charles_darwin

74
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
contemporaneously, the actual topic of discussion was evolution.
This was especially true of the discussion, debates, and writing of
Christian opponents of Darwin’s ideas. Their concern was much less
about the specific ideas in The Origin of Species and much more
focused on the implications of the theory of evolution. They worried
about Darwinism rather than Darwin. Darwinism was synonymous
with evolution in the minds of Christian opponents: and evolution
was the danger, or evil, that had to be challenged. 27
According to William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the populist
politician and three-time candidate for president of the United States,
a naturalist scientific theory supported a materialist approach to life.
Materialism, living life as though God did not exist or was not important,
led to excessive capitalism, imperialism and a world war,
and a society with no moral foundation. Other Christian opponents
of Darwinism echoed these claims.
Was evolution a good (in the moral sense) theory? At the beginning
of the twentieth century, the question of the effect on society
of accepting a theory of evolution became a greater concern to Christian
opponents of Darwinism. The impact of the theory on belief in
the creation story in the Bible was troubling; however, looking at the
state of the world, what these opponents saw as the collapse in society’s
morals was far worse. From 1920 onward, the social impact of
the theory of evolution was as much a part of the twentieth-century
debate about Darwin and The Origin of Species as were the disputes
among scientists about the mechanism of evolution.
Notes
1. The Origin of Species, 481–482.
2. Ibid., 482.
3. Darwin recognized this in the chapters ‘‘Difficulties on Theory’’
and ‘‘Recapitulation and Conclusion.’’ See The Origin of Species, 171–172,
459–466.
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of
Natural Selection with Some of its Applications (London: Macmillan, 1889), v.
5. In Darwin’s defense, the German pathologist and biologist Rudolf
Virchow (1821–1902) did not propose his theory that cells were the basic
building blocks of every living organism until 1858. Cytology, the study of
cells, was a very new science, dating from the 1840s.
6. Wallace, Darwinism, vi. Wallace did some of the measurements he
suggested; see Darwinism, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60–61, 67, 72–73.
7. Ibid., vi–viii.