The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of the Environmental Reform, 1917–1978

6. Evolution and Ecology

6 Evolution and Ecology PRIOR TO World War II, the Save-the-Redwoods League and the Sierra Club were allies. They shared common goals and a common philosophy, based in part upon the influence of evolutionary assumptions . During the 1930s and 1940s, the natural sciences made dramatic advances. The club was deeply influenced by the resulting modern ecological perspective. The league continued to reflect the thought of the earlier period. Generalizations about the history of the twentieth-century biological sciences are hazardous, yet it is possible to suggest three periods in their development. During the progressive years from the 1890s through the 1920s, most scientists and probably most college-educated Americans subscribed to some directional interpretation of evolution. Either they simply believed, as did John Merriam, that natural history was progressive or else they advocated, as did Henry Fairfield Osborn, some specific theory of orthogenesis. Such assumptions had scientific as well as philosophical and religious origins. The evolutionary sciences not only allowed but encouraged many Americans to hold to their previously conceived view that the universe was ordered, thereby contributing to the intellectual climate of these years. Like most reformers of the progressive years, early wilderness advocates were generally moderate reformers. Aside from an exceptional individual such as John Muir, club founder and its first president, they did not seriously challenge industrial or technological progress. Their faith in progressive evolution limited their advocacy of reform and prevented them from denying a belief in human control over the natural world. Theories of directed evolution presumed that nature produces ever more complicated, powerful, and adaptive creatures and that man's brain was the summit of this process. Technology, then, was the fulfillment of natural history. 79 80 THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE REDWOODS The 1930s and 1940s witnessed significant advances in the biological sciences, especially in population genetics. Directional theories were discredited, and a consensus reached by 1950 within the scientific community that evolution was the product of random genetic change and the opportunistic process of natural selection. This view of natural history was absorbed into the consciousness of educated Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s. The new synthesis of genetics and selection underlay the ecological perspective and environmental militancy of much citizen activism of the past quarter century. This evolutionary synthesis proved just as conducive to the questioning of human dominance and material progress as did awareness of environmental deterioration. The synthesis underscored the chance course of natural history and the equality of species. The Sierra Club was caught up in this philosophical shift that coincided with, indeed helped cause, its entry into the redwoods' fate. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection had been well accepted, at least by younger naturalists of the period. Indeed, by the 1880s his followers had become highly theoretical and were attempting to explain all biological change by adaptation. Not surprisingly, about 1890 scientists began to question whether natural selection was in fact the controlling force in evolution, and by 1910 some were proclaiming the death of Darwinism. They did not doubt the fact of evolution but Darwin's explanation of its causes.! Taking their cue from the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, some antiselectionists attacked Darwin's theory at its most vulnerable pointthe lack of a sound theory of genetics. When de Vries rediscovered Mendel's work in 1900, this weakness was not rectified because the Dutch botanist disagreed with Darwin's position that small adaptive changes were the controlling factor in evolution. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, geologists estimated the age of the earth to be only about 100 million years. Given this estimate, early geneticists concluded that only dramatic leaps, or mutations, could explain the formation of new species. On the basis of experiments showing that artificial selection had no effect on certain plant species, they concluded that selection would not generate the genetic raw materials necessary for evolution. Thus the rediscovery of Mendel's experiments further undermined Darwinism.2 De Vries, however, projected random mutations, and many scientists soon concluded that his theory was no more adequate to explain evolution than was Darwin's. They pointed to the lack of fossil evidence of dramatic, adaptive genetic leaps. They argued that random mutations EVOLUTION AND ECOLOGY 81 could not explain the substantial progress of natural history. Wrote one such opponent of discontinuous evolution, "You might as well argue about the...