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

Preface

p r e f a c e Science, like art, suggests radically new ways of seeing. This is a book about scientists ’ and artists’ attempts to o¤er the public new ways to imagine the human evolutionary past; about how scientists responded to the evolution debates of the 1920s in the United States; and about the central importance in those debates of visual images. It focuses on the changing appearance of evolutionary theory as it passed through a series of di¤erent lenses into popular culture. The evolution debates of the 1920s neither began nor ended with the 1925 Scopes trial, though that event did a great deal to shape historical—and historians ’—memories of the controversy. By the time John Thomas Scopes came to trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, charged with violating the state’s law against teaching evolution, evolution had been a topic of intense newspaper and magazine conversation for several years. This conversation drew on a rich symbolic vocabulary . Much of that vocabulary was visual, and visual images held a prominent and problematic place in the controversy. Science had been one of the great shibboleths in American culture in the years before World War I. By the 1920s, however, anxieties about modern life fostered new uneasiness about science. In this decade when the authority of science was at issue, when the details of evolutionary theory remained in dispute among scientists, and when the very boundaries of science often seemed remarkably permeable, scientists found themselves faced with passionate public controversies over evolution. Which scientists responded, and how they responded, to these controversies are among the subjects of this book. Its themes include the issues of scientific authority, the role of publicity and media, and the changing place of science in American culture in the 1920s. But pictures form the heart of the story. Scientists understood how diªcult it could be for lay readers to follow the complex arguments of scientific theory couched in an esoteric lexicon, and they often relied on scientific illustration to bridge the gap. Communication through scientific illustration, translated and mistranslated through the lenses of popular culture, turned out to be a complicated matter, however. Interpretation of images raised diªcult questions about the very definition of science and of its boundaries. Scientists o¤ered the public new ways to visualize the human past, in the conviction that these visual images would not only clarify—and serve as evidence in support of—new discoveries about human evolution but would also provide solace and comfort. Diagrams demonstrating the optimistic view that the evolutionary story was a tale of ineluctable progress, and portrayals of early humans as dignified and worthy ancestors, would, evolutionists hoped, cast evolution in a hopeful light. They would suggest new and positive ways to visualize an ennobled human past, human history as a grand pageant. Anti-evolutionists were not mollified. Indeed, they focused many of their objections to evolution precisely on those visual images. When scientists invoked “life’s splendid drama,” anti-evolutionists mocked them as “dramatists of evolution .”1 In a sermon published in the year of the Scopes trial, the Reverend John Roach Straton, ascribing modern immorality to “the sinister shadow of Darwinism,” insisted that “if man is a descendant of the beast instead of a child of God, then we need not be surprised if we find him inclined to live like a beast. Monkey men make monkey morals.”2 If one accepted the teachings of evolutionists, Straton insisted in another sermon, it would mean that sin was no longer sin but merely “a survival of the brute in man.”3 Straton emphasized the visual over and over again in his attacks on evolution—not only because so much of the most compelling evidence scientists marshaled was visual but also because, for Straton, the visual could be suspect: under a subheading, “The Lust of the Eyes,” he warned that “the things we see with the eyes, that we are led by the Devil to admire and long for, become destructive forms of worldliness.”4 While he certainly understood how to use challenges to visual images e¤ectively, Straton also attacked images of evolution because he understood them to be powerful. They were. A liberal minister, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, an evolutionist, disagreed with Straton about many things, but he, too, confronted the significance of visual images for religion, and the significance of the visual implications of modern science...