Rocks of Ages (15 page)

Let me pass on this third point. Bryan’s contention strikes at the heart of academic freedom, and scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case. I merely record that Bryan embedded his curious argument in his own concept of populism. “The taxpayers,” he wrote,

But what of Bryan’s first two arguments about the influence of Darwinism on militarism and domestic
exploitation? We may detect the touch of the Philistine in Bryan’s claim, but we must also admit that he had identified something deeply troubling—and that the fault does lie partly with violations of NOMA by scientists and their acolytes.

Bryan often stated that two books had altered the character of his opposition to evolution from laissez-faire to vigorous action:
Headquarters Nights
, by Vernon L. Kellogg (1917), and
The Science of Power
, by Benjamin Kidd (1918). I read these two books and found them every bit as riveting as Bryan had. I also came to understand his fears, even to agree in part (though not, of course, with his analysis or his remedies).

Vernon Kellogg was an entomologist and perhaps the leading teacher of evolution in America (he held a professorship at Stanford and wrote a major textbook,
Evolution and Animal Life
, with his mentor and Darwin’s leading disciple in America, David Starr Jordan, ichthyologist and president of Stanford University). During the First World War, while America maintained official neutrality, Kellogg became a high official in the international, nonpartisan effort for Belgian relief, a cause officially “tolerated” by Germany. In this capacity, he was posted at the headquarters of the German Great General Staff, the only American on the premises. Night after night he listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself,
among Germany’s highest military officers.
Headquarters Nights
is Kellogg’s account of these exchanges. He arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force.

Kellogg was appalled, above all, at the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by these officers, many of whom had been university professors before the war. They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale but advocated a false and particularly crude version of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle:

Kellogg, of course, found in this argument only “horrible academic casuistry and … conviction that the individual is nothing, the state everything.” Bryan conflated a perverse interpretation, based on a fundamental violation of NOMA, with the thing itself and affirmed his worst fears about the polluting power of evolution.

’Benjamin Kidd, an English commentator highly respected in both academic and lay circles, wrote several popular books on the implications of evolution. In
The Science of Power
(1918), his posthumous work, Kidd constructs a curious argument that, in a very different
way from Kellogg’s, also fueled Bryan’s dread. Kidd, a philosophical idealist, believed that life can only progress by rejecting material struggle and individual benefit. Like the German militarists, but to excoriate rather than to praise, Kidd identified Darwinism with domination by force. He argued, for example, that Darwinism had rekindled the most dangerous of human tendencies—our pagan soul, previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation:

We may conclude that Bryan was playing, probably quite unconsciously, the classic game of “blaming the victim” in excoriating Darwin, or the theory of natural selection, or even evolution itself, as the chief source of moral decay in his time. The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory (unless such misuse arises from the originator’s own confusion or poor expression, which he then, in a fit of pique or haughtiness, makes no effort to correct; it just isn’t Alexander Graham Bell’s fault that your teenage kid’s phone bill nearly bankrupted you last year). Bryan, as noted previously, failed to comprehend evolution in nearly all conceivable ways. He certainly did not understand Darwin’s idea of natural selection, which is not a principle of victory by mortal combat, but a theory about reproductive success, however that goal be best achieved in local environments (by combat in some circumstances, to be sure, but by cooperation in others). But, most important, for the context of this book, Bryan never grasped NOMA’s chief principle that factual truth, however constituted, cannot dictate, or even imply, moral truth. Any argument that facts or
theories of biological evolution can enjoin or validate any moral behavior represents a severe misuse of Darwin’s great insight, and a cardinal violation of NOMA.

But Bryan continued to characterize evolution as a principle of battle and destruction of the weak, a doctrine that undermined any decent morality and deserved banishment from the classroom. In a rhetorical flourish near the end of his “Last Evolution Argument,” the final speech that he prepared with great energy, but never had an opportunity to deliver at the Scopes trial, Bryan proclaimed:

I wish I could stop here with a snide comment on Bryan as Yahoo and a ringing defense for science’s proper interpretation of Darwinism. But such a dismissive judgment would be unfair, because Bryan cannot be faulted on one crucial issue. Lord only knows, he understood precious little about science, and he wins no medals for logic of argument. But when he said that Darwinism had been widely portrayed as a defense of war, domination, and domestic exploitation, he was right.

We now come to the crux of this story. Such misuses of Darwinism stand in violation of NOMA, and have also perpetrated much mischief in our century. But who bears the responsibility for such misuse? If scientists had always maintained proper caution in their interpretations, and proper humility in resisting invalid extensions of their findings into the inappropriate domains of other magisteria, then we could exonerate my profession by recognizing the inevitable misuses by nonscientists as yet another manifestation of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

But NOMA cuts both ways and imposes restriction and responsibility on both magisteria. The political campaigns of American creationists do represent—as usually and correctly interpreted—an improper attempt by partisans of a marginal and minority view within the magisterium of religion to impose their doctrines upon the magisterium of science. But, alas, scientists have also, indeed frequently, been guilty of the same offense in reverse, even if they don’t build organized political movements with legislative clout.

Many people believe that evolution validates this or that moral behavior because scientists have told them so. When we view the behavior thereby justified as either benign or harmless, we tend to look the other way, and give the scientist a pass for his hubris. But fashions change, and today’s benevolence may become tomorrow’s
anathema. The average American male reader in 1900 probably accepted racism, with his group on top, as a dictate of nature, and probably supported imperial expansion of American power. The claim that evolution justified the morality of both conclusions probably seemed, to him, both evident and reasonable. And if a prominent biologist advanced such a statement, then the argument became even more persuasive.

Most people today—from the subsequent perspective of Ypres, Hiroshima, lynchings, and genocides—consider such transgressions from evolutionary fact to social morality as both insidious and harmful. Bryan drew a valid lesson from his reading. Several of the German generals who traded arguments with Kellogg had been university professors of biology. Scientists cannot claim immunity from misinterpretations, particularly from socially harmful arguments advanced in violation of NOMA, if their own colleagues become frequent proposers and perpetrators.

Let me close with a specific example from a chillingly relevant source. In his “Last Evolution Argument,” Bryan charged that evolutionists had misused science to present moral opinions about the social order as though they represented facts of nature.

Who can fault Bryan here? One of the saddest chapters in the entire history of science records the extensive misuse of data to support the supposed moral and social consequences of biological determinism, the claim that inequalities based on race, sex, or class cannot be altered because they reflect the innate and inferior genetic endowments of the disadvantaged. Enough harm has been done by scientists who violate NOMA by misidentifying their own social preferences as facts of nature in their technical writings. How much more mischief might arise when scientists who write textbooks, particularly for elementary and high-school students, promulgate these social doctrines as the objective findings of their profession.

I own a copy of the book that John Scopes used to teach evolution to the children of Dayton, Tennessee—
A Civic Biology
, published in 1914 by George William Hunter, professor of biology at Knox College. Many writers have consulted this book to find the sections on
evolution that Scopes taught and Bryan quoted. But I also discovered disturbing comments in other chapters that have eluded previous commentators—an egregious claim, for example, that science holds the moral answer to questions about mental retardation, or social poverty so misinterpreted. Hunter discusses the infamous Jukes and Kallikaks, the “classic,” and false, cases once offered as canonical examples of how bad heredity runs in families. Under the heading “Parasitism and Its Cost to Society—The Remedy,” Hunter writes:

In another passage, just two pages after the famous diagram that Bryan held aloft to demonstrate how Scopes had taught the insidious notion that humans might be classified as mammals, Hunter writes a single paragraph under the heading “the races of man”—in a textbook assigned to children of all groups in public high schools throughout America: