Darwinism in the United States, 1859–1930

Abstract

As explosive as was Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in Britain, it initially received a cool response from American naturalists. This was partly because it did not engage the middle class in the United States the way it did in Britain, and partly because in the first half of the nineteenth century the United States was an intellectual and scientific backwater. Nonetheless, Darwin’s work served an important formative role in the establishment of the scientific enterprise in the United States. Before and throughout the Darwinian revolution, science in the United States was a profoundly practical endeavor pursued primarily for its economic potential. In its emergence in the eighteenth, development in the nineteenth, and maturation in the twentieth century, American science was intricately bound to the development of new technologies and was justified almost entirely on its ability to generate practical economic, moral, or military benefits, especially when it was funded with public money. Tocqueville, the French political theorist who toured the United States about the same time that Darwin voyaged around South America, posited that Americans took up science “as a matter of business, and the only branch of it which is attended to is such as admits of an immediate practical application” (Tocqueville 2003, 65). American science thus contrasted sharply with the European scientific tradition in which science was generally pursued by wealthy gentlemen and usually for its own sake.