Darwinism and Popular Science

From April 24, 1909

The April number of The Popular Science Monthly contains a series of articles on Darwin and Darwinism, most of them addresses delivered on the hundredth anni­versary of Darwins birth, February 12th, 1909. The impression that will be derived by the ordinary non­scientific reader, or even by educated people who are not closely in touch with present day thought in biology, will be inevitably that Darwinism is still a great force in the scientific world, an almost universally accepted theory that now has risen almost to the higher plane of a scientific doctrine. Of course any such idea is utterly false. Darwinism is not evolution, but an attempt to explain evolution. Darwin was not the first to make such an attempt of explanation; but literally hundreds of thinkers before him made the effort and at least half a dozen of them came as near making a successful ex­planation as his has proved to be.

In all of these ad­dresses there is practically no hint that at the present moment the great leaders of biological thought in Europe, the professors of the biological sciences at the Universities of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Strassburg, Tiibingen, Erlangen, Amsterdam and Heidelberg have in the last ten years written books against Darwinism. English speaking scientists still continue, apparently from national motives, to cling to Darwinism, but even such distinguished American biologists as Cope, perhaps the greatest of American zoologists, Packard of Brown, and Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia, wrote against the Darwinian theory. The greatest investigating scientists of the nineteenth century were almost without exception anti­Darwinians. The "antis" include Von Baer, the greatest of embryologists, though from embryology Darwinism is supposed to derive its strongest confirmation; Wigand, the botanist, though botany is supposed to have fur­nished most evidence for the transmutation of species; Agassiz and Sir William Dawson, the greatest of paleontologists, though it was the study of fossils that was expected to furnish the missing links; and Van Kolliker Nageli and Virchow, the great human and com­parative anatomists, whose knowledge of anthropology should make their opinions of great weight. Prof. Driesch of Heidelberg, Haeckels greatest disciple, de­clared last year in the Gifford Lectures at Edinburg, that "Darwinism fails all along the line." Of all this grow­ing protest against Darwinism there is almost no hint in this symposium on Darwin, published in The Popular Science Monthly, except a halting sentence or two from Prof. Morgan, who declares that "it is the spirit of Darwinism and not its formul­tion for the genuine scientist. Evidently this case is no exception. The centennial of Darwin has not made evolution more certain than he left it.

Darwins Place in Biology

From January 22, 1910