Darwinism around the world

Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender. Edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse. Cambridge University Press. 1999. xi + 300 pp. ISBN 0-521-62071-6 (hardback). I have a hanging on my living room wall a cartoon published in 1882 in the New York magazine Puck. Entitled ‘A Sun of the Nineteenth Century’, the cartoon depicts the face of the recently deceased Charles Darwin as the sun, radiating golden light and sweeping away dark clouds of religious conservatism, represented by the horrified faces of assorted bishops, rabbis and other clerics. The cartoon nicely summarizes the late 19th century view of the conflict between religion and science, at least from the viewpoint of enlightened scientific liberalism. The real story, of course, is far more complicated. There were, in fact, clerics who readily accepted Darwinism and scientists who did not, and many points of view in between. This volume, edited by two leading scholars working at the interface between the history of science and the history of religion, explores the reception and dissemination of Darwinism from different regional, ethnic, religious and gender perspectives. There already is an enormous literature on Darwinism and religion. Perhaps the best known work is Moore's (1979) masterful synthesis of Protestant responses to Darwinism in England and the United States in the last three decades of the 19th century. David Livingtone and Jon Roberts, both of whom contributed to the current volume, earlier examined Protestant and Evangelical responses to Darwinism in some detail (Livingstone, 1987; Roberts, 1988). There also have been comparative studies of the reception of Darwinism in different countries, most notably a volume edited by Glick (1974) more than 25 years ago and several contributions in Kohn (1985). A major difference between these previous comparative treatments and the current volume is that the former focused heavily on the responses of scientists to Darwinism, as influenced by regional and religious backgrounds, whereas the current volume focuses more on responses of religious and social thinkers to developments in biology. Indeed, with some exceptions, biologists who normally read this journal may find many of the contributions to this volume somewhat light on science and heavy on religious and social thinking. Nevertheless, for those interested in the historical reception and dissemination of Darwinian ideas, the book is a valuable contribution. The influence of regional cultural differences and religious backgrounds on the reception of Darwinism take precedence here, with race and gender issues being a relatively minor part of the book. The book is derived from a conference held in New Zealand in 1994, so it is not surprising to find treatments of regions not often discussed in previous surveys of Darwinism, most notably New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The focus remains very much on the English-speaking world. There is little here about responses to Darwinism in Europe, for example. Race and gender issues enter the picture in part of John Stenhouse's chapter on New Zealand that deals with the influence of Darwinism on attitudes towards the Maori, in a chapter by Eric Anderson on responses of African Americans to Darwinism and a chapter by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Mark R. Jorgensen on the responses of women to evolutionary ideology. A recurrent theme throughout the book is the influence of regional cultural and religious differences on the responses of religious and social thinkers, and to some extent, working scientists, to Darwinian biology. Despite a common cultural, linguistic and political heritage, English-speaking thinkers in England, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand did not necessarily react to Darwinism in exactly the same way, and in several chapters, the authors attempt to identify reasons for regional differences. In some instances, the academic jargon becomes a bit heavy. Take, for example, the following passage from David Livingstone's investigation of responses of conservative Presbyterian leaders to Darwinism in three places, Princeton, New Jersey; Belfast, Northern Ireland; and Edinburgh, Scotland: ‘My suspicion is that the project of reconstructing the historical relations between science and religion might similarly benefit from a localizing strategy that seeks to situate responses or encounters in their respective socio-spatial settings’ (p. 8). In fairness to Prof. Livingstone, most of the remainder of his chapter is a reasonably straightforward and clearly written analysis of regional differences in the response to Darwinism. Nevertheless, this sort of writing, which crops up elsewhere in the book, does little to enhance the accessibility of the book to readers not already immersed in the literature in this field. In addition to Livingstone's treatment of Presbyterian responses to Darwinism, several other chapters focus mainly on the thinking of religious leaders, including a chapter by Jon Roberts on American Protestants, one by R. Scott Appleby on Catholic reactions, and another by Marc Swetlitz on American Jewish responses. A chapter on Darwinism in the American South, by Ronald L. Numbers and Lester D. Stephens, which appeared earlier in a book by Numbers (1998), also focuses mainly on religious issues, but here the emphasis is more on academics at various colleges around the South, including biologists and geologists, and the extent to which they incorporated evolutionary thinking into their teaching. All of these chapters together make clear that the responses of different religious communities to Darwinism often developed at different rates, and in some cases, went in opposite directions. Among many Protestant and Jewish thinkers, for example, there was relatively little reaction to Darwinism in the first 10 years after the publication of the Origin of Species, but opposition among conservative thinkers began to harden in the 1870s. At the same time, more liberal Protestant intellectuals began to follow the lead of scientists in accepting evolution, and this lead to attempts to rewrite theological doctrine to reconcile science and religion. In the American Jewish community, on the other hand, acceptance of evolution by more liberal intellectuals did not result in a major movement to transform theology, but rather led to evolutionary ideas being used to support pre-existing liberal theological views. Several of the other chapters, particularly those with a regional focus, go into more detail about the thinking of working scientists and their reaction to Darwinism, although in many cases this too was coloured by their religious beliefs. For example, John Stenhouse discusses reactions to Darwinism in the scientific community in New Zealand, a community that had barely come into existence at the time the Origin was published. In a sense, New Zealanders were in on the ground floor of the Darwinism debate. Stenhouse suggests that incorporation of Darwinian ideas into New Zealand science was relatively rapid because the young colony simply lacked an entrenched, conservative scientific establishment to lead the opposition. Indeed, several of the leading natural scientists in New Zealand already were supporters of Darwinism when they arrived in the 1860s. Ironically, although New Zealand scientists almost universally took what we might consider the liberal position, acceptance of Darwinian evolution, that same acceptance led many scientists to use Darwinism to support the view that the native Maori were doomed to extinction in competition with superior European colonists. An interesting sidelight, not mentioned by Stenhouse, is that an early pre-Darwinian statement of natural selection appeared in an obscure book, Emigration Fields, published in 1839 by the Scottish writer Patrick Matthew (Matthew, 1839). The book was framed in part as an argument in favour of British colonization of New Zealand as a way to increase the vigour of the white race. Matthew anticipated later racist Darwinian approaches to the Maori by arguing that British colonists were justified in improving the efficient use of the land either by assimilating or displacing the native inhabitants (Wells, 1973). The final two chapters of the book shift from religious and geographical considerations to issues of race and gender. Eric D. Anderson documents the response of American blacks to Darwinism, or more accurately, the lack of response, from the publication of the Origin until World War I. He finds little evidence of a strong reaction, either negative or positive, from leading black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington. Even when Darwinian ideas were used by whites to justify racist treatment of blacks, most black writers did not denounce Darwinism as inherently racist. Indeed, a few, such as the obscure writer W. O. Thompson, actually argued the reverse, stating that evolution supported the notion of a common origin of all human races. What little opposition to Darwinism did occur among black writers appears to have come not from its association with racist ideology, but from the generally conservative theological views of many black churches. Nevertheless, reaction to Darwinism never reached the level of fundamentalist white creationists of the 1920s. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Mark R. Jorgensen explore responses of women, not so much to Darwinism per se, but to evolutionary ideology as influenced by Darwinism. Women writers concerned with promoting educational and other opportunities for women often reacted strongly to ideas about the physical and mental inferiority of women, initiated in part by Darwin in The Descent of Man and amplified by later writers such as Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Edward Drinker Cope, and Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson. Perhaps the most interesting writer discussed in this chapter is Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a Unitarian minister, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Women, and an enthusiastic proponent of evolution. She challenged male-centred Victorian views of Cope, Spencer and others who used Darwinism to support the idea that women were inherently less intelligent or less capable than men. Later feminist writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Eliza Burt Gamble, went even further, using evolutionary ideas to construct a type of feminist social Darwinism in which women, not men, possessed the characters necessary for human advancement. Whereas many of the other chapters in the book explore the ways in which pre-existing religious or social views coloured reactions to Darwinism, this chapter provides a more detailed examination of the way in which scientific ideas were directly integrated into social thinking. Overall, this book is likely to appeal more to historians of science and religion and social scientists than to evolutionary biologists. For those interested in the complexity of responses to Darwinism, however, it provides an enlightening summary of current research in the field.

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