Presentation July 25th

Evolution in America

MALA 6040

Dr. James P. Oliver

Books and essay selected for presentation: On the Origin of Species edited by Gillian Beer, The Book That Changed America by Randall Fuller, and The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy by John Dewey.

Links to Asa Gray's reviews on separate post.

I first read parts of On the Origin of Species as a teenager, when I was interested in science. Unfortunately, I remembered little of it. As I began to read The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation by Randall Fuller (2017), I realized that to better appreciate its impact on America in the 1860s, I needed to re-read it which I did, but Fuller’s account led me to several interesting backstories that were not directly related to the scientific basis of Darwin’s theory. They provided some details about individuals who were affected by the Origin and address the question, did the Origin change America and if so in what way?

For the initial impact of the Origin, to place this book in a proper historical and literary context, we must consider some of the events that transpired within three years of its being published in 1859. Other notable books published in 1859 were A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Louisa May Alcott had her first story published in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1860 and immediately began writing a second story about an interracial marriage between a biracial man and a white woman. James Russell Lowell, the editor, thought it was too incendiary to publish because of how it would be received in the south; it was subsequently published in 1862. Alcott had a close personal relationship with Emerson, having unlimited access to his library and with Thoreau. She later incorporated them as primary characters in her first novel. Nathaniel Hawthorne joined the community and became Alcott’s neighbor. His novel, Marble Faun, was published in 1860. Also, in September 1860 Henry David Thoreau read his “Succession of Forest Trees” to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, in Concord. According to Fuller, it was an “early response to a world Darwin had introduced—a place divested of God and yet made wonderful by science, a world of weakened faith and exciting discovery.” Two years later in November 1862, the Atlantic Monthly published Thoreau’s Wild Apples. These writings captured a naturalistic direction that was generated by Darwin’s Origin. I found this circle of friends particularly intriguing, many were members of the Concord Transcendental Society and it is interesting for me how many times great minds meet and generate great ideas. Movie directors, Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, and de Palma all hung out with each other and were instrumental in creating some great movies by inspiring each other.

Historical events during this time included John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859; he was captured, tried, and hung on December 2, 1859, Abraham Lincoln’s nomination on May 18, 1860 to be the Republican candidate for President of the United States, South Carolina’s decision to be the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, Confederate forces attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 that began the Civil War, and President Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. When we look at any historical, literary, philosophical, sociological, or cultural event we need to consider it in the context of the other disciplines and related events. They are not isolated.

With these events occurring concurrently with the appearance of the Origin in America, how was it received? Fuller stated that Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, was “almost certainly the first American to read Darwin’s Origin in its entirety.” Gray also first wrote a long essay about the Origin for the American Journal of Science which was intended for an enlightened scientific audience and then three articles for the Atlantic Monthly intended for layman. The first of these three Atlantic articles was very supportive of Darwin and probably created a favorable first impression that Gray was forced to walk-back in his last article. (I am including all four for your review – the Atlantic articles are accessed by a link to address any potential copyright issues.)  I realize that time will probably not permit you to first read On the Origin of Species before you read Gray’s reviews. Try to imagine the internal conflict Gray must have experienced. He studied under Agassiz, an opponent of Darwin’s theory and had established his own reputation as an exceptional collector of botanical specimens (this is how he secured his position at Harvard). He was an expert in his field. His opinion would have influenced an American public who didn’t have the time to read the Origin or have the knowledge to understand it. Gray met Darwin a couple of times before the Origin was published but it was the exchange of a letter to Gray around 1855 that preserved Darwin’s role in being the first to consider natural selection. They later developed a friendship with Gray going to visit Darwin in England and walking the famous Sandwalk.

After Gray read and annotated his copy of the Origin, he shared it with Charles Loring Brace, husband of his cousin, Jane Loring Gray. Brace brought it with him to a meeting at the home of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn on January 1, 1860. Also, in attendance were Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Sanborn was a member of the “Secret Six.” The other five were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns. They had been instrumental in funding John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry and all were under scrutiny for having potentially committed treason against the United States; an action carrying with it the death penalty.

As they celebrated the new year, after they ate, they retired to talk, and Brace produced the book he had brought with him. Its complete title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Sanborn was engaged in his own struggle for life, certainly a little on edge to be attending a meeting where he could be subjected to arrest. He twice left the country to avoid being taken to Washington DC and being questioned and almost certainly convicted of treason. Later, marshals physically removed him from his home and it was only the quick thinking of his wife who rallied the citizens to block his being taken that prevented him from almost certain death by hanging.  Fuller suggested that “Sanborn felt that On the Origin of Species described the world he inhabited. The depiction of constant struggle and endless competition in the Origin perfectly captured what it felt like to live in America in 1860.”

Fuller said that “Brace saw the Origin as leading to something ultimately good and as a defense against slavery. We were all descended from one prototype.” Of those present, Thoreau was probably the most deeply affected. According to Fuller, Thoreau had already read The Voyage of the Beagle when it was first published in America nearly a decade earlier. He had loved the book from the first. Thoreau became more engaged with Origin because he could relate to it from his own observations and previous notes. He focused “especially on the book’s third chapter ‘The Struggle for Existence.’” He relived the devastation of a fire he had created in 1844 that wiped out “a large swath of the Concord woods.”

Fuller found critical reviews of the Origin as early as February 1860 that stated that “The Origin was nothing less than a ‘sneer at the idea of any manifestation of design in the material universe,’ and its theories ‘repudiate the whole doctrine of final causes,’ rendering obsolete ‘all indication of design or purpose in the organic world.’” Gray did his best to counter these reviews by arguing that, “Darwin’s ideas were no different from those of Isaac Newton, whose ‘theory of gravitation and …nebular hypothesis assume a universal and ultimate physical cause, from which the effects in nature must necessarily have resulted.’” Gray asserted that the theory, “broke down a centuries-old belief that species were stable and immutable,” and he believed that a “spirited conflict among opinions of every grade must ensue” about natural selection and special creation.

While there were several precursors to the evolution theory, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1799, and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by an anonymous author, published fifteen years before the Origin, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, William Buckland, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection is what distinguished him from these individuals. According to Fuller, “Natural selection was a brilliant concept, but like many brilliant concepts it assaulted long-cherished ideas and beliefs. It threatened the notion that human beings were a separate and extraordinary species, differing from every other animal on the planet. Taken to its logical conclusion it demolished the idea that people had been created in God’s image.”

Natural selection appealed to Thoreau, his essay “The Succession of Forest Trees” resulted from “Thoreau’s encounter with Darwin…He challenged Clark’s and Agassiz’s explanation of spontaneous generation as the way plants appeared on land that had been burned and defoliated. He did it through observation…Thoreau like Darwin initially were conflicted about what they witnessed as observers that was based on science and what they thought might reflect ‘the idea of design.’” What was remarkable about Thoreau’s essay was his recognition of the importance of the seed. “His touchstone was the seed…millions upon millions of seeds and spores are produced and scattered, broadcast by the air and by animals in order that a few plants may find their niche and grow.”

Darwin defined natural selection in On the Origin of Species in this way, “ Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight, and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection.” If we stop to reflect, we realize that many seeds and infant animals never survive. As difficult as it may be to believe, only a rare baby bunny survives to adulthood. They are caught in their nest and eaten by cats, dogs, or foxes. If they make it out of the nest, they are vulnerable to the same predators in addition to hawks and eagles, diseases, and lastly to humans from hunting to cars. We just never see the cruel reality of their trying to survive in Nature and theirs is just one example of many animals including insects that live from moment to moment. But beyond animals we see this in societies throughout the world were refugees struggle to survive, but to avoid that unpleasant reality, we usually change the channel, look the other way, or tune out. Perhaps, even among humans, those that do survive have inherited a variation that will help future generations survive.

Natural selection also appealed to Brace because he argued that “Darwin’s theory implied that all peoples shared the same basic humanity and were therefore capable of more or less the same level of development,” but he also realized that the theory “could be used against black people as easily as it could be used on their behalf—that in fact Darwinism could be used to support just about any social or political claim one wanted to make.” Those claims became ever more prevalent as nations pursued the industrial revolution and Social Darwinism took hold to justify the survival of the fittest and to defend the existing plutocracy during Reconstructions and the Gilded Age and today’s disproportionate income inequality.

Darwin’s conception of all of life represented by a great tree explained how “all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of different genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes.” This led him to conclude that, “On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic being.”

Darwin’s detailed analysis and mention of Gray may have influenced Gray initial positive reviews of the Origin. His view of Darwin’s theory evolved through his essays as he reflected on the implications of the theory. By his third essay, he retreated to a position, “that natural selection might be the process by which God has fashioned the world.” He found it “impossible to live in the world Darwin had imagined: a world of chance, a world that did not require a God to operate.” Gray and Darwin continued to correspond and in one of the most poignant exchanges, Darwin shared his thoughts. “Toward the end of 1860, Darwin wrote, [to Gray], ‘I had no intention to write atheistically,’ but he admitted that he could not accept Gray’s arguments on behalf of intelligent creation. ‘I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design…I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; & yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design.’” “There seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding with the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

Did the Origin change America and ignite a nation? There are some books that did change America – Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and perhaps to some degree On the Origin of Species. It strongly influenced the abolitionists who saw it as an argument against slavery because all humans originated from an earlier progenitor and if we reserve judgement to before Reconstruction, it did. However, after the Civil War, it was used to justify racial superiority and inferiority. It was used to excuse poverty, child labor, domestic abuse, mistreatment of women, and income inequity and its significance continued to 1925 and still today since we are still debating the theory and still arguing whether it is factual or theoretical.

John Dewey delivered a lecture in 1909 fifty years after the Origin was published, entitled “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” in which he recognized that “In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the ‘Origin of Species’ introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” He also understood that “the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest participant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the ‘Origin of Species.’” That revolution is still on going and perhaps in another one or two hundred years there will be a greater acceptance of the contribution that On the Origin of Species made in changing America then, now, and in the future.

Questions:

1.       According to Fuller, who was probably the first American to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species?

2.       What was the “Secret Six” society?

3.       What is the complete title of Darwin’s book?

4.       According to Fuller what “demolished the idea that people had been created in God’s image”?

5.       What was Thoreau’s touchstone?

6.       Why did Darwin say he could not “look at each separate thing as the result of design.”?