By R. G. Price

There is a growing effort among opponents of evolution to portray Charles Darwin as a racist, and evolutionary theory as morally reprehensible, even to claim that Darwinism “provided Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power.”
These accusations are not merely from fringe radicals, but have indeed been made by elected officials and published in books by university professors, as we shall see.
Most disturbing, however, is the lack of significant rebuttal to these charges. Many people in fact, including some evolutionary biologists, find it easy to believe that perhaps Darwin was a racist, and perhaps evolutionary theory did contribute to Nazi ideology.
In 2001 African American State Representative Sharon Broome of Louisiana sponsored a resolution to condemn “Darwinist ideology” as racist and liken it to Nazism.
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By Adrian Desmond and James Moore

Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin. He is the grizzled grandfather peering from book jackets and billboards, from textbooks and TV — the sage on greeting cards, postage stamps and commemorative coins. Darwin’s head on British £10 notes radiates imperturbability, mocking those who would doubt his science. Hallow him or hoot at him, Darwin cannot be ignored. Atheists trumpet his ‘atheism’, liberals his ‘liberalism’, scientists his Darwinism, and fundamentalists expend great energy denouncing the lot. All agree, however, that for better or worse Darwin’s epoch-making book On the Origin of Species transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.
How did a modest member of Victorian England’s minor gentry become a twenty-first-century icon? Celebrities today are famous for being famous, but Darwin’s defenders have a different explanation.
To them Darwin changed the world because he was a tough-minded scientist doing good empirical science. As a young man, he exploited a great research opportunity aboard HMS Beagle. He was shrewd beyond his years, driven by a love of truth. Sailing around the world, he collected exotic facts and specimens — most notably on the Galapagos islands — and followed the evidence to its conclusion, to evolution. With infinite patience, through grave illness heroically borne, he came up with ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’ and published it in 1859 in the Origin of Species. This was a ‘dangerous idea’ — evolution by ‘natural selection’ — an idea fatal to God and creationism equally, even if Darwin had candy-coated this evolutionary pill with creation-talk to make it more palatable. Evolution annihilated Adam; it put apes in our family tree, as Darwin explained in 1871 when he at last applied evolution to humans in The Descent of Man. Secluded on his country estate, publishing book after ground-breaking book, Darwin cut the figure of a detached, objective researcher, the model of the successful scientist. And so he won his crown.
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By Kate Wong

When Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he pondered the evolution of organisms ranging from orchids to whales. Conspicuously missing from his magnum opus, however, was any substantive discussion of how humans might have arisen. He wrote only “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” Scholars attribute Darwin’s relative silence on this matter to reluctance on his part to further nettle the Victorian establishment (and his pious wife), for whom the origin of all living things—especially humans—was God’s work.
Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist otherwise known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” had no such reservations. In 1863 Huxley penned Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, in which he explicitly applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to humans, arguing that we had descended from apes. Eight years later Darwin himself, possibly encouraged by Huxley’s effort, wrote The Descent of Man. In it he declared the chimpanzee and gorilla our closest living relatives based on anatomical similarities and predicted that the earliest ancestors of humans would turn up in Africa, where our ape kin live today. At the time, only a handful of human fossils were known—all of them Neandertals from sites in western Europe.
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By Steve Mirsky

“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin.” So wrote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. “In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.”
Dennett’s musing really hits home to anyone who took introductory biology that did not include evolution: such a course is a giant survey of the different kinds of plants, animals and other organisms of our planet, tied together by a single principle–you needed to know it for the final. But evolution by natural selection ties all life together with process and chemistry. As the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously, and correctly, said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
The idea itself is fairly easy to grasp (which may be one reason why people who would never dream of finding fault with Einstein feel qualified to dispute Darwin): in populations of organisms, each individual is a bit different from every other; the differences may give that individual a bit of a survival advantage; that individual is more likely to pass on the traits that helped it survive; that trait becomes more widespread; rinse; repeat. In a few hundred million years, you can go from amoebae to elephants (and still have amoebae).
Of course, in the decades since the publication of Origin of Species, scientists have learned much more about the evolutionary process than Darwin could have dreamed of. Genes get duplicated; chromosomes get rearranged; viruses shuttle genetic information from one species directly to another; individual genes govern the activity of other genes. But Darwin got much of the overall picture right–a remarkable achievement for a man working with whole organisms, before the unraveling of heredity on the molecular level of DNA.
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By Bertrand Russell

The eminent theologian Dr. Thaddeus dreamt that he died and pursued his course toward heaven. His studies had prepared him and he had no difficulty in finding the way. He knocked at the door of heaven, and was met with a closer scrutiny than he expected. “I ask admission,” he said, “because I was a good man and devoted my life to the glory of God.” “Man?” said the janitor, “What is that? And how could such a funny creature as you do anything to promote the glory of God?” Dr. Thaddeus was astonished. “You surely cannot be ignorant of man. You must be aware that man is the supreme work of the Creator.” “As to that,” said the janitor, “I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but what you’re saying is news to me. I doubt if anybody up here has ever heard of this thing you call ‘man.’ However, since you seem distressed, you shall have a chance of consulting our librarian.”
The librarian, a globular being with a thousand eyes and one mouth, bent some of his eyes upon Dr. Thaddeus. “What is this?” he asked the janitor. “This,” replied the janitor, “says that it is a member of a species called ‘man,’ which lives in a place called ‘Earth.’ It has some odd notion that the Creator takes a special interest in this place and this species. I thought perhaps you could enlighten it.” “Well,” said the librarian kindly to the theologian, “perhaps you can tall me where this place is that you call ‘Earth.'” “Oh,” said the theologian, “it’s part of the Solar System.” “And what is the Solar System?” asked the librarian. “Oh,” said the theologian, somewhat disconcerted, “my province was Sacred Knowledge, but the question that you are asking belongs to profane knowledge. However, I have learnt enough from my astronomical friends to be able to tell you that the Solar System is part of the Milky Way.” “And what is the Milky Way?” asked the librarian. “Oh, the Milky Way is one of the Galaxies, of which, I am told, there are some hundred million.” “Well, well,” said the librarian, “you could hardly expect me to remember one out of so many. But I do remember to have heard the word galaxy’ before. In fact, I believe that one of our sub-librarians specializes in galaxies. Let us send for him and see whether he can help.”
After no very long time, the galactic sub-librarian made his appearance. In shape, he was a dodecahedron. It was clear that at one time his surface had been bright, but the dust of the shelves had rendered him dim and opaque. The librarian explained to him that Dr. Thaddeus, in endeavoring to account for his origin, had mentioned galaxies, and it was hoped that information could be obtained from the galactic section of the library. “Well,” said the sub-librarian, “I suppose it might become possible in time, but as there are a hundred million galaxies, and each has a volume to itself, it takes some time to find any particular volume. Which is it that this odd molecule desires?” “It is the one called ‘The Milky Way,'” Dr. Thaddeus falteringly replied. “All right,” said the sub- librarian, “I will find it if I can.”
Some three weeks later, he returned, explaining that the extraordinarily efficient card index in the galactic section of the library had enabled him to locate the galaxy as number QX 321,762.
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By Robert S. Boyd

Two centuries after Charles Darwin’s birth on Feb. 12, 1809, people still argue passionately about his theory of evolution.
Was Darwin right? Should schoolchildren be exposed to contrary views in science class? These two controversies continue to rage, partly because both sides are evenly matched.
Most scientists and courts that have ruled on the matter say that overwhelming evidence backs Darwin’s explanation of the origin and evolution of species, including humans, by natural selection.
Many people, especially religious and social conservatives, strongly disagree.
Among them are “creationists,” who take literally the Genesis story that God created the world and mankind in six days no more than 10,000 years ago. Others support “intelligent design,” the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without a supernatural “designer,” presumably God.
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By Doug Linder

When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles. (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.) The King James Version of the Bible introduced into evidence by the prosecution in Dayton contained Ussher’s famous chronology, and Bryan more than once would be forced to resort to the bishop’s dates as he tried to respond to Darrow’s questions.
The chronology first appeared in The Annals of the Old Testament, a monumental work first published in London in the summer of 1650. In 1654, Ussher added a part two which took his history through Rome’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The project, which produced 2,000 pages in Latin, occupied twenty years of Ussher’s life.

Ussher lived through momentous times, having been born during the reign of Elizabeth and dying, in 1656, under Cromwell. He was a talented fast-track scholar who entered Trinity College in Dublin at the early age of thirteen, became an ordained priest by the age of twenty, and a professor at Trinity by twenty-seven. In 1625, Ussher became the head of the Anglo-Irish Church in Ireland.

As a Protestant bishop in a Catholic land, Ussher’s obsession with providing an accurate Biblical history stemmed from a desire to establish the superiority of the scholarship practiced by the clergy of his reformed faith over that of the Jesuits, the resolutely intellectual Roman Catholic order. (Ussher had absolutely nothing good to say about “papists” and their “superstitious” faith and “erroneous” doctrine.) Ussher committed himself to establishing a date for Creation that could withstand any challenge. He located and studied thousands of ancient books and manuscripts, written in many different languages. By the time of his death, he had amassed a library of over 10,000 volumes.

The date forever tied to Bishop Ussher appears in the first paragraph of the first page of The Annals. Ussher wrote: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period.” In the right margin of the page, Ussher computes the date in “Christian” time as 4004 B.C.

Although Ussher brought stunning precision to his chronology, Christians for centuries had assumed a history roughly corresponding to his. The Bible itself provides all the information necessary to conclude that Creation occurred less than 5,000 years before the birth of Christ. Shakespeare, in As You Like It, has his character Rosalind say, “The poor world is almost six thousand years old.” Martin Luther, the great reformer, favored (liking the round number) 4000 B.C. as a date for creation. Astronomer Johannes Kepler concluded that 3992 B.C. was the probable date.

As paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould points out in an essay on Ussher, the bishop’s calculation of the date of Creation fueled much ridicule from scientists who pointed to him as “a symbol of ancient and benighted authoritarianism.” Few geology textbook writers resisted taking a satirical swing at Ussher in their introductions. How foolish, the authors suggested, to believe that the earth’s geologic and fossil history could be crammed into 6,000 years. Gould, while not defending the bishop’s chronology, notes that judged by the research traditions and assumptions of his time, Ussher deserves not criticism, but praise for his meticulousness. The questionable premise underlying Ussher’s work, of course, is that the Bible is inerrant.
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By Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

I am uncomfortable enough in a standard four-in-hand tie; pity the poor seventeenth-century businessmen and divines, so often depicted in their constraining neck ruffs. The formidable gentleman in the accompanying engraving commands the Latin title Jacobus Usserius, Archiepiscopus Armachanus, Totius Hiberniae Primas, or James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland. He is known to us today almost entirely in ridicule–as the man who fixed the time of creation at 4004 B.C., and even had the audacity to name the date and hour. October 23 at midday.

Let me begin with a personal gloss on the caption to this engraving, for my misreading embodies, in microcosm, the entire theme of this essay. I confess that I have always been greatly amused by the term primate, used in its ecclesiastical sense as “an archbishop … holding the first place among the bishops of a province.” My merriment must be shared by all zoologists, for primates, to us, are monkeys and apes–members of the order Primates. Thus, when I see a man described as a “primate,” I can’t help thinking of a big gorilla. (Humans, of course, are also members of the order Primates, but zoologists, in using the term, almost always refer to nearly 200 other species of the group–that is, to lemurs, monkeys, and apes.)

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by Douglas Linder

The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.

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