Darwin and the Theory of Evolution/Chapter 2

by Carroll Lane Fenton

CHAPTER II

THE WAR OVER SPECIES

Darwin's diary, under the date of October 1, 1859, bears the entry, "Finished proofs (thirteen months and ten days) of Abstract on 'Origin of Species'; 1,250 copies printed. The first edition was published on November 24th, and all copies sold first day." On the 9th of December he and his family returned home from a visit to a water-cure establishment; the only later entry in the diary is, "During end of November and beginning of December employed in correcting for second” edition of 3,000 copies; multitude of letters."

There is a great deal implied in those two brief entries—more, even, than Darwin himself appears to have realized. In the first place, it is very unusual for an entire edition of a scientific book, even when that edition is only 1,250 copies, to be exhausted the day it appears. It is still more unusual for a second edition, nearly two and a half times as great as the first, to be called for within a month. Such things generally happen to but two classes of books: those that are very bad, such as most popular novels, and those that are almost unbelievably good. It is characteristic of the former that they are received with enthusiasm and acclaim; of the latter that they are welcomed by a few, suspected yet considered by many, and attacked by the majority of those who read them as well as by an equal or greater number who don't. And this is particularly true when the substance of the really great book is also the substance of long established tradition and prejudice, and the conclusions drawn are such as to contradict or seriously modify other conclusions reached thouands of years before, and cherished dearly by y the greater part of the human race.

Darwin was prepared for scepticism, disbelief, and attack, yet it is doubtful if he realized the magnitude of the upheaval that his book would cause. Even before the Origin officially was published the discussion began, for the paper of 1858 had aroused much interest. Everyone at all interested was impatiently waiting for the complete book; those who were on terms of friendship with the author, or had helped him in the work, received copies in advance. Of these Huxley in particular knew what was to come, perhaps with the instinct of a born fighter. On November 23, the day before the pole in of Species was put on sale, he wrote Darwin:

I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you. Depend upon it you have earned the lasting gratitude of thoughtful men. And as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead.

I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness.

Reviews of the book. began to appear in December, and continued in steadily increasing numbers. Some of them were favorable, such as the one three and a half columns long, which Huxley got into the London Times. Others were tolerant, but more were opposed. As Huxley warned, there was to be a great barking and yelping, not from scientific opponents alone, but from great religious groups who knew hardly the first essentials of biology, and cared little more than they knew. Thus in February of 1860 Darwin wrote his friend Hooker, "The stones are begining to fly. But Theology has more to do with these two attacks than Science. . . ." It was not long before almost every letter bore a reference to some review in which the critic had grossly misunderstood or wilfully distorted passage after passage of the Origin. In June the naturalist wrote Lyell that he was "weary of reviews."

The storm broke with full fury, however, at the June meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford. On Thursday, June 28, there was an argument between Owen, the anatomist, and Huxley, in which the whole audience took sides. Owen was dogmatic and Huxley firm, even though he refrained from making any real attack on the opponents of Darwin. On Friday there was quiet—the quiet before a storm. Every one knew that the two factions would come to battle, and almost every one wanted to take part. All that was needed was an excuse.

That came on Saturday, when Dr. J. W. Draper^[1] of New York, an evolutionist and militant agnostic, read a paper on the "Intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin." The paper itself appears not to have possessed any great importance, but several of the statements which Dr. Draper made. and the conclusions which he drew made the religious faction in the Association furious. The Bishop of Oxford announced that he would speak upon the theory of descent, and the fight was on.

The excitement was tremendous.^[2] The Lecture Room, in which it had been arranged that the discussion should be held, proved far too small for the audience, and the meeting adjourned to the Library of the Museum, which was crammed to suffocation long before the champions entered the lists. The numbers were estimated at from 700 to 1000—a huge attendance for the British Association. Had it been during session of the University, or had the general public been admitted, it would have been impossible to have accommodated the rush to hear the oratory of the bold Bishop. Professor Henslow, who was president of the section, held the chair, and wisely announced at the beginning that none who had not valid arguments to bring forward on one side or the other would be allowed to address the meeting—a caution that proved necessary, for no fewer than four combatants had their utterances burked by him, because of their indulgence in vague declamation.

The Bishop was up to time, and spoke for fully half an hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness, and unfairness. It was evident from his handling of the subject that he had been "crammed" up to the throat, and that he knew nothing at first hand; in fact, he used no argument not to be found in his "Quarterly" article. He ridiculed Darwin badly, and Huxley savagely, but all in such dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well-turned periods, that I who had been inclined to blame the President for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific purpose now forgave him from the bottom of my heart. Unfortunately the Bishop, hurried along on the current of his own eloquence, so far forgot himself as to push his attempted advantage to the verge of personality in a telling passage in which he turned round and addressed Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather's or his grandmother's side to an ape.

Huxley's reply was nearly as forceful and eloquent as was the attack of the Bishop, and much more firmly grounded in scientific knowledge. In concluding, he came to the Bishop's question about ancestry, and delivered a keen rejoinder. "I asserted," he said, "And I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issues by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeal to religious prejudice."

The excitement was then at its height. A woman fainted and had to be carried out, men gesticulated and shouted at each other. FitzRoy, Darwin's old friend, rushed about brandishing a bible and trying to make impassioned appeals to the authority of "The Book".^[3] Finally things quieted down so that discussion could be resumed. Several of the members called for Hooker, the botanist and co-worker of Darwin, and Henslow invited him to give a view of the theory from the side of botany. Hooker complied willingly, showing that, by his own statements the Bishop had not understood even the simpler principles of Darwinism, and at the same time was thoroughly ignorant of the elementary facts of botany. The Bishop made no reply, so the meeting broke up.

Accounts of the meeting reached Darwin promptly, and on Sunday he wrote Hooker congratulating him for his triumph over the Bishop, and recognizing his own inability to take part in public arguments. A little later he expressed himself to Huxley, "From all I hear from several quarters, it seems that Oxford did the subject great good. It is of enormous importance, the showing the world that a few first-rate men are not afraid of expressing their opinion."

Such was the beginning of the scientific-religious war which for more than sixty years has raged with varying degrees of fury over the idea that one species arises from another. It spread throughout the civilized world—indeed, was in full progress in the United States at the time of the Oxford meeting, and the countries of continental Europe were reached a little later, when translations began to appear. For a time the opposition was conducted in part, at least, by scientists, who thought they could see real scientific reasons to advance against those set forth by Darwin. But gradually this party died out—and died off—and the field was left to the religious group. But they, too, found themselves in difficulty. Not a few of the older, and therefore more reactionary theologians went the way of the older and more reactionary naturalists. They were replaced by younger men who, in spite of their training, were somewhat tolerant of the new ideas of the century. Not a few of them even possessed some knowledge of biology, so they set about the process of reconciling what they believed with what they, or their betters, knew. This was not extremely difficult; the old doctrine of theology was ready and, with a little remodeling, applied excellently. Evolution ceased to be a contradiction of God, and became merely his way of doing things. What Darwin himself thought of this idea, and the unreasoning dogmatisms to which it often leads, is shown in a later chapter, Darwin and the Gods.

There were, of course, plenty of irreconcilables. The Catholic Church would make no compromise with fact, when that fact in any way detracted from the finality of Catholic dogma. Other sects, without the power and dignity of the Church of Rome possessed even more virile enthusiasm for ancient creeds and writings of doubtful authority. Captain FitzRoy was not the only one who insisted on the authority of "The Book"; his cry was taken up by the majority of the Protestant sects. The leaders of this group, being as ignorant of evolution as was the Bishop of Oxford, did not hesitate to ascribe to that theory all manner of properties and implications which it did not possess. Indeed, it furnished them with a ready explanation for all evils—political, social, economic, and religious, or rather, anti-religious. Did a new and not particularly desirable philosophy spring up, a social system give evidence of decay, or the Christian church show alarming signs of becoming as defunct as Zoroastrianism, these gentlemen had the true cause at their finger tips. That cause was the iniquitous Mr. Darwin, who believed that one species of plant-louse could arise from another without the intervention of God the Almighty.

And so the war goes on. German Kultur, Bolshevism, weakening morals of educated people—these and many other scarecrows are the latest to be put in the witness box against Darwin, his followers, and even those scientists who oppose him. Willful ignorance and distortion of facts continue, and orators go from state to state, and even nation to nation, urging people to use their political power to do away with the teaching of so wicked a doctrine as the origin of species. Indeed, under the impetus of reactionaries who, dull as they are, perceive the extinction which threatens them and their kind, the war against fact is becoming more fierce than almost ever before. Perhaps the legal steps taken by the opposition will succeed for a time, at least; perhaps they will meet well-deserved failure. At any rate, those who are inclined to deny that evolution, mental or physical, progresses at an almost unbelievably slow pace, may do well to consider these facts: In 1923, sixty-four years after Darwin published the Origin of Species an American legislature voiced its attitude by opposing books in which the theory of evolution was even mentioned. And in 1922, four hundred thirty years after Columbus reached America, and four hundred years after Magellan's ship made the first circuit of the globe, a teacher in an Indiana school was threatened with discharge for telling her pupils that the earth was not flat, but round.

1. The author of A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, a book which, though nearly half a century old, contains a more thorough study of the subject from this particular angle than does any other work in English.
2. The following account is paraphrased from the several given by Francis Darwin, Life and Letters, vol. 2, pp. 114–116 (American Edition}.
3. Poulton, Darwin and the Origin of Species, p. 66.