pure-food laws have become necessary to keep manufacturers from poisoning their customers; child labor laws have become necessary to keep employers from dwarfing the bodies, minds and souls of children; anti-trust laws have become necessary to keep overgrown corporations from strangling smaller competitors, and we are still in a death grapple with profiteers and gamblers in farm products.
3. For the rule of majority opinion against imposing elites. Christian belief still enjoyed widespread majority support in America, but college education was eroding a consensus that had once ensured compassion within democracy. Bryan cited studies showing that only 15 percent of college male freshmen harbored doubts about God, but that 40 percent of graduates had become skeptics. Darwinism, and its immoral principle of domination by a selfish elite, had fueled this skepticism. Bryan railed against this insidious undermining of morality by a minority of intellectuals, and he vowed to fight fire with fire. If they worked through the classroom, he would respond in kind and ban their doctrine from the public schools. The majority of Americans did not accept human evolution, and had a democratic right to proscribe its teaching.
Let me pass on this third point. Bryan’s contention strikes at the heart of academic freedom, and scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case. I merely record that Bryan embedded his curious argument in his own concept of populism. “The taxpayers,” he wrote,
have a right to say what shall be taught … to direct or dismiss those whom they employ as teachers and school authorities … The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school, and a teacher has no right to teach that which his employers object to.
But what of Bryan’s first two arguments about the influence of Darwinism on militarism and domestic exploitation? We may detect the touch of the Philistine in Bryan’s claim, but we must also admit that he had identified something deeply troubling—and that the fault does lie partly with violations of NOMA by scientists and their acolytes.
Bryan often stated that two books had altered the character of his opposition to evolution from laissez-faire to vigorous action: Headquarters Nights, by Vernon L. Kellogg (1917), and The Science of Power, by Benjamin Kidd (1918). I read these two books and found them every bit as riveting as Bryan had. I also came to understand his fears, even to agree in part (though not, of course, with his analysis or his remedies).
Vernon Kellogg was an entomologist and perhaps the leading teacher of evolution in America (he held a professorship at Stanford and wrote a major textbook, Evolution and Animal Life, with his mentor and Darwin’s leading disciple in America, David Starr Jordan, ichthyologist and president of Stanford University). During the First World War, while America maintained official neutrality, Kellogg became a high official in the international, nonpartisan effort for Belgian relief, a cause officially “tolerated” by Germany. In this capacity, he was posted at the headquarters of the German Great General Staff, the only American on the premises. Night after night he listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself, among Germany’s highest military officers. Headquarters Nights is Kellogg’s account of these exchanges. He arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force.
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 false and particularly crude version 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 is 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, based on a fundamental violation of NOMA, with the thing itself and affirmed his worst fears about the polluting power of evolution.
’Benjamin Kidd, an English commentator highly respected in both academic and lay circles, wrote several popular books 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 can only progress by rejecting material struggle and individual benefit. Like the German militarists, but to excoriate rather than to praise, Kidd identified Darwinism with domination by force. He argued, for example, that Darwinism had 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.
We may conclude that Bryan was playing, probably quite unconsciously, the classic game of “blaming the victim” in excoriating Darwin, or the theory of natural selection, or even evolution itself, as the chief source of moral decay in his time. The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory (unless such misuse arises from the originator’s own confusion or poor expression, which he then, in a fit of pique or haughtiness, makes no effort to correct; it just isn’t Alexander Graham Bell’s fault that your teenage kid’s phone bill nearly bankrupted you last year). Bryan, as noted previously, failed to comprehend evolution in nearly all conceivable ways. He certainly did not understand Darwin’s idea of natural selection, which is not a principle of victory by mortal combat, but a theory about reproductive success, however that goal be best achieved in local environments (by combat in some circumstances, to be sure, but by cooperation in others). But, most important, for the context of this book, Bryan never grasped NOMA’s chief principle that factual truth, however constituted, cannot dictate, or even imply, moral truth. Any argument that facts or theories of biological evolution can enjoin or validate any moral behavior represents a severe misuse of Darwin’s great insight, and a cardinal violation of NOMA.
But Bryan continued to characterize evolution as a principle of battle and destruction of the weak, a doctrine that undermined any decent morality and deserved banishment from the classroom. In a rhetorical flourish near the end of his “Last Evolution Argument,” t
he final speech that he prepared with great energy, but never had an opportunity to deliver 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 such a dismissive judgment would be unfair, because Bryan cannot be faulted on one crucial issue. 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 portrayed as a defense of war, domination, and domestic exploitation, he was right.
We now come to the crux of this story. Such misuses of Darwinism stand in violation of NOMA, and have also perpetrated much mischief in our century. But who bears the responsibility for such misuse? If scientists had always maintained proper caution in their interpretations, and proper humility in resisting invalid extensions of their findings into the inappropriate domains of other magisteria, then we could exonerate my profession by recognizing the inevitable misuses by nonscientists as yet another manifestation of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.
But NOMA cuts both ways and imposes restriction and responsibility on both magisteria. The political campaigns of American creationists do represent—as usually and correctly interpreted—an improper attempt by partisans of a marginal and minority view within the magisterium of religion to impose their doctrines upon the magisterium of science. But, alas, scientists have also, indeed frequently, been guilty of the same offense in reverse, even if they don’t build organized political movements with legislative clout.
Many people believe that evolution validates this or that moral behavior because scientists have told them so. When we view the behavior thereby justified as either benign or harmless, we tend to look the other way, and give the scientist a pass for his hubris. But fashions change, and today’s benevolence may become tomorrow’s anathema. The average American male reader in 1900 probably accepted racism, with his group on top, as a dictate of nature, and probably supported imperial expansion of American power. The claim that evolution justified the morality of both conclusions probably seemed, to him, both evident and reasonable. And if a prominent biologist advanced such a statement, then the argument became even more persuasive.
Most people today—from the subsequent perspective of Ypres, Hiroshima, lynchings, and genocides—consider such transgressions from evolutionary fact to social morality as both insidious and harmful. Bryan drew a valid lesson from his reading. Several of the German generals who traded arguments with Kellogg had been university professors of biology. Scientists cannot claim immunity from misinterpretations, particularly from socially harmful arguments advanced in violation of NOMA, if their own colleagues become frequent proposers and perpetrators.
Let me close with a specific example from a chillingly relevant 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!
Who can fault Bryan here? One of the saddest chapters in the entire history of science records the extensive misuse of data to support the supposed moral and social consequences of biological determinism, the claim that inequalities based on race, sex, or class cannot be altered because they reflect the innate and inferior genetic endowments of the disadvantaged. Enough harm has been done by scientists who violate NOMA by misidentifying their own social preferences as facts of nature in their technical writings. How much more mischief might arise when scientists who write textbooks, particularly for elementary and high-school students, promulgate these social doctrines as the objective findings of their profession.
I own a copy of the book that John Scopes used to teach evolution to the children of Dayton, Tennessee—A Civic Biology, published in 1914 by George William Hunter, professor of biology at Knox College. Many writers have consulted this book to find the sections on evolution that Scopes taught and Bryan quoted. But I also discovered disturbing comments in other chapters that have eluded previous commentators—an egregious claim, for example, 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,” Hunter 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 and 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.
In another passage, just two pages after the famous diagram that Bryan held aloft to demonstrate how Scopes had taught the insidious notion that humans might be classified as mammals, Hunter writes a single paragraph under the heading “the races of man”—in a textbook assigned to children of all groups in public high schools throughout America:
At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
Bryan advocated the wrong solution, but he had correctly identified a serious problem!
Science is a discipline, and disciplines are exacting. All disciplines 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 when we ponder the great questions of morals and aesthetics. But science cannot answer these questions alone and science 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 to further 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 respect that tempted us in the first place. NOMA cuts both ways.
We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have distinctive ways of knowing, valid in their proper domains. No single way can hold all the answers in our wondrously complex world. Besides, highfalutin morality aside, if we continue to overextend the boundaries of science, folks like Bryan will nai
l us properly for their own insidious purposes.
We should give the last word to Vernon Kellogg, a 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.
To which, let all people of goodwill; all who hold science, or religion, or both, dear; all who recognize NOMA as the logically sound, humanely sensible, and properly civil way to live in a world of honorable diversity—let them say, Amen.
2 I am no biblical expert or exegete, and cannot engage this issue in any serious manner. But I must say that I simply don’t understand what reading the Bible “literally” can mean, since the text, cobbled together from so many sources, contains frequent and inevitable contradictions. These variant readings pose no problem to the vast majority of religious people who view the Bible as an inspired document full of moral truth, and not as an accurate chronicle of human history or a perfect account of nature’s factuality. For the most obvious example, how can “literalists” reconcile the plainly different creation stories of Genesis I and II, which, according to all biblical scholars I have ever consulted, clearly derive from different sources. In the more familiar Genesis I, God creates sequentially in six days, moving from light to the division of waters and firmament, to land and plants, to the sun and moon, and finally to animal life of increasing complexity. On the sixth day he creates human beings, both male and female together: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” In Genesis II, God creates the earth and heavens and then makes a man “of the dust of the ground.” He then creates plants and animals, bringing all the beasts to Adam and granting his first man naming rights. But Adam is lonely, so God creates a female companion from one of his ribs: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he the woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman.” Our traditional reading conflates these two stories, taking the basic sequence, with humans last, from Genesis I, but borrowing the rib scenario for the subsequent creation of Eve from Genesis II. I often surprise people by pointing out this contradiction and conflation (for even highly devout people don’t always study the Bible much these days). They think that I must be nuts, or hallucinating, so I just tell them to check it out (at least most homes still have the basic data, no matter how otherwise bookless!)—and they get mighty surprised. Always be wary of what you think you know best.
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