Darwin’s inheritors

Maybe you were one of those people, like me, who did not get to hear Richard Dawkins speak Monday. But this wasn’t the first time people have been turned away from a public discussion involving evolution.

At the Oxford evolution debate in 1860, just seven months after publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” more than 1,000 people crowded into a chamber in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and hundreds more were turned away. 

Since 2009 marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and the bicentennial of his birthday, our culture and University seem particularly attuned to the ideas he fostered.

Yes, we are commemorating some mixed conception of evolution and Darwin. But what are we remembering, in particular?

Probably not the idea of “favored races” in Darwin’s subtitle: “Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

An unfortunate side effect of this aspect of Darwin’s theory gave seemingly scientific backing for the eugenics that partly informed Hitler’s vision of a superior Aryan race.

And we’re certainly not remembering Darwin’s sexism in proclaiming in 1871 in “The Descent of Man” that “the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” 

Instead, people are more likely to recall Darwin’s influence as something of an enlightenment for the scientific community, which transferred into society soon after in the form of religious skepticism.

But has U.S. society made this transfer?

On a train from Oxford one morning earlier this year, I overheard a fellow relate to his companion across the aisle that, according to a recent study he had encountered, 76 percent of Americans believed in God and only 15 percent believed that Darwinism was the best explanation for the origin of the world (though Dawkins puts this at about 40 percent).

His companion, after a brief silence, tersely replied, “Then three quarters of Americans are idiots.”

Indeed, it was not so long ago that parts of this country outlawed the teaching of evolutionary theory. Tennessee’s 1925 Butler Act – tested in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial – declared it unlawful in any state-funded educational establishment “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

But things have changed, and IU seems fully behind evolution with the 2009 Themester of “Evolution, Diversity and Change,” which sponsored a symposium on “Origins” last weekend and has recently brought in Dawkins, Michael Ruse and others.

Perhaps one final thing we commemorate this year, though, is Darwin’s intellectual fortitude in publishing a theory that he knew would be attacked.

Only now, the theory that is more likely to be attacked in the university setting is not evolution but its converse. It could be that as we celebrate intellectual courage, some of the current inheritors of that tradition of fortitude are now standing on the opposite side of the evolution debate.