Darwinism Comes to America (review)

Ronald L. Numbers. Darwinism Comes to America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 216 pp. $39.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paperbound).

The first thing readers of this journal will want to know is that this book is not another broad survey of the impact of Darwinian thought on American intellectual life. Nor does it explore the scientific meaning and significance of Darwinism. Rather, it is an attempt to map the American reaction to Darwinism in two spheres alone--science and religion. Those familiar with this territory will wonder whether such a book is necessary after so many previous studies of evolution and its aftermath. Ronald Numbers asks the question himself, but answers it, not surprisingly, with a resounding yes. There remain, he insists, many "dark corners" to illuminate, as well as some tenacious "myths and misperceptions" to dispel, including the following: that American scientists who accepted evolution divided into two camps--neo-Darwinians and neo-Lamarckians; that Darwinism touched off a late-nineteenth-century religious crisis; that the American South was particularly hostile to evolution; and that Fundamentalists generally disliked science and feared its consequences.

Much of this rings true, though Numbers's corrections are often more akin to fine-tuning than to wholesale revision. Thus, seeking to rescue the South from the opprobrium of having been a citadel of antievolutionism, he nonetheless has to concede that there was more hostility to evolution there than elsewhere in the United States. His more modest point is that "the South was far less uniform in its opposition to Darwinism than most scholarly accounts suggest" (p. 59). His exploration of neo-Lamarckianism and neo-Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth century challenges Peter Bowler's version of the two theories as "mutually hostile camps," largely because he can find very few avowed American neo-Darwinians. But he would appear to agree with Bowler that Darwinian natural selection had gone into something of an eclipse at this period, and that a number of different causal mechanisms for evolution, including use-inheritance and orthogenetic development, were being discussed.

Numbers offers a refreshingly wry view of the Scopes trial, arguing, essentially, that almost everyone has gotten the message of the trial wrong: the modernists (some at least) who believed that they had damped the fires of the Fundamentalist crusade against evolution, the creationist Fundamentalists who believed that when Bryan forsook a literal interpretation of the "days" in Genesis he gave away the store, and subsequent historians who, following Frederick Lewis Allen, have seen Scopes as a defeat for Bryan and the Fundamentalists. Numbers argues, on the contrary, that contemporaries did not see things that way, and that newspapers and journals of the time do not support the conclusion that Fundamentalism lost at Dayton. He attributes the spread of what he refers to as the "legend" of Dayton to Inherit the Wind (1960), a film with numerous inaccuracies. Yet while I accept his corrective, I do think that he overstates the degree to which the Fundamentalists came out of Dayton strengthened for the continuing campaign against evolution. Observers at the time may have thought that Fundamentalism emerged triumphant, but its subsequent failure to get states to pass antievolution legislation (only three did so) suggests otherwise. Where earlier historians went wrong is not so much in their appraisal of the immediate effects of the Scopes trial as in their belief that Scopes symbolized the end of Fundamentalism under the onslaught of modernism. The notable reemergence of Fundamentalist Christianity into public and political prominence in the 1970s is testimony to its continued viability during the intervening years.

Numbers is deeply interested in creationism, to which he devoted an earlier book. The chapters that readers will find least familiar, I would guess, are the final two, which deal with Seventh Day Adventist and Pentecostal reactions to evolution. The author is certainly right to examine these lesser-known forms of Protestant religiosity, on the basis of numbers alone: he cites experts...