Drawing Battle Lines

One major reason for this change was the rise of public schools. In 1890, only 200,000 American children attended public schools, but by 1920, 2 million were enrolled. The textbooks that the students were given in their biology classes embraced evolution, describing it as a process of genetic mutations and natural selection. For opponents of evolution, the textbooks came to represent a godless intrusion into their children’s lives.

Another reason for the conflict was evolution’s role in some disturbing cultural changes in both the United States and Europe. World War I was an unprecedented butchery, and some Germans tried to justify the carnage with evolution. They drew their inspiration from the influential German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who portrayed humans as the pinnacle of all evolution and claimed that we were evolving to still loftier heights. In his book History of Creation, Haeckel wrote, “We are proud of having so immensely outstripped our lower animal ancestors and derive from it the consoling assurance that in the future also, mankind as a whole will follow the glorious career of progressive development and attain a still higher degree of mental perfection.”

For Haeckel, some humans were more progressive than others. He divided them into 12 different species and ranked them from lowest to highest. At the lowest were various species of Africans and New Guineans, and at the very summit were Europeans–”Homo mediterraneus.” And within H. mediterraneus, Haeckel’s fellow Germans stood at the very summit. “It is the Germanic race in Northwestern Europe and in North America, which above all others, is in the present age spreading the network of its civilization over the whole globe, and laying the foundations for a new era of higher mental culture,” he wrote. Sooner or later most of the other races would “completely succumb in the struggle for existence to the superiority of the Mediterranean races.”

Haeckel’s vision of human destiny became the foundation of a new, biologically based religion that he called Monism. A group of his devotees, called the Monist League, declared that the next stage of evolution required Germany to become a world power and urged their countrymen to enter World War I not for political ends but to realize their evolutionary destiny.

In England and the United States, meanwhile, evolution was being misused in another way, to justify laissez‑faire capitalism. The British philosopher Herbert Spencer, promoting a jumble of Darwinian natural selection and Lamarckian evolution, claimed that a freemarket struggle would make humans evolve greater intelligence. He granted that there would have to be suffering along the way–Spencer thought that the Irish famines were an example of people taking “the high road to extinction”–but this suffering would prove worthwhile, because humanity would be elevated to moral perfection.

Spencer won admirers from around the world, particularly among the new robber barons of the Industrial Revolution. Andrew Carnegie called Spencer “Master Teacher.” Spencer’s admirers codified his ideas into a school of thought known as social Darwinism, which held that the incredible disparity of rich and poor at the end of the 1800s was not an injustice but simply biology. “The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done,” said Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, a leading social Darwinist.

Social Darwinism was as scientifically baseless as Monism. It took natural selection out of its proper place in biology and put it in a social environment, while also muddling Darwin’s theory with Lamarck’s discredited one. But despite being unscientific, social Darwinism lent authority to government efforts to control the evolution of the human race. In the early 1900s, the United States and other countries sterilized retarded people and others they judged to be degenerates so that they wouldn’t contaminate the evolution of their nations.

Some of the textbooks used in American public high schools celebrated this controlled breeding. In A Civic Biology (1914), the author wrote of families in which criminality and other vices were thought (wrongly) to be a hereditary curse. “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

Out of the turmoil of the early twentieth century emerged fundamentalism. Fundamentalists were determined to return Protestantism to its traditional roots, and that required putting a stop to teaching evolution in public schools. Leading the fundamentalists in this fight was the statesman William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s political celebrity–he had run as the Democratic nominee for president three times and served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson–earned the antievolution crusade national attention.

Bryan’s hostility to evolution was not based on any particular scientific point of view. Like many other fundamentalists of his day, Bryan believed that the six days of creation were metaphorical, rather than a strict 144 hours. Bryan wasn’t even opposed to the idea that animals and plants might have evolved from older species. What bothered him about evolution was the effect he thought Darwinism had on the soul. “I object to the Darwinian theory,” Bryan declared, “because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God’s presence in our daily life, if we must accept the theory that through all the ages no spiritual force has touched the life of man and shaped the destiny of nations. But there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate–the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”

Bryan would have been quite right to be concerned if he was referring to social Darwinism or Monism, which people used to justify brutality, poverty, and racism. But both philosophies were based on misreadings of Origin of Species, mixed with a healthy portion of Lamarckian pseudoscience. Bryan did not recognize this difference, and instead he made Darwin his sworn enemy. In the process, he helped sow a confusion that still thrives in the United States.