Quote of the Day (Francis Galton, on Evolution and Eugenics)

“I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.”—Sir Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (1908)

It’s funny how some of the major advocates of science-based racism fell short of their own warped standards of perfection. In the last century, you need only look at Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and the object of their psychopathic veneration, Adolf Hitler. In the Victorian Era, the unprepossessing physical specimen would have been Sir Francis Galton (pictured), born on this date 190 years ago today.

The “new views” to which Galton (1822-1911) alluded in the quote above derived from cousin Charles Darwin’s epochal 1859 study, The Origin of Species. It’s been said that genius is not far removed from madness, and Galton treaded that line consistently—including, to preposterous effect, an equation linking male-pattern baldness to brain activity. (It may have been the first time in history that mathematics was employed to demonstrate that physical disfavor was a sign of genius. Talk about self-interested work!)

Now, this eccentric polymath (exploration was among his many endeavors) strove to prove that a) intelligence could be inherited and b) that laws should be propagated to help winnow out the more feeble-minded. He even coined the term for his pseudo-science: eugenics. Darwinians who dismiss how interrelated the work of Darwin and Galton is are best advised to read the fifth chapter of The Descent of Man (1871), “On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties,“ where Galton is cited approvingly several times.

Over the years, it’s become increasingly common to tie Christopher Columbus to the demographic decimation that virtually wiped indigenous tribes from North America. But there’s a far more direct line between Galton and the Holocaust.

This was the man who, after all, indicated that North American Indians were ''melancholic''; Negroes possessed ''neither patience reticence nor dignity''; and the Irish, after the potato famine, became ''low and coarse.'' Undesirables who procreated, he believed, should be declared “enemies of the state.” There really wasn’t that much distance between that statement and Hitler’s euthanasia program, which sought to eliminate “life not fit for life”--a kind of trial run for the gas chambers.

Flashback, July 1925: Darrow Cross-Examines Bryan at Scopes Trial

In a confrontation as heated as the Tennessee weather that week, William Jennings Bryan, the most radical major-party Presidential candidate until Jesse Jackson, endured hours of cross-examination on the literal interpretation of the Bible by Clarence Darrow, the longtime “attorney for the damned.”

When it was over, Darrow had not managed to avert a sentence of guilty for client John Scopes for teaching evolution, but he had left Bryan’s reputation as a populist in tatters and spawned some of the most simplistic assumptions in America’s long history of culture wars.

Appropriately, a trial that began as a stunt climaxed as one. The defense team at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial had no more intention of getting anything useful out of Bryan’s testimony than the prosecution had of putting the defendant’s livelihood and human rights at risk.

For a trial that was not just massively but maniacally covered (it was the first time a legal proceeding was filmed or broadcast live over the radio), innumerable myths have spring up about the eight-day case in Dayton, Tenn. Most of these derive from Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, especially in the 1960 film adaptation starring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy in the principal roles.

Lawrence and Lee could probably claim some form of dramatic license just by naming the two adversaries “Matthew Harrison Brady” and “Henry Drummond.” But so much of the centerpiece of the movie—Bryan’s cross-examination—was taken from the Scopes trial transcript that viewers could be forgiven for thinking just about everything in the film was true. 

Hollywood’s distortion of history, ranging from elementary facts to larger issues regarding the major figures’ motivations, fits in perfectly with what historian Garry Wills wrote about the trial in Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990): “Almost everything about the Scopes trial has been misinterpreted, and it is the ‘educated’ part of America that has accepted the distortions.”

In the popular imagination, for instance, the notion has taken hold that Bryan believed literally in every single word of the Bible. But a careful examination of the following small portion of the trial transcript—part of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan--reveals that the great orator and three-time Democratic nominee for President was not what would nowadays be termed a fundamentalist:

CLARENCE DARROW: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

DARROW: But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale -- or that the whale swallowed Jonah, excuse me, please -- how do you literally interpret that?

BRYAN: When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah -- it does not say whale.

DARROW: Doesn't it? Are you sure?

BRYAN: That is my recollection of it, a big fish. And I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man, and can make both do what He pleases.

DARROW: Mr. Bryan, doesn't the New Testament say whale [Matthew 12:40]?

BRYAN: I am not sure. My impression is that it says fish, but it does not make so much difference. I merely called your attention to where it says fish, it does not say whale.

DARROW: But in the New Testament it says whale, doesn't it?

BRYAN: That may be true. I cannot remember in my own mind what I read about it.

DARROW: Now, you say the big fish swallowed Jonah, and he remained how long -- three days -- and then he spewed him up on the land. You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?

BRYAN: I am not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done.

That hardly ended the distortions associated with the Stanley Kramer film. Among the other misimpressions:

* That Bryan’s testimony took place inside the courtroom. Temperatures were so high and the courtroom was so packed that the cross-examination was moved outside.

* That Scopes was targeted right in his classroom while teaching Darwin. Though Scopes had previously taught from the textbook George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), he had not done so on the day specified in the indictment. In fact, Darrow did not want to place his client on the witness stand lest the fact emerge at cross-examination—and the case be thrown out before it could be appealed.

* That Scopes was locked up at the start of the trial. This was an invention of the film, but there was no chance of it happening. For starters, the town fathers were not out to stamp out evolution (though they surely wouldn’t have minded it) so much as to increase tourism. (It was in the midst of a recession that had resulted in the town's population declining by half.) They believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the media would be out in full force if they could mount a challenge to Tennessee’s recently passed legislation banning the teaching of evolution in schools. Moreover, the whole thing was a put-up job: not only did the schools superintendent and owner of a local coal mine ask Scopes if he were willing to, in effect, act as a “test case” against the new Tennessee law, but a couple of members of the prosecution team were also friends of the schoolteacher.

* That Bryan bullied Scopes’ girlfriend. Never happened. In fact, not only did the “Great Commoner” offer to pay Scopes’ fine for teaching the class, but the defendant wrote in his memoir (published decades later) on his continuing admiration for Bryan.

* That Bryan’s testimony represented the turning point of the trial. Judge John Raulston, it was certainly true, was not in any way, shape or form impartial, but he was surely correct that Bryan’s testimony was highly irregular. His ruling should have carried the day, except that Bryan, eager to air his views, said he had no objection to the defense motion. (That horrible mistake was compounded by the fact that Bryan had not argued a case in nearly three decades.) In any event, Raulston ruled, the day after the testimony, that the jurors were to disregard every bit of it.

* That Bryan suffered a fatal heart attack toward the conclusion of the trial. The heat—not to mention Darrow’s cross-examination—was rough on Bryan, who suffered from diabetes. But he did not die immediately after his day on the stand, but five days after the end of the trial, in his sleep.

* That, despite their clash, Darrow retained deep respect for Bryan. The closing scene of the film shows Drummond reproving cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck for his cruel summary of Brady’s life. In fact, Darrow was just as scathing. When he was told by reporters that Bryan had died—perhaps from a broken heart over the trial, it was suggested—Darrow muttered bluntly that it had to do more with "a busted belly," then offered something more palatable for public consumption.

*That H.L. Mencken, though displaying contempt for Bryan, kept an ironic distance from Darrow. The Hornbeck character was based, of course, on columnist-editor-lexicographer H.L. Mencken. Unlike his character in the film, Mencken acted as a virtual consultant to the Scopes defense team. In the modern media environment, that connection would itself be the subject of controversy because of the writer’s extreme lack of objectivity.

* That the case represented the Waterloo for teaching evolution in the schools. Not really. Scopes lost the case before Judge Raulston, but a higher Tennessee court overturned the verdict on a technicality (the jury, not Raulston, was supposed to figure out the size of the fine)—exactly what Darrow was hoping to avoid. He wanted the law to be overturned on its merits, rather than the denouement in this case.

*That Bryan objected to evolution largely because he couldn’t accept the notion of man’s descent from apes. This might be the greatest distortion of all in the movie. The crux of Bryan's opposition came down to what he believed to be a natural consequence of Darwinian evolutionary theory—the notion of “social Darwinism.” Several robber barons had argued that, since evolution favored the strong, they had no obligation to help the poor to survive. Bryan disagreed vehemently, and counterposed the Christian “gospel of love” against it.

Quote of the Day (Hans Kung, on Charles Darwin)

“In (Charles) Darwin the two great scientific trends of the nineteenth century—natural science and the human sciences, which at first had developed on completely separate lines—came together. Nature and history were seen to be evolving in a single mighty natural-historical process which by the smallest steps over vast ages had produced all the wealth of the world and the abundance of its living beings.”—Hans Kung, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (1981)

On this date 150 years ago, Charles Darwin submitted the first three chapters of The Origin of Species to his publisher. That anniversary, along with the bicentennial of his birth celebrated two months ago, is a reminder of a peculiar cultural phenomenon of our time: no sooner do the apostles of rationalism tear off the haloes surrounding the old gods and saints than they promote their own heroes to secular canonization.

For nearly 70 years, Lenin’s Tomb became the Soviet Union’s counterpart to medieval shrines such as Thomas Becket’s at Canterbury. Since his assassination, John Lennon—who, in “Imagine,” sang of a world in which there was “nothing to kill or die for,/And no religion too”—has achieved a pop apotheosis as a visionary of the Age of Aquarius, a prophet of peace and light whose own darkness (sarcastic, cutting humor and substance abuse) ends up being glossed over.

There ought to be a way to talk about such figures without special pleading, in much the same way that we can now speak of the contradictions that led Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, to retain slaves throughout his lifetime.

At least Kung (and, before him, Teilhard de Chardin) sought to reconcile scientific inquiry by positing a God with a beautiful creation in mind. More secular advocates of Darwin, however, have not only ignored that approach, but have bleached out some of the darker stains on their hero’s legacy.

Case (very much!) in point: Adam Gopnik. Two and a half years ago, the New Yorker staff writer published an essay on the scientist. More recently, noticing the interesting coincidence that Darwin was born on the same date as Abraham Lincoln, he wrote another think piece on the President, then combined them into Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life.

Like blogger Ross Douthat, I agree that for Gopnik, “where something more than cleverness is called for he's often at a loss, or else inappropriately facile.” Douthat was subjecting Gopnik’s “The Troubling Genius of G.K. Chesterton” to searching analysis.

“Troubling Genius” is a less appropriate title for the hyperprolific and largely happy Chesterton than for Darwin, a hypochondriac who spent years on his magnum opus—and only then rushed it into print when it became apparent that someone from out of the blue, Alfred Russel Wallace, was ready to proclaim the same theory of evolution after spending much less time testing and pondering it.

Moreover, though Gopnik made heavy weather out of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, he thoroughly airbrushed Darwin’s far more significant contribution to what may be two of the great horror stories of the first half of the 20th century: class exploitation and scientific racism.

I should state right here that I think the evidence of evolution is overwhelming. Moreover, despite the anti-science label slapped on groups indiscriminately lumped together as the “religious right,” many elements of the latter—including the Roman Catholic hierarchy—have no problem with the theory of evolution.

That is a far cry, however, from claiming, as so many of Darwin’s advocates seem intent on doing, that his thought is without fault. Early on, Herbert Spencer applied his phrase “survival of the fittest” to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America, Barry Werth is at great pains to reclaim the scientist from the American robber barons who quickly adopted “Social Darwinism” as their standard.

I’m afraid that this won’t fly, anymore than Gopnik’s notion that, despite sharing some of his age’s “gentry tastes and snobberies,” Darwin represented, like Lincoln, a new, more realistic form of liberalism. The most devastating assault on Gopnik’s fatuous arguments came two years ago from Peter Quinn, in his dissection of the “Gentle Darwinians.”

These apologists for the scientist have the equivalent of a ticking bomb in their hands: the utter readiness with which so many elements of the Victorian ruling class rushed to accept Darwinism, even pushing it into a realm pioneered by Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton: eugenics.

Naturally, following the Second World War, the idea that there could be superior and inferior classes of human beings acquired a distinctly unappetizing aroma. The Gentle Darwinians, however, attempted to sanitize their hero of any association with this discredited theory.

Unfortunately, try as they might, a large obstacle stands in their way: Darwin’s own words. By the time he wrote the second edition of The Descent of Man (1874), Darwin had not only taken to calling Spencer “our greatest philosopher” but had labeled Galton’s studies on intelligence and character “remarkable.”

Anybody who believes that Quinn is not giving Gopnik a fair shake ought to read the work of The New Yorker writer himself. You’ll see that Gopnik leaves himself so open for an intellectual takedown that he’s unintentionally engaging in self-parody.

Take the excerpt from his new book that appeared in The Smithsonian back in February. Let’s start with the way he mounts his major thematic hobbyhorse, that Darwin is some kind of prose master: “Darwin's work remains probably the only book that changed science that an amateur can still sit down now and read right through. It's so well written that we don't think of it as well written.”

Well, I had a somewhat different reaction when I was assigned to read The Origin of Species in my Contemporary Civilization class at Columbia University. It wasn’t only that I read another work—Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—that, for ease of reading (and love of intellectual combat), easily surpassed Darwin. No, it was the fact that, strictly on the merits of The Origins of Species, Darwin’s writing was not memorable or even particularly good.

When I read Gopnik’s observation, I blinked and asked myself, “Did I miss something?” But then, I came across a writer—far greater than myself, Darwin, or (can you imagine?) Gopnik—who felt the same way I did.

Irish playwright-novelist Samuel Beckett, I found out from a review of his recently published early diaries, purchased a copy of The Origin of Species, but came away with a pronounced case of buyer’s remorse, calling it “badly-written catlap.”

Elsewhere, Gopnik writes that for Darwin, “the habit of pontification was completely alien to him, unless it was reassuringly tied with a bow of inductive observation.” Put aside, faithful reader, how much you might want to wretch at that cute little “bow of inductive reasoning” and ask yourself if it’s really true.

After WWII, the cause of racial hygiene and its extreme uses—compulsory sterilization, immigration quotas—at home and in Nazi Germany inspired more than a little scientific skepticism. You won’t find any of that in Darwin, who quoted approvingly from studies remarking airily on the inferiority of the Irish and African-Americans to Anglo-Saxon stock.

Most damning of all, Gopnik would like to have it both ways: He claims repeatedly that Darwin freed the world from the shibboleths of churchmen in favor of “humanism, in flight,” yet he ignores the evidence that the eminent Victorian left the world in even greater thrall to the far more pernicious doctrine of racism.

If we’re going to think of Darwin in any kind of adult way, we’d do well to consider how we regard the work of another scientist: Thomas Jefferson. As the embodiment of the American Enlightenment, the latter produced, in Notes on the State of Virginia, an argument for the inferiority of African-Americans based on “observations” concerning their childishness, irrationality, even their “disagreeable odour.”

Two centuries later, though they give Jefferson full credit for his contribution to the cause of freedom worldwide, you won’t find many reputable historians excusing the astonishingly bad scientific thesis quoted above. Too bad that the same openness to spirited inquiry hasn’t yet been embraced by Gopnik and the other diehard advocates of Darwin.