Survival of the Pithiest – The Weekly Standard

In early 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charles Darwins On the Origin of Speciespublished in Britain in November 1859became a topic of conversation among a number of New England intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Origin. So did Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa Alcott, and Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society. Two leading scientists also read the Origin: the botanist Asa Gray, who defended Darwin, and the zoologist Louis Agassiz, who attacked Darwin. Now, in The Book That Changed America, Randall Fuller declares that "the Origin did what few books ever do: alter the conversation a society is having about itself."

Did Darwin's theory of evolution really "ignite a nation"? It's hard to say from the evidence Fuller provides in this lucid book because he writes mainly about New England intellectuals. (Indeed, my only quibble with Fuller is that occasionally he adds novelistic touches that are not warranted.) Yet perhaps the subtitle is accurate, for Darwin wrote to Asa Gray: "I assure you I am astonished at the impression my Book has made on many minds."

The Origin only marginally altered the conversation about slavery. Darwin's theory that every living creature is descended from one prototype undermined the argument for polygenesisthe notion that God created blacks as a separate species. Yet many writers who agreed with Darwin that there was a common origin for all human beings nevertheless argued that blacks were at a lower stage of development than whites, somewhere between apes and humans. This view was widespread among Southern apologists for slaverycartoonists often depicted Abraham Lincoln as a man/apebut this view was also commonplace in the North. The Origin did not change anyone's mind about slavery; it just gave writers for and against slavery different arguments to support their positions. Darwinism, Fuller says, "could be used to support just about any social or political claim one wanted to make."

Like all the New England intellectuals, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray condemned slavery, yet Agassiz insisted that blacks were a different species. Opposing miscegenationit was called "amalgamation"Agassiz believed that people of African descent should return to Africa. Gray said that it was impossible for blacks to be a different species: Different species cannot interbreed, yet slaveholders often mated with slaves. Polygenists argued that biracial children were infertile, but there was no evidence to support this claim. Charles Loring Brace agreed with Agassiz that it would be best if blacks emigrated: The United States, he argued, was a great nation because its leaders were Anglo-Saxons. He worried (Fuller writes) "that one day America might not be a white nation at all." Brace, however, disagreed with Agassiz about Darwin: He admired the Origin and made use of Darwin's theory in his Races of the Old World, which Fuller calls "a sprawling, ramshackle work ... deeply marred by a series of internal contradictions."

The Origin had a greater impact on the conversation about science and religion. Many Americans rejected the notion that the diversity of species was a result of chance. They agreed with Agassiz, who conducted a public campaign against Darwin, calling the theory of natural selection "fanciful." Agassiz said that God had created immutable species: "What," he asked, "has the whale in the arctic regions to do with the lion or the tiger in the tropical Indies?" Agassiz always invoked God as an explanation for the diversity of the animal kingdom: "There is a design according to which they were built, which must have been conceived before they were called into existence." (Gray argued that Agassiz's view "was theistic to excess." By referring the origin and distribution of species "directly to the Divine will," he said, Agassiz was removing the study of organic life from "the domain of inductive science.")

Bronson Alcott rejected any theory of species diversity that left out God. He offered his own odd take on evolutionarguing, in Fuller's words, that "all creatures had begun as humans, as part of a Universal Spirit. ... The lower the animal in the chain of being, the further that particular animal had fallen from its true spiritual state." Humans came first! Alcott was the most woolly-minded of the New England intellectuals, yet even the astute Gray was reluctant to give up the notion of design. He wrote to Darwin to say that design must have played some part in evolution; how else can one explain the extraordinary nature of the human eye? "I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design," Darwin replied. "I cannot think the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design." Darwin maintained that "the notion of design must after all rest mostly on faith." But he did not think his theory should affect people's religious beliefs: "I had no intention to write atheistically." Gray, a devout Presbyterian, concluded that God chose natural selection as the method for creation: "A fortuitous Cosmos is simply inconceivable," he said. "The alternative is a designed Cosmos."

Fuller points out that, by 1876, "a large swath of the liberal clergy" agreed with Asa Gray that natural selection was a mechanism employed by God. Yet, to this day, many Americans do not accept Darwin's theory: According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Group, "34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

The Origin also affected the conversation Americans were having about politics. Should capitalism be regulated? Adam Smith thought that it should, but Social Darwinists warned that regulating capitalism was misguided because it was against nature. Capitalism should be understood as a Darwinian struggle where the "fittest" thrived; why help the "unfit" when it was clear from nature that they were doomed to fail? So argued Yale social scientist William Graham Sumner:

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

A good gloss on Sumner's thought is a remark Gray made to Brace: "When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle, you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts."

Fuller begins and ends this book with Thoreau, who admired Darwin's detailed observation of the natural world in both The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. Thoreau was a budding natural scientist who took thousands of pages of notes about local flora. "What he intended to do with all this data," Fuller says, "is still not entirely clear." Fuller speculates that Thoreau may have "had difficulty organizing his material into a coherent project. ... He had adopted the methods of science without the benefit of a scientific theory."

The strongest evidence that Darwin influenced Thoreau comes from Thoreau's notebooks. In the last year of his life (Thoreau died in 1862) he embarked on a project to record the innumerable ways in which local forest trees propagated and thrived in a constantly changing environment. And in his notebook, he offers a hypothesis about what he has observed: "The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation." Thoreau, Fuller contends, "no longer relies upon divinity to explain the natural world." Fuller supports his contention with another sentence from Thoreau's notebooks: "Thus we should say that oak forests are produced by a kind of accident."

Of course, the notion of "accident" would have been rejected by Bronson Alcott, who was a close friend of Thoreau's. Alcott visited Thoreau on the day he died, reporting that his friend was "lying patiently & cheerfully on the bed he would never leave again." Another visitor, an aunt, asked Thoreau: "Have you made your peace with God?"

"We never quarreled," Thoreau replied.

Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.

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Survival of the Pithiest - The Weekly Standard