Neuron Culture

The history of science lives. Today it came to life over at the Atlantic, which just posted a key document in the fight over Darwin’s theory of evolution: a review of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, which originally ran in the Atlantic in July 1860.

Gray’s review provided a pivotal victory for Darwin: It gave his highly controversial theory, which he had published the previous December, the support of one of America’s most respected scientists. Gray proved a key and effective advocate for Darwin in the U.S., especially during 1860, when he thrice defeated in debate America’s most prominent scientist, the zoologist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, a creationist, resisted Darwin’s theory ferociously. He did so both because he disagreed and because he himself had become the country’s most famous scientist by beautifully articulating a vision of species as works of God. He had built his career on this vision. He knew he had to defeat Darwin or go down himself.

He lost, however, and the defeat started with the 1860 debates with Gray. Gray, however, unlike the UK’s Thomas Huxley, aka “Darwin’s bulldog,” was not a pugnacious sort — not one to argue with archbishops. Rather he was a devout Christian who, as late as 1858, believed in pretty much the sort of static, God’s-order vision of species that Louis Agassiz promoted. But in a remarkable series of inquiries in 1858 and 1859, Darwin led Gray to his view.

The passage below tells how he did so. It’s from Chapter 5 of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral — a book about another long argument in the 19th century, that over the origin of coral reefs, which paralleled and in many cases inverted the argument over the origin of species. In the small story of Gray’s seduction, as in the two big sweeping stories of which it is part, ideas travel long arcs and sometimes strike, smack in the back of the head, the people who let them go.

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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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