As with any novel scientific theory, Darwin’s theory of natural selection stimulated a wide range of responses, both positive and negative. The theory was far less secure in 1859 than it is today and was the subject of robust scientific debate.
In 2009, a rich fossil record, the knowledge of genetics, many methods for dating geological strata, and a huge data-base of millions of species all add support to Darwin’s theory, which is considered to be the cornerstone of the biological sciences. However, 150 years ago, the supporting data were much fewer; genes were not even known. Darwin himself outlined and openly discussed the problems that he saw in Chapter 6 of On the Origin of Species, entitled ‘Difficulties on Theory’, and the majority of his critics were fellow scientists who expounded upon those difficulties.
A famous debate
The main annual scientific conference for Darwin and his colleagues was the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1860 the conference was held in Oxford, less than a year after the publication of On the Origin, and there was a vigorous scientific discussion about natural selection.
It was natural that the Bishop of Oxford, Sam Wilberforce, previously a Vice-President of the British Association, should give a talk at the Oxford meeting. During the first half of the 19th century, science in the UK had still been dominated by Anglican (protestant) clerics who remained responsible for all the teaching in the ancient universities such as Oxford and Cambridge; no less than forty-one Anglican clergymen had presided over the various sections of the British Association during the period 1831-1865.
In his talk, Wilberforce criticized Darwin’s new theory. Responses defending Darwin were made by Thomas Henry Huxley and by the botanist Joseph Hooker. Decades later this debate began to be presented as a debate about ‘science versus religion’, but in reality Bishop Wilberforce avoided any discussion of religion, and kept only to the scientific points. In his review of the Origin of Species that appeared a few weeks later, he wrote that “we have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by Revelation.” That is, Wilberforce did not accept criticism of science that was based on religious beliefs. Darwin was impressed by Bishop Wilberforce’s review, writing to his good friend Hooker, “It is uncommonly (‘exceptionally’) clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties”.
Mixed Responses
Bishop Wilberforce was not typical of the Anglican church leaders of the time in his opposition to evolution. Perhaps of greater significance was the fact that the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, gave the official sermon at the same Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860 and argued that the activity of God was to be discerned throughout the laws governing the natural world, not in the gaps in current scientific knowledge. Although Temple did not mention Darwin by name in that lecture, he developed this theme in his Bampton lectures of 1884, presenting a specifically Darwinian view of evolution.
Already by the mid 1860’s, Darwinian evolution was the subject of exam questions for Cambridge University undergraduates. The idea that evolution was strongly opposed by the scientific and religious authorities of that era is a myth. In reality the responses were very mixed. There were scientists, both religious and secular, who rapidly incorporated the theory into their scientific world-view. There were other scientists who opposed the theory on scientific grounds alone or on religious grounds alone, or sometimes both. There were scientific popularisers and clerics who readily accepted Darwin's theory and quickly adapted it into traditional theological frameworks. There were some clerics, a minority, who opposed the theory strongly, thinking that it would undermine ideas of morality and human value.
Darwin’s great achievement was to establish the idea of evolution as a well-supported scientific theory, even though scientists did not necessarily accept natural selection as the mechanism whereby evolution had occurred. Even Darwin’s great defender, Thomas Henry Huxley, never really accepted natural selection as the mechanism for natural selection. Not until the 1930s was natural selection almost unanimously accepted by the scientific community as the central mechanism for evolution.
Response in America
In the USA it was largely Christian academics who popularized Darwinian evolution both within the scientific community and beyond. For example, Asa Gray, Professor of Natural History at Harvard and a committed Christian, was Darwin’s long-term correspondent and confidante who helped organise the publication of the Origin of Species in America. Gray’s correspondence with Darwin has been preserved, and much of it may be read on-line at the Darwin Correspondence Project web-site. The correspondence has been dramatized by the Menagerie Theatre Company, in the play, Re:Design.
Other Christian academics in the USA who were enthusiastic proponents of Darwinian evolution included James McCosh, president of the College of New Jersey (later to become Princeton University); the theologian and geologist George Wright, whose books on glacial geology were for years the standard texts on the subject; Alexander Winchell, professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Michigan, who played a major role in organising geology as a science in the United States and was a founding member of the American Geological Society; and James Dana, professor of Natural History at Yale, and editor of The American Journal of Science. As Dana commented, “It is not atheism to believe in a development theory, if it be admitted at the same time that Nature exists by the will and continued act of God”.
Historical Perspective
The historian James Moore writes that ‘with but few exceptions, the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution’, and the American historian George Marsden reports that ‘...with the exception of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, virtually every American Protestant zoologist and botanist accepted some form of evolution by the early 1870s’. In an era in which religious support was important for the acceptance of ideas, this helps us to understand how such a revolutionary theory could be accepted so quickly and so widely. Without religious support it is doubtful that evolution would have been received, for the most part, rather positively.
After Darwin’s death the popularity of evolution by natural selection declined, only to be revived in the early decades of the 20th century by the discovery of genes and the re-discovery of the laws of inheritance, published in 1866 by Gregor Mendel, the Abbot of a Moravian Augustinian monastery, but since forgotten. It was the fusion of population genetics with natural selection that led to the so-called ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’ that remains today’s contemporary evolutionary theory.
