The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation

Randall Fuller, “The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation,” Viking, 2017, 250 pp.

Fuller’s account of how Americans responded to the publication of Darwin’s great work in 1859 is organized as a series of set pieces — dinners, conversations, lectures — with reactions of these notable people to the recently published “On the Origin of Species”.  The author focuses on a group of New England writers, scientists and social reformers including Franklin B. Sanborn, a schoolmaster in Concord, Mass; Charles Loring Brace, a graduate of Yale and founder of the Children’s Aid Society, which worked to assist the thousands of orphaned, abandoned and runaway children who populated the streets of New York City; Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father), a local school superintendent so talkative that his neighbors would start walking in the opposite direction when they saw him coming to avoid an interminable discourse on one subject or another;  Henry David Thoreau; and Asa Gray, a professor of natural history at Harvard.

However, I believe the book’s title is incorrect as regards America; in fact, I believe Darwin has had the least effect on the American public than on any other industrialized country unless you believe that Creationism is totally in-line with Darwin’s thinking.  Yet, at least for Darwin’s contemporary’s, it was impossible to remain neutral about Darwin’s ideas once exposed to them.  Their dinner conversations served as their Facebook and Twitter of today.  Just look at our current Facebook conversations and marvel at the complex subjects covered.

Incidentally, Darwin’s 1859 book said nothing about the origins and evolution of human beings. But it was evidently impossible not to extrapolate his theory to people and his later publication confirmed that he had humans in mind all along.  And, “once the Origin of Species gained admission inside a reader’s head, it began to compete with all sorts of dearly held convictions, struggling against biblical accounts of the Earth’s age and beginnings, destroying consolatory views that had served as a bulwark for much of history.  With special and desolating force, it combated the idea that God had placed humans at the peak of creation. (pg. 213)”

My Notes:

Pg. 24:  What made Darwin’s insight so radical was its reliance upon a natural mechanism to explain the development of species.  An intelligent Creator was not required for natural selection to operate.  Darwin’s vision was of a dynamic, self-generating process of material change.  That process was entirely arbitrary, governed by physical laws and chance—and not leading ineluctably toward progress and perfection.  The world in which natural selection functioned was a world in which change was the only constant.  Natural selection was a brilliant concept, but like many brilliant concepts it assaulted long-cherished ideas and beliefs.  It threatened the notion that human beings were a separate and extraordinary species, differing from every other animal on the planet.  Taken to its logical conclusion, it demolished the idea that people had been created in God’s image.

Pg. 12:  Thoreau noted in his journal: “A man receives only what he is ready to receive…We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

Pg. 21:  Darwin seldom used the word ‘evolution.’  He preferred instead using the more accurate descent through modification. 

Pg. 23:  By 1836 many others had touched on what we now call evolution.  What distinguished Darwin’s theory from its precursors wasn’t his emphasis on deep time, however.  It was the process he called ‘natural selection.’  This activity involved the slight, random variations observable within any species.  What made Darwin’s insight so radical was its reliance upon a natural mechanism to explain the development of species.  An intelligent Creator was not required for natural selection to operate. 

Pg. 25:  Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) contained a simple premise: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”  Human reproduction outstripped agricultural food production.  Malthusian theory was a crucial step in Darwin’s concept of natural selection: Death sifted out individuals poorly suited for survival.

Pg. 68:  Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: compelled citizens to return escaped slaves.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: did away with the Missouri Compromise’s northern limit on slavery, allowing new territories north of 36 degrees 30 minutes to choose whether to become slave states.  This led to the eruption of violence in Kansas between pro and antislavery settlers, followed by John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry and his subsequent hanging.

Pg. 111:  The problem with evoking the Creator to explain the natural world was that it foreclosed other hypotheses.  It favored dogma at the expense of logic and empiricism. 

Pg. 125:  Few if any Americans felt that blacks could be integrated into Northern society.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, had banished every biracial character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Africa, neatly solving the problem of amalgamation and interracial society.  Also, in 1862, when Abraham Lincoln met with a ‘Committee of colored men’ to discuss the future, he expressed his concern that both races living side by side were bound to have ‘general evil effects on the white race.’ ‘It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.’

Pg. 130:  One of the most famous passages of the Origin begins as follows: ‘The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.’  This tree was abundant with ‘green and budding twigs’ that ‘represent existing species.’  It also carried dead limbs and boughs that ‘represent the long succession of extinct species.’  Darwin was suggesting that if we could rewind the spool of time, traveling far enough back to a period before human existence, before the age of dinosaurs and the cycles of glacial subsidence and the upheaving of volcanic mountains, we would discover a single parent from which all living creatures had descended: a common root from which the Tree of Life had sprung.  For ‘all living things have much in common: their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction.’  (In Darwin’s time, there was no way to confirm all this as genetic science did not yet exist).

Pg. 179:  Darwinian theories began making their appearance in works by Stephen Crane and Jack London and in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.  All these narratives presented characters who were driven by large impersonal forces—biology, sexuality, economics—in a vision that owed a great deal to Darwin’s naturalistic model of the world.  These characters either adapted to their environment or died because they could not.

Pg. 209:  Since at least the time of Socrates, natural philosophers had considered the complexity of the eye as proof that creation had been fashioned by a supernatural being.  Darwin had anticipated this argument in the Origin and asserted that random variation explained the formation of the eye just as persuasively as divine fiat.  All one had to do was imagine gradual adaptive change occurring over vast stretches of time, from primitive eye-buds to the acute optical organ of a hawk.

Pg. 215:  The eye of whales and hawks and humans had not evolved to enjoy a cerulean summer sky or to glory in God’s creation.  They had not been fashioned to enjoy the pigments of paint or the delicate tints of autumn leaves.  They had developed over eons in order to plunder, pillage, and overpower: to enable their particular species to survive in the competitive struggle of life.