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“The Darwinian Student’s After-Dinner Dream”
No caption.
Charles
Darwin applied his theory of evolution through natural selection, first
articulated in his Origin of Species (1859), to humans with the
publication of The Descent of Man in 1871. In addition to generating much discussion and debate over its
scientific merits, as well as its social and religious ramifications,
Darwin’s theory of human evolution sparked a great deal of literary
and pictorial satire. In
the featured cartoon, musing on the scientific theory after a heavy meal
is proving too much for the young student, who daydreams that items from
the dinner evolve into humans and animals.
Flying from the table to the upper-left and then swirling
clockwise around him, the oyster gradually transforms into a young
woman, the fork into a young man (perhaps the daydreamer himself), and
the wine bottle into a clergyman. The evolution continues as the couple meets the cleric, is
wedded, and has a child. The
cycle of life is completed as the child, family cat, lamp, and other
figures slowly change back into the dinner items.
In the separate scene below the main illustration, a male hunter
evolves into a goose, and a woman into a duck, which fly toward each
other.
Born in 1809, Charles Robert
Darwin was the son of a prosperous London physician and the grandson of
physician-scientist Erasmus Darwin.
Young Darwin exhibited a keen interest in science at an early
age, and, at the age of 16, entered the University of Edinburgh to study
medicine. Repulsed by
surgery, he became interested in zoology, but his father enrolled him in
the divinity program at the University of Cambridge in 1827.
Darwin participated in discussions with a group of Cambridge
scientists, and left the university in the spring of 1831 to read
scientific texts and join a geologic expedition in Wales.
That August, he was asked to accompany the HMS Beagle as
an unpaid naturalist while the ship surveyed the coasts of South America
(including the Galapagos Islands) and Pacific islands.
The five-year voyage began in late December 1831 and allowed
Darwin to make detailed observations and collect biologic and geologic
specimens, upon which he later based three books about the geology of
South America. His reports
back to England made him well known within the scientific community.
In 1836, Darwin returned to
England and was awarded membership in several prestigious organizations,
including the Geological Society, the Athenaeum, and the Royal Society.
Over the next few years he published the books based on his
voyage aboard the Beagle. As
he collected data to bolster his theory of organic evolution, he
secretly began collecting scientific information related to “the
species problem,” to which he gave considerable thought.
Based upon the accumulated evidence, Darwin concluded that the
various species of animals had evolved over time (many millennia) and
space (their distinct geographic habitat), rather than having been the
result of the special creation of each. In October 1838, he read Thomas Malthus’s thesis that
population growth outpaced food production, and that the resulting food
shortages reduced the population to a sustainable level.
Darwin adopted this “survival of the fittest” idea to explain
the theory of natural selection. Others
had observed the struggle between species, but Darwin applied it to
individual animals within species.
Several thinkers, including his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had
proposed the idea of organic evolution previously, but Charles Darwin
was able to provide evidence to support the theory.
Fearing a negative reaction,
Darwin withheld his theory of natural selection from public scrutiny for
over a decade, even as scientific discussions of evolution multiplied.
In June 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist who had
gathered data in the Malay Archipelago, sent him a scientific paper
summarizing the points of natural selection.
Through the intervention of friends, Darwin and Wallace presented
their findings jointly to a scientific meeting in London in July 1858.
The next year, Darwin published On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, which quickly sold out and went through
six editions over the next dozen years.
Most in the scientific community readily accepted the theory, but
there were prominent critics, including Richard Owen of the British
Museum and Louis Agassiz of Harvard.
Many Christian clergy were aghast, but some religious leaders,
both orthodox and evangelical, did not view the theory as inherently
hostile to a traditional religious worldview.
Darwin applied his theory of evolution through natural selection
to humans in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, shortly
before the featured cartoon appeared.
The general response of the
American (secular) press to Darwin’s The Origin of Species
(1859) was skeptical or hostile, although his theory did not at the time
make a significant impact on public consciousness in the United States.
In 1859, The New York Times warned its readers that the
theory of evolution could “threaten war” on traditional religion.
However, attitudes among American journalists shifted over the
decades, so that when Darwin died in 1882, his contributions to
scientific knowledge and human understanding were praised by such
newspapers as The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the
Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Atlanta Constitution.
By the time of the Scopes trial in 1925, the press lined up
solidly behind schoolteacher John Scopes, who was accused of violating
Tennessee law by teaching the theory of natural selection.
Outside of scientific journals, press coverage of Darwin and
evolution tended to peak around certain events:
the publication of Origin of the Species in 1860 (in the
United States); publication of The Descent of Man in 1871; the
American tour of Thomas Huxley, a leading Darwin defender, in 1876;
Darwin’s death in 1882; the centenary of his birth and the 50th
anniversary of Origin in 1909; the passage of state laws against
teaching evolution in the early 1920s; and the Scopes trial in 1925.
Initially, there was only
slight reference to Darwin and his theory of evolution in the pages of Harper’s
Weekly, but the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871
forced the newspaper to take notice.
That April, it ran a portrait and biographical sketch of Darwin,
referring to his Origin of the Species as a “bold and ingenious
essay,” and matter-of-factly delineating the thesis of his new
application of natural selection to humans. While praising Darwin’s skillful scientific work and
imaginative theorizing, the reviewer did express concern about the lack
of direct evidence for natural selection.
The piece concluded on an ambiguous note:
“We must leave the subject to thoughtful readers. Species is a
mystery; life is a great mystery; the conscious rational soul is a
greater mystery still. There are such problems in the universe as
physical science will never be able to solve.”
Besides
the featured cartoon, Darwin’s theory entered into the “Humors of
the Day” column of Harper’s Weekly in May 1871, and into a
fictional short story (“A Woman’s Vengeance”) the following May,
in which author James Payn describes a young woman’s rise in society
as “triumphant corroboration” of “Darwinian theory.” In March 1872, the journal’s “Scientific Intelligence”
column reported possible substantiation of Darwin’s theory through
evidence from ducks in New Zealand.
In December 1876, a large advertisement appeared for Alfred
Russel Wallace’s book, Wallace’s Geographical Distribution of
Animals, written by “the joint inventor with Mr. Darwin of the
theory of ‘Natural Selection’” and published by Harper &
Brothers. In April 1882, Harper’s
Weekly reprinted the previous biographical sketch as an obituary for
Darwin, the “renowned naturalist, whose theory respecting the origin
of man has been the occasion of so much animated controversy …”
Robert C. Kennedy
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