God—or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age

Conclusion

Conclusion In his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “I remember once in a museum, coming face to face with a demonstration: a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee.”1 Du Bois’s reminiscence illustrates the long resonance of images of evolutionary ideas and suggests a reason for his own critical awareness of the distinction between the authority of science in general and the authority of individual scientists. One of the arguments scientists frequently made in defending evolution was that their years of experience and training conferred on them an authority that gave their judgments special weight. It was ludicrous, from their point of view, for people like William Jennings Bryan to challenge scientific interpretations of the evidence for evolution. When had Bryan ever studied in Germany, worked in a laboratory, or published a scientific discovery? They had a point. Interpretation of the scientific evidence for evolution depended more and more on detailed knowledge of embryology, paleontology, geology, and comparative anatomy. Scientists ’ years of experience in the lab and the field counted for a great deal. And many of Bryan’s challenges were—or at least sounded—disingenuous. But not all of them were. When Osborn began using Hesperopithecus, the “Nebraska ape,” to ridicule Bryan, his scientific judgment failed him. Bryan understood this, well before the evidence against Hesperopithecus as an advanced primate was in. Just look at the flimsiness of the evidence scientists rely on, he told appreciative Dayton audiences, citing Osborn and the Nebraska tooth. In recruiting fossil finds— or anticipations of fossil discoveries—for rhetorical use against fundamentalists, Osborn let his instinct for publicity get the better of him. But this kind of lapse in judgment was not the only diªculty in the way of communication between scientists and a multiform public. The scientific issues were complex and the scientific community fragmented. Disagreements that scientists saw as internal to science could not be kept under wraps; yet explaining them to a diverse and poorly understood public, at a time when adversaries like Bryan monitored scientific dialogues for inconsistencies, presented a serious challenge. Some of the evidence convincing biologists that evolution was beyond dispute—a law of nature like gravity—did not translate well, as Edwin Grant Conklin learned in trying to revise his contribution to Creation by Evolution. When facing challenges from anti-evolutionists, scientists often responded that their years of training and experience made the evidence they looked at transparent to them in a way that it could never be to the public. This response may in part have been less a conscious rhetorical strategy than a kind of throwing up their hands in despair at the diªculty of communicating with a segment of the public that seemed to them determined not to understand. Yet science popularizers often did an extremely creditable job of explaining the evidence in books for the public, as did some scientists—including Osborn in Men of the Old Stone Age and The Age of Mammals. This was not enough, however. Scientists and popularizers faced a diªculty beyond that of explaining scientific details to nonscientists. The greatest barrier to communication was much more formidable: it was that the reasons for many people’s skepticism about evolution had little to do with the substance of the science after all. Evolution carried overwhelming symbolic significance. In many cases it represented the irritations and dislocations of modern life and the uncertainties of new roles for groups of people whose amplified assertiveness worried traditional authority. It also stood for science in general, in a way that recent revelations in physical science and mathematics could not, quite. For some religious traditionalists , the implications of science were those so persuasively limned by Walter Lippmann’s fictional fundamentalist in American Inquisitors: eternal salvation traded for perpetual uncertainty. Scientists who joined the debate aligned themselves with theological modernists , asserting the compatibility of evolution with Christian faith. This strategy carried no weight with theologically conservative Christians; indeed, it was counterproductive, for the Christianity of the science reconcilers sounded distinctly modernist—even pantheistic—to conservatives. The notion of progress as the organizing principle in evolution, so helpful to nineteenth-century scientists in accommodating evolution to their religious views, did not comfort conservative Christians. The emphasis on progress seemed to them to deny the centrality of the Fall of...