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SUNDAY SCIENCE: AMERICA’S BATTLE OVER DARWINISM WAS PERSONAL  
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Evan McMurry
August 18, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Darwin had fretted for years about the cataclysm that his book’s
publication would cause. In the U.S, one opponent loomed over others.
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, Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Heritage
Images / Getty.

 

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Atlantic_’s archives to contextualize the present and surface
delightful treasures. Sign up here.
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In July 1860, _The Atlantic Monthly_’s readers were confronted,
many for the first time, with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural
selection. “Darwin on the Origin of Species
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the first of three
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the Harvard botanist Asa Gray about Darwin’s 1859 book, instigated a
torrent of letters in response, some intrigued, others scandalized.
Emily Dickinson, it seems, remembered the experience of reading Gray
enough to allude to it decades later. One hundred and fifty years
after its publication, his essay spiked
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readership on this website.

Gray, a scholar and naturalist, adopted the pose of a reader made
uncomfortable by Darwin’s idea. “Novelties are enticing to most
people: to us they are simply annoying,” his essay began. “We
cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of
clothes … New notions and new styles worry us.”

This was subterfuge. Gray was among the few confidants for whom Darwin
had previewed the idea of natural selection, and he had supplied
Darwin with key research about plant distribution. Darwin had fretted
for years about the cataclysm that _Origin_’s publication would
cause, and in the United States, one opponent loomed over others:
Louis Agassiz.

At the time America’s most prominent scientist, the Swiss-born
zoologist swapped theories with Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David
Thoreau sent him a turtle specimen from Walden Pond; Oliver Wendell
Holmes rhapsodized about him
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this magazine. Agassiz, a colleague of Gray’s at Harvard, was a hit
on the lecture circuit, where he performed a populist version of
science that grated on Gray, who was establishing himself as a precise
empiricist. (Gray snickered in a letter to Darwin
that Agassiz’s _Atlantic_ article on glaciers
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not strain your brain.”) Agassiz promoted the belief that God had
created species in their exact geographical and hierarchical slots,
where they remained unchanging. This anti-evolutionist notion
eventually ruined his legacy, but in 1860, he was an imposing figure
who could stomp out Darwinism the moment it reached America.

Gray did not maintain his ruse of reluctance in _The Atlantic_ for
long. By the end of his first article, he had overcome his professed
misgivings about natural selection. In the second, the biographer
Christoph Irmscher points out, he set about using his fellow
professor’s arguments against him. Agassiz—“our great
zoölogist,” Gray sniffed
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observed that earlier species contained combined characteristics that
reappeared separately in subsequent animals. He called them
“prophetic types.” Extinct “reptile-like fishes,” for
instance, appeared to prophesy both the common fishes and reptiles.
Gray wondered aloud: Didn’t natural selection explain Agassiz’s
observation much better than his own baseless supposition did? “If
these are true prophecies,” Gray continued, “we need not wonder
that some who read them in Agassiz’s book will read their fulfilment
in Darwin’s.”

After _Origin_’s publication, Darwin gifted a copy to Agassiz,
along with a note swearing that he hadn’t sent the book as a
provocation. Agassiz seemed to have been too appalled to finish it;
despite his outraged marginalia (“this is truly monstrous”), he is
believed to have ceased reading partway through. Still, he’d
tolerated enough of natural selection that he reckoned he’d caught
it in a tangle. “If species do not exist at all,” as he saw the
upshot of Darwin’s theory to be, then “how can they vary? and if
individuals alone exist,” he continued, in a critique quoted by
Gray, “how can the differences which may be observed among them
prove the variability of species?”

“An ingenious dilemma,” Gray allowed, before turning it around on
his opponent
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Agassiz maintained that species were “categories of thought”
established by God. Even if this were true, Gray responded, that
hardly stopped those categories from varying—God’s thoughts could
presumably encompass all manner of change and multiplicity. And what,
exactly, were these “categories of thought” Agassiz proposed,
anyway? “Mr. Darwin would insinuate that the particular philosophy
of classification upon which this whole argument reposes is as purely
hypothetical and as little accepted as his own doctrine,” Gray
wrote.

In other words, Gray suggested, Agassiz’s vision of a divinely
segmented universe was nothing but metaphysical conjecture; he was,
more or less, making stuff up. Against this, Gray submitted_ On the
Origin of Species_, which had been comprehensively researched and
meticulously argued. Agassiz, the doyen of American science, suddenly
found himself rendered not just unconvincing but _unscientific_.

Agassiz could only repeat his belief, more emphatically but less
compellingly. He lost allies in Cambridge and gained critics in
scientific organizations. Darwinism spread among his students. In
1864, Agassiz and Gray exchanged words on a train; Gray, Agassiz
declared, was “no gentleman!” One of them was rumored to have
challenged the other to a duel. Agassiz finally left for a research
trip to Brazil. “It was clear to Agassiz’s friends,” Louis
Menand wrote in _The Metaphysical Club_, “that it might indeed be a
good idea for him to get out of town.”

A second line of attack lurked in Gray’s essays, one perhaps more
fatal from our vantage point. Agassiz believed that races were created
separately, were as immutable as animal species, and had been stacked
by God with white people on top. Although he opposed slavery, his
writings “lent scientific authority to those determined to defend
the slave system,” the Darwin biographer Janet Browne noted. Gray,
who like Darwin opposed slavery, took a shot at Agassiz’s
pseudoscientific racism. “The very first step backwards makes the
Negro and the Hottentot our blood-relations,” Gray wrote of the
branching human lineage implied by Darwin’s theory of descent.
“Not that reason or Scripture objects to that, though pride may.”
If man emerged from a common origin, went Gray’s implication, then
maybe a certain zoologist and the Black people who repulsed him were
more closely linked than the zoologist preferred to believe. One can
imagine Gray composing the line about “pride” with Agassiz’s
aghast reaction to it in mind.

Agassiz’s resistance to evolution diminished his reputation during
his lifetime, but his racism posthumously doomed it. His name has been
removed from schools and natural landmarks; Swiss towns have faced a
call to rechristen the Agassizhorn mountain. But in 1860, that was all
in the future. A change in _The Atlantic Monthly_’s editorial
leadership shortly after the publication of Gray’s essays favored
Agassiz; he contributed frequently to the magazine well into old age.
Asa Gray, the victor in the fight over the American reception of
Darwinism, and in some ways over the future of American science, never
appeared in these pages again.

_EVAN MCMURRY [[link removed]] is a
senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees audience._

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Engineered Virus Steals Proteins From H.I.V., Pointing to New Therapy
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By Carl Zimmer
New York Times
After promising results in monkeys, scientists plan to test the new
treatment in a few people with H.I.V.
August 8, 2024

* Science
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* biology
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* Evolution
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* Charles Darwin
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