press, Chicago 1776 Crook P (1984) Benjamin Kidd: portrait of a social Darwinist. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1777 Crook P (1994) Darwinism, war and history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1778 Crook P (2007) Darwin’s coat tails: essays on social Darwinism. Peter Lang, New York 1779 Darwin C (1871) The descent of man. John Murray, London 1780 Darwin C (1964) On the origin of species. Facsimile first edn. Mayr E (introduction). Harvard University 1781 Press, Cambridge 1782 Dawkins R (1989)UNCORR The selfish gene, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1783 Dawkins R (1996) The blind watchmaker. W.W. Norton, New York 1784 Dawkins R (2006) The god delusion. Houghton Mifflin, New York 1785 Dembski W (1999) Intelligent design: the bridge between science & theology. InterVarsity, Downers Grove

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