About the Project. Site Map. All rights reserved. First, he argued, each animal is not an exact replica of its parents, but is different in subtle ways. Second, he said, although these differences in each generation are random, some of them convey distinct advantages to an animal, giving it a much greater chance to survive and breed.
Over time, this beneficial variation spreads to the rest of the species, because those with the advantage are more likely than those without it to stay alive and reproduce. And, finally, over longer periods of time, cumulative changes produce new species, all of which share a common ancestor. The book became an instant bestseller and, as Darwin had feared, set off a firestorm of controversy in his native Britain.
While many scientists defended Darwin, religious leaders and others immediately rejected his theory, not only because it directly contradicted the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis, but also because — on a broader level — it implied that life had developed due to natural processes rather than as the creation of a loving God.
Moody, began to inveigh against Darwinism as a threat to biblical truth and public morality. From the s to the s, the major American Protestant denominations gradually split into two camps: modernist, or theologically liberal Protestantism what would become mainline Protestantism ; and evangelical, or otherwise theologically conservative, Protestantism.
This schism owed to numerous cultural and intellectual developments of the era, including, but not limited to, the advent of new scientific thinking. Theologians and others also grappled with new questions about the historical accuracy of biblical accounts, as well as a host of provocative and controversial new ideas from such thinkers as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud about both the individual and society. Modernist Protestants sought to integrate these new theories and ideas, including evolution, into their religious doctrine, while more conservative Protestants resisted them.
The issue became a mainstay for Protestant evangelists, including Billy Sunday, the most popular preacher of this era. But it was William Jennings Bryan, a man of politics, not the cloth, who ultimately became the leader of a full-fledged national crusade against evolution. Evolutionary thinking had helped birth the eugenics movement, which maintained that one could breed improved human beings in the same way that farmers breed better sheep and cattle.
Many who favored the teaching of evolution in public schools did not support eugenics, but simply wanted students to be exposed to the most current scientific thinking.
For others, like supporters of the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union, teaching evolution was an issue of freedom of speech as well as a matter of maintaining a separation of church and state.
And still others, like famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, saw the battle over evolution as a proxy for a wider cultural conflict between what they saw as progress and modernity on the one side, and religious superstition and backwardness on the other. Defending Scopes was Darrow, then the most famous lawyer in the country. And joining state prosecutors was Bryan. From the start, both sides seemed to agree that the case was being tried more in the court of public opinion than in a court of law.
But then Darrow made the highly unorthodox request of calling Bryan to the witness stand. Letters, however, show that the responses to Darwin were extremely variable. Many of his strongest public supporters, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Asa Gray, continued to have sharp theoretical differences with him; on the other hand, a number of his public critics assisted his research privately. Correspondence was itself an important arena of debate, one that Darwin greatly preferred to the public sphere.
Often sharp disagreements could be resolved or overcome, and friendship and support sustained in spite of enduring differences. Darwin's correspondence can thus help broaden our understanding of the role of scientific controversy and the ways in which it was conducted in the nineteenth century. Darwin rarely engaged with critics publically. Letters exchanged with Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, and Richard Owen, the eminent comparative anatomist, show how Darwin tried to manage strong disagreement in the more private realm of correspondence.
In the case of Sedgwick, Darwin was able to remain on friendly and respectful terms with his former professor. In the case of Owen, however, though their theoretical differences were less severe, the relationship quickly deteriorated and Darwin came to regard him as a bitter enemy.
Letter — Darwin, C. Letter — Sedgwick, Adam to Darwin, C. Letter — Owen, Richard to Darwin, C. Darwin describes how, for fear this might be so, he resolved to give up the work if he could not convince two or three competent judges.
Value of his views now depends on men eminent in science. Darwin usually avoided public controversy, and he is sometimes thought to have withheld his views on religion or human nature because he feared adverse public reaction. This exchange of letters with the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, an ardent proponent of Darwinism and a stern critic of religious authority in Germany, shows that Darwin had strong reservations about the value of polemical debate in science, and a deep optimism that the truth would eventually prevail without such aggressive tactics.
Hickman, L. Roberts, and F. Hickman, Integrated Principles of Zoology , p. Depew and B. Skip to content Introduction Everyone agrees that Darwinian evolution is a controversial topic.
Evolution 2 — Universal Common Descent: The idea that all organisms are related and are descended from a single common ancestor. Evolution 3 — Darwinian Evolution: The view that an unguided process of natural selection acting upon random mutation has been the primary mechanism driving the evolution of life. The scientists who have signed the dissent statement say this: We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.
Collectively, Evolution 2 and 3 might be termed macroevolution, which is defined as follows: Macroevolution: Large-scale changes in populations of organisms, including the evolution of fundamentally new biological features.
In writing this, we do not intend to speak for any of them in particular, but the following section briefly lists some of the types of scientific data that are often cited by those challenging Darwinian evolution: Genetics—Mutations Cause Harm and Do Not Build Complexity: Darwinian evolution relies on random mutations that are selected by a blind, unguided process of natural selection.
This undirected process has no goals.
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