Darwinism: Evolution or Revolution?

Abstract

When Charles Darwin wrote about the evolution of hu man beings and animals in his Ori gin of Species (1859) and The De scent of Man (1872), the resulting Darwinian revolution involved much more than the science-versus-reli gion controversy so emphasized in textbooks for courses in the history of Western Civilization. The impact of the Darwinian revolution lasted more than sixty years, making Darwinism a major issue in social and political thought, pacifism, feminism, Marxism and Stalinism, eu genics and race improvement movements, child labor laws and minimum wage laws, and even studies of the Victorian age. Since Darwinism was so central to so many concerns and controversies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Darwinian revo lution is an excellent example of a logic in the history of science which may be smoothly and logically incorporated into Western Civilization courses. Evolution was not Darwin's in vention. It was implied as early as the work of the ancient Greek phi losopher Aristotle, whose great chain of being listed all living things in a progression from the simplest to the most complex plants and from the simplest to the most complex ani mals. During the Middle Ages, no evolutionary implications were seen in the great chain of being. Species were believed to be unchangeable, remaining as created by God. Even the seventeenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who pro duced rules for classifying and naming species, thought that species were immutable. The earth also did not appear to be old enough for systematic evolu tion. In the seventeenth century, a British clergyman attempted to de termine the age of the earth by calculating the number of genera