Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Kellogg was appalled, above all, at the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by these officers, many of whom had been university professors before the war. They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale but advocated a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle:

  Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the Allmacht [“all might” or omnipotence] of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema.… This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species…. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage…should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization—its Kultur—on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them. This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters…. Add the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and that German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter—by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.

  Kellogg, of course, found in this argument only “horrible academic casuistry and…conviction that the individual is nothing, the state everything.” Bryan conflated a perverse interpretation with the thing itself and affirmed his worst fears about the polluting power of evolution.

  Benjamin Kidd was an English commentator highly respected in both academic and lay circles. His book Social Evolution (1894) was translated into a dozen languages and as widely read as anything ever published on the implications of evolution. In The Science of Power (1918), his posthumous work, Kidd constructs a curious argument that, in a very different way from Kellogg’s, also fueled Bryan’s dread. Kidd, a philosophical idealist, believed that life must move toward progress by rejecting material struggle and individual benefit. Like the German militarists, but to excoriate rather than to praise, Kidd identified Darwinism with these impediments to progress. In a chapter entitled “The Great Pagan Retrogression,” Kidd presented a summary of his entire thesis:

  1. Darwin’s doctrine of force rekindled the most dangerous of human tendencies—our pagan soul, previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation:

  The hold which the theories of the Origin of Species obtained on the popular mind in the West is one of the most remarkable incidents in the history of human thought…. Everywhere throughout civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority….

  For centuries the Western pagan had struggled with the ideals of a religion of subordination and renunciation coming to him from the past. For centuries he had been bored almost beyond endurance with ideals of the world presented to him by the Churches of Christendom…. But here was a conception of life which stirred to its depths the inheritance in him from past epochs of time…. This was the world which the masters of force comprehended. The pagan heart of the West sang within itself again in atavistic joy.

  2. In England and America, Darwinism’s worst influence lay in its justification for industrial exploitation as an expression of natural selection (“social Darwinism” in its pure form):

  The prevailing social system, born as it had been in struggle, and resting as it did in the last resort on war and on the toil of an excluded proletariat, appeared to have become clothed with a new and final kind of authority.

  3. In Germany, Darwin’s doctrine became a justification for war:

  Darwin’s theories came to be openly set out in political and military textbooks as the full justification for war and highly organized schemes of national policy in which the doctrine of force became the doctrine of Right.

  4. Civilization can only advance by integration: The essence of Darwinism is division by force for individual advantage. Social progress demands the “subordination of the individual to the universal” via “the iron ethic of Renunciation.”

  5. Civilization can only be victorious by suppressing our pagan soul and its Darwinian justification:

  It is the psychic and spiritual forces governing the social integration in which the individual is being subordinated to the universal which have become the winning forces in evolution.

  This characterization of evolution has been asserted in many contexts for nearly 150 years—by German militarists, by Kidd, by hosts of the vicious and the duped, the self-serving and the well-meaning. But it remains deeply and appallingly wrong for three basic reasons.

  1. Evolution means only that all organisms are united by ties of genealogical descent. This definition says nothing about the mechanism of evolutionary change: In principle, externally directed upward striving might work as well as the caricatured straw man of bloody Darwinian battle to the death. The objections, then, are to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, not to evolution itself.

  2. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an abstract argument about a metaphorical “struggle” to leave more offspring in subsequent generations, not a statement about murder and mayhem. Direct elimination of competitors is one pathway to Darwinian advantage, but another might reside in cooperation through social ties within a species or by symbiosis between species. For every act of killing and division, natural selection can also favor cooperation and integration in other circumstances. Nineteenth-century interpreters did generally favor a martial view of selection, but to every militarist, we may counterpose a Prince Kropotkin (see Essay 22), urging that the “real” Darwinism be recognized as a doctrine of integration and “mutual aid.”

  3. Whatever Darwinism represents on the playing fields of nature (and by representing both murder and cooperation at different times, it upholds neither as nature’s principal way), Darwinism implies nothing about moral conduct. We do not find our moral values in the actions of nature. One might argue, as Thomas Henry Huxley did in his famous essay “Evolution and Ethics,” that Darwinism embodies a law of battle, and that human morality must be defined as the discovery of an opposite path. Or one might argue, as grandson Julian did, that Darwinism is a law of cooperation and that moral conduct should follow nature. If two such brilliant and committed Darwinians could come to such opposite opinions about evolution and ethics, I can only conclude that Darwinism offers no moral guidance.

  But Bryan made this common threefold error and continually characterized evolution as a doctrine of battle and destruction of the weak, a dogma that undermined any decent morality and deserved banishment from the classroom. In a rhetorical flourish near the end of his “Last Evolution Argument,” the final speech that he prepared with great energy, but never had an opportunity to present at the Scopes trial, Bryan proclaimed:

  Again force and love meet face to face, and the question “What shall I do with Jesus?” must be answered. A bloody, brutal doctrine—Evolution—demands, as the rabble did nineteen hundred years ago, that He be crucified.

  I wish I could stop here with a snide comment on Bryan as yahoo and a ringing defense for science’s proper interpretation of Darwinism. But I cannot, for Bryan was right in one crucial way. Lord only knows, he understood precious little about science, and he wins no medals for logic of argument. But when he said that Darwinism had been widely protrayed as a defense of war, domination, and domestic exploitation, he was right. Scientists would not be to blame for this if we had always maintained proper caution in interpretation and proper humility in resisting the extension of our findings into inappropriate domains. But many of these insidious and harmful misinterpretations had been promoted by scientists. Several of the German generals who traded arguments with Kellogg had been university pro
fessors of biology.

  Just one example from a striking source. In his “Last Evolution Argument,” Bryan charged that evolutionists had misused science to present moral opinions about the social order as though they represented facts of nature.

  By paralyzing the hope of reform, it discourages those who labor for the improvement of man’s condition…. Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!

  I cannot fault Bryan here. One of the saddest chapters in all the history of science involves the extensive misuse of data to support biological determinism, the claim that social inequalities based on race, sex, or class cannot be altered because they reflect the innate and inferior genetic endowments of the disadvantaged (see my book The Mismeasure of Man). It is bad enough when scientists misidentify their own social preferences as facts of nature in their technical writings and even worse when writers of textbooks, particularly for elementary- and high-school students, promulgate these (or any) social doctrines as the objective findings of science.

  Two years ago, I obtained a copy of the book that John Scopes used to teach evolution to the children of Dayton, Tennessee—A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter (1914). Many writers have looked into this book to read the section on evolution that Scopes taught and Bryan quoted. But I found something disturbing in another chapter that has eluded previous commentators—an egregious claim that science holds the moral answer to questions about mental retardation, or social poverty so misinterpreted. Hunter discusses the infamous Jukes and Kallikaks, the “classic,” and false, cases once offered as canonical examples of how bad heredity runs in families. Under the heading “Parasitism and Its Cost to Society—the Remedy,” he writes:

  Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

  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.

  Bryan had the wrong solution, but he had correctly identified a problem!

  Science is a discipline, and disciplines are exacting. All maintain rules of conduct and self-policing. All gain strength, respect, and acceptance by working honorably within their bounds and knowing when transgression upon other realms counts as hubris or folly. Science, as a discipline, tries to understand the factual state of nature and to explain and coordinate these data into general theories. Science teaches us many wonderful and disturbing things—facts that need weighing when we try to develop standards of conduct and ponder the great questions of morals and aesthetics. But science cannot answer these questions alone and cannot dictate social policy.

  Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal—why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place.

  If this plea sounds like the conservative and pessimistic retrenching of a man on the verge of middle age, I reply that I advocate this care and restraint in order to demonstrate the enormous power of science. We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domains. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. Besides, high-falutin morality aside, if we continue to overextend the boundaries of science, folks like Bryan will nail us properly for their own insidious purposes.

  We should give the last word to Vernon Kellogg, the great teacher who understood the principle of strength in limits, and who listened with horror to the ugliest misuses of Darwinism. Kellogg properly taught in his textbook (with David Starr Jordan) that Darwinism cannot provide moral answers:

  Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravitation justifies the shooting of a bird.

  Kellogg also possessed the cardinal trait lacked both by Bryan and by many of his evolutionary adversaries: humility in the face of our profound ignorance about nature’s ways, combined with that greatest of all scientific privileges, the joy of the struggle to know. In his greatest book, Darwinism Today (1907), Kellogg wrote:

  We are ignorant, terribly, immensely ignorant. And our work is, to learn. To observe, to experiment, to tabulate, to induce, to deduce. Biology was never a clearer or more inviting field for fascinating, joyful, hopeful work.

  Amen, brother!

  Postscript

  As I was writing this essay, I learned of the untimely death from cancer (at age forty-seven) of Federal Judge William R. Overton of Arkansas. Judge Overton presided and wrote the decision in McLean v. Arkansas (January 5, 1982), the key episode that led to our final victory in the Supreme Court in June 1987. In this decision, he struck down the Arkansas law mandating equal time for “creation science.” This precedent encouraged Judge Duplantier to strike down the similar Louisiana law by summary judgment (without trial). The Supreme Court then affirmed this summary judgment in their 1987 decision. (Since Arkansas and Louisiana had passed the only anti-evolution statutes in the country, these decisions close the issue.) Judge Overton’s brilliant and beautifully crafted decision is the finest legal document ever written about this question—far surpassing anything that the Scopes trial generated, or any document arising from the two Supreme Court cases (Epperson v. Arkansas of 1968, striking down Scopes-era laws that banned evolution outright, and the 1987 decision banning the “equal time” strategy). Judge Overton’s definitions of science are so cogent and clearly expressed that we can use his words as a model for our own proceedings. Science, the leading journal of American professional science, published Judge Overton’s decision verbatim as a major article.

  I was a witness in McLean v. Arkansas (see Essay 21 in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes). I never spoke to Judge Overton personally, and I spent only part of a day in his courtroom. Yet, when I fell ill with cancer the next year, I learned from several sources that Judge Overton had heard and had inquired about my health from mutual acquaintances, asking that his best wishes be conveyed to me. I mourn the passing of this brilliant and compassionate man, and I dedicate this essay to his memory.

  29 | An Essay on a Pig Roast

  ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio, Jack Dempsey won the heavyweight crown by knocking out Jess Willard in round three. (Willard, the six-foot six-inch wheat farmer from Kansas, was “the great white hope” who, four years earlier in Havana, had finally KO’d Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ, and primary thorn in the side of racist America.) Dempsey ruled the ring for seven years, until Gene Tunney whipped him in 1926.

  Yet during Dempsey’s domination of pugilism in its active mode, some mighty impressive fighters were squaring away on other, less physical but equally contentious turfs. One prominent battle occurred entirely within Dempsey’s reign, beginning with William Jennings Bryan’s decision in 1920 to launch a nationwide legislative campaign against the teaching of evolution and culminating in the Scopes trial of 1925
. The main bout may have pitted Bryan against Clarence Darrow at the trial itself, but a preliminary skirmish in 1922, before any state legislature had passed an anti-evolution law, had brought two equally formidable foes together—Bryan again, but this time against Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History. In some respects, the Bryan-Osborn confrontation was more dramatic than the famous main event three years later. One can hardly imagine two more powerful but more different men: the arrogant, patrician, archconservative Osborn versus the folksy “Great Commoner” from Nebraska. Moreover, while Darrow maintained a certain respect based on genuine affection for Bryan (or at least for his earlier greatness), I detect nothing but pure venom and contempt from Osborn.

  The enemy within, as the old saying goes, is always more dangerous than the enemy without. An atheist might have laughed at Bryan or merely felt bewildered. But Osborn was a dedicated theist and a great paleontologist who viewed evolution as the finest expression of God’s intent. For Osborn, Bryan was perverting both science and the highest notion of divinity. (Darrow later selected Osborn as one of his potential witnesses in the Scopes trial not only because Osborn was so prominent, socially as well as scientifically, but primarily because trial strategy dictated that religiously devout evolutionists could blunt Bryan’s attack on science as intrinsically godless.)