UC San Diego

America's contentious relationship to Darwinism is often inadequately viewed as the product of religious reaction or educative failure. I argue that evolutionary biology has proven contentious in America because of the unique political context into which Darwin's ideas emerged. After the Civil War, evolution's content, and the predominately Northern scientists who supported it, became associated with the politics of radical Republicanism and racial egalitarianism. The Darwinian revision of the concept of racial variety made a polygenist conception of human origins untenable and discredited the structural inequalities implied by the rival "American School of Anthropology". Whereas before Darwin, natural history had formed an important part of the justification for slavery, after the publication of "The Origin of Species" in 1859, natural history became distasteful to the southern planters and slaveholders who had previously appealed to scientific authority. Because of the particular historical, social, and political context into which Darwinian evolution emerged in the United States, to believe or not to believe in evolution carried social and political connotations about ones fidelity to white supremacy, and called into question ones identity within the larger milieux of American political traditions and groups. Debates over evolution have been inextricably bound to a complex set of beliefs about race and political practices that have upheld white supremacy, sometimes called Southern nationalism, Southern civil religion, or ascriptive Americanism, which have operated to channel Southern understanding and treatment of evolution. The history of evolution in America teaches us how communities of identity use ideological beliefs to identify themselves as members of particular political and social groups, and how a constellation of mutually supporting ideas about the right to participate in the American polity and the nature of racial identity have shaped American reactions to science, religion, and society. Beliefs about racial identity and the constructed myths of Southern nationalism channeled white Southern reaction against evolutionary biology in ways that boosted the religious response to the scientific threat to white supremacy and increased the feeling that evolutionary biologists taught a dangerous, alien doctrine that was morally and socially subversive. The rejection of evolution by many Americans, especially in the South, has often been a way to signal and police social and political group boundaries. Because Darwinism had overthrown the scientific basis for polygeny, was supported by abolitionist New Englanders, and was charged with racially subversive undertones, while also challenging the conservative, Christian justifications for white supremacy, white Southerners reacted against evolution as a scientific doctrine, and in so doing they signaled support for the prevailing racial order and acted in solidarity to create the social and political ideology that sustained the Solid South