charles_darwin

78
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
accommodate the millennia required for evolution to occur was
finally demonstrated to be incorrect. Third, and even more significant,
the science of genetics looked likely to provide the answer to
the question that Darwin could not answer in The Origin of Species:
how and why natural selection worked. Two of the major problems
with the ideas Darwin developed in The Origin of Species began to
recede. The period from 1930 onward was the beginning of a new
era for the reception of The Origin of Species.
The Scopes Trial is evidence that the year 1930 did not mark
the end of the debate about and opposition to the ideas in The Origin
of Species. In fact, in the years after 1925, Christian opponents of
evolution formed a new group whose approach to science was more
like the majority of society in the twentieth century. Calling themselves
creationists, these Christians used the newest findings in geology
to develop ideas about the age of the Earth and the impact of
the flood mentioned in the book of Genesis: they used modern science
to defend the Bible.
The difference between 1930 and 1900 was the way in which
scientists and the educated public perceived The Origin of Species. In
1900, it was possible that scientists might ignore, discount, or even
reject Darwin’s theories. That was not the case after 1930. Darwin’s
theory needed more refinement—not until the discovery of the structure
of DNA and RNA in the 1950s would scientists be able to
explain how genes worked and the connection between genes and
mutation—but scientists still accepted the majority of Darwin’s
theory as he wrote it in The Origin of Species. The linking of genetics,
statistical analysis of the growth of populations, and the research
of naturalists in the 1930s and 1940s led to what scientists called
‘‘the grand synthesis’’ in the 1950s. The action of natural selection
and why it occurred could be explained by the mutation of genes.
This agreement on the mechanism of evolution was called Neo-
Darwinism. The ideas of The Origin of Species now had a permanent
place in Western and world thought.
The Scopes Trial and Renewed Opposition to
Evolution
In 1940, the British theologian Vernon Faithfull Storr wrote:
The panic caused by the publication in 1859 of The Origin of
Species appears to us today almost unbelievable. The doctrine of
evolution was regarded as materialistic and atheistic in tendency.