The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America

Smocovitis, Vassiliki Betty

doi:10.1086/649311

Cited by 91 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…At the celebration of the centennial of the publication of the Origin in 1959 hopes ran high that the consensus that had been reached among professional evolutionary biologists would lead at long last to widespread public understanding and acceptance of evolution on largely neo-Darwinian terms (Smocovitis 2000). In spite of an inability to penetrate very deeply into the public mind, these efforts met with some success.…”

Section: Darwinian Controversies 325mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The plan for the Chicago commemoration went well enough except for a botched beginning (see Smocovitis 2000 for a full account). Huxley ''preached'' the opening ''sermon'' from the pulpit of the University's Rockefeller Chapel.…”

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Huxley, it seems, had shucked off racism in order to free eugenics from unwanted baggage rather than, like his American colleagues, treating the deconstruction of racism as doing in eugenics as well. Accordingly, Huxley argued that techno-scientific man must now take God's place in directing evolution, thereby freeing humans from any residual need for religion (Smocovitis 2000;on Huxley's humanism, Crook 2007; on his difference from R. A. Fisher, who thought the role of humans in directing evolution by eugenics was part of God's plan and consistent with his Anglican faith, see Moore 2007).…”

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So doubly offensive was this speech to the general public, which heard about it from journalists accredited to the conference, that it stimulated the publication of Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood (Morris and Whitcomb 1961;Smocovitis 2000). This book re-circulated the ''scientific creationism'' that had first been articulated by the Seventh Day Adventist George Ready Price in 1923.…”

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

Depew

2009

Sci & Educ

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This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-century debates about the heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin's Origin of Species; adaptationism and its critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, technical-scientific, and personal-religious spheres of discourse. Over most of them falls the shadow of eugenics. The main lesson is that the history of Darwinism cannot be told except by showing the mutual influence of the different norms of discourse that obtain in the personal, technical, and public spheres. Nor can evolutionary biology successfully be taught to citizens and citizens-to-be until the fractious intersections between spheres of discourse have been made explicit. In the course of showing why, I take rival evolutionary approaches to be dynamical historical research traditions rather than static theories. Accordingly, I distinguish Darwin's version of Darwinism from its later transformations. I pay special attention to the role Darwin assigned to development in evolution, which was marginalized by twentieth-century population genetical Darwinism, but has recently resurfaced in new forms. I also show how the disputed phrases ''survival of the fittest'' and ''social Darwinism'' have shaped personal anxieties about ''Darwinism,'' have provoked public opposition to teaching evolution in public schools, and have cast a shadow over efforts to effectively communicate to the public largely successful technical efforts to make evolutionary inquiry into a science.

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Section: Darwinian Controversies 325mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Darwinism and Religion In America: The Road To The Scopes Trialmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

Depew

2009

Sci & Educ

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“…The current 2007 ''Centennial Edition'' -published a century after Delbru¨ck's birth -includes no new text except a 9 There are a variety of examples across scientific fields offered by contributors to Graham et al, 1983 andElliott, 1999. See especially Smocovitis, 1999. 10 Abir-Am, 1999, 2004.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Paradox of the Phage Group: Essay Review

Creager

2010

J Hist Biol

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From boundary-work to boundary object: how biology left and re-entered the social sciences

Meloni¹

2016

The Sociological Review Monographs

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In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth‐century episteme, the moment at which the life‐ and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary‐work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of historical scholarship, for an implicit convergence of their views. After this excavation, I look at recent developments in the life sciences, which I have named the ‘social turn’ in biology (Meloni, 2014), and in particular at epigenetics with its promise to destabilize the social/biological border. I claim here that today a different account of ‘the biological’ to that established during the Galton–Kroeber period is emerging. Rather than being used to support a form of boundary‐work, biology has become a boundary object that crosses previously erected barriers, allowing different research communities to draw from it.

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The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America

Cited by 91 publications

References 0 publications

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

The Paradox of the Phage Group: Essay Review

From boundary-work to boundary object: how biology left and re-entered the social sciences

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