The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [129]
The reaction to Darwin was even stronger in America, where it took the form of a surge of fundamentalism and public baptism. Indeed it was not until 1925 that the trial of John Scopes, a teacher from Tennessee who was prosecuted for teaching evolution on the grounds that the theory undermined the authority of the Bible, would challenge and lose the case over the ban on Darwinism, and it would be another forty-two years before the relevant state law would be repealed. The Catholic Church moved faster. Catholics were permitted to discuss evolution after the publication of Pius XII’s Humani Generis, in 1951.
Darwin reproduced the mechanism of natural selection in pigeons. If breeders could develop varieties of the common rock pigeon (top to bottom: Carrier, Fantail and Tumbler) so unalike as to seem different species, so could nature.
A mid-nineteenth-century Punch cartoon, lampooning the fashion for nature study which Darwin helped to create.
The effects of Darwin’s theories outside the sphere of religion were wide-ranging. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Darwin had the luck to please anybody with an axe to grind.’
Racialism had been in evidence before Origin, especially after the work of the first serious racial theorist, Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races was published in France in 1853. But Darwin gave spurious respectability to the idea of racial purity. His cousin Francis Galton was a leading expounder of the British and American eugenics movement in the 1860s.
Galton thought that town life had led to the deterioration of human stock, encouraging as it did those best adapted to withstand contagious or infectious diseases and to eat impure food. Darwin’s theory gave scientific credence to eugenics. By the end of the century some eugenicists advocated such extreme measures as preventive sterilisation of imbeciles, syphilitics, tuberculosis victims and bankrupts, as well as financial aid for the parents of each child produced by persons of ‘civic worth’.
Galton himself, with his mania for classification, produced a ‘beauty map’of Britain, using a patent recording machine to list the percentage of ‘attractive, indifferent and repellent-looking women’in various towns. London came top of the beauty stake, while Aberdeen was bottom.
On the Continent Darwinism was to be used to a similarly extreme end, due to the work of a German scholar called Ernst Haeckel. In 1859, when Darwin published, Haeckel was a doctor in Berlin. Aged twenty-five, he was about to attend the university of Jena to study zoology.
A Punch cartoon of 1861 shows the popular press reaction to On the Origin of Species.
A castle designed for mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Germany looked to the past for inspiration; it was to provide the myth of their Aryan, super-race origins.
This was an age of turmoil and division in Germany, a country looking for an identity and soon to find it under the guidance of Bismarck. At the time the source of the greatest political and philosophical influence in Germany and indeed all over Europe was the German thinker Hegel. He taught that nothing was real but the ‘whole’, which he called the ‘Absolute’, that history was a series of advances towards the Absolute Idea, that things went from less to more perfect (Darwin ended Origin with a ringing defence of the same thought), and that the development of the spirit in man had best been represented by German achievements. For Hegel, history’s great men were all German. They were Theodoric, Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Luther and Frederick the Great. These men, all ‘heroes’, the best a nation could produce, were the finest examples