I bring here the sixth entry in my partial serialization of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which finds Louis Agassiz facing off against Asa Gray in a decisive argument over Darwin’s theory of evolution. I first ran this excerpt back on April 28, independently, before I began this serialization of Reef Madness. If it looks familiar, that’s probably why. This entry stands on its own, but if you want the run-up to it from Reef Madness, click the links at bottom of read in order the Introduction, Louis Agassiz, Creationist Magpie, The One Darwin Really DID Get Wrong: Rumble at Glen Roy, Louis Agassiz, TED Wet Dream, Conquers America, and Reef Madness 5: Alexander Agassiz Comes of Age. More information on serialization experiment at bottom.
6. How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray
from Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
© David Dobbs, all rights reserved
After Darwin’s book came out in late 1859, Louis mounted an all-or-nothing attack on it. He waged his war on two fronts — one among peers, another in the popular press and lecture circuit. Louis actually won a draw on the popular front, at least in the United States, for most Americans chose the straddle mentioned earlier. Even 150 years later, over half of Americans continued to believe that God either created most species as is or somehow directs evolution.
This happy stance ignores, of course, the philosophical implications that haunted Darwin, and it overlooks the underlying disagreement about how one should seek answers. Louis’s idealist logic and Darwin’s empirical method clashed as violently as did their creationist and mechanistic conclusions. For scientists of the era — a time when science was self-consciously moving toward an empirical stance — this argument about method mattered as much as whether we arose from God or monkey. It was this methodological debate that Louis so decisively lost.
A debate, of course, requires an opponent, and even Darwin couldn’t argue effectively from across the Atlantic. He didn’t much like arguing anyway, preferring to sway through his writing while friends did the knifework. In England, Thomas Huxley, self-anointed as “Darwin’s bulldog,” did the bloodiest of it. Huxley won an early and instantly famous debate over Darwinism even though his opponent, the former Oxford debater Archbishop Wilberforce, fired the most memorable salvo of the entire long war: In June 1860, before an excited crowd at Oxford, Wilberforce wrapped up his creationist attack on Origin by asking Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he descended from a monkey. The agnostic Huxley, murmuring to a friend that “The Lord hath delivered him unto my hands,” rose, rubbing those hands together, and dismantled the archbishop’s argument. He finished by declaring that if given the choice between kinship to a smelly ape or to a man willing to use his intelligence and privilege to twist the truth, he would choose the ape. The packed hall erupted in shouting; one woman reportedly fainted.
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