Reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species

Abstract

The chapter describes the initial reaction of the British general public to the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the immediate and later reactions of the scientific community, and the 20th Century response of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The British public had a generally favorable reaction to Origin of Species when it was first published, and it has been said that the British public widely accepted that the theory of evolution was true within a decade of the book’s publication. As the chapter explains, Darwin’s “theory of descent with modification” was widely accepted among scientists in Britain and the U.S. by the 1870s, but many biologists were not convinced that Darwin’s “theory of Natural Selection” was the mechanism of evolution until the early 20th Century, when the field of genetics showed that individual characteristics were expressed through and transmitted by genes and that random mutations in genes could produce significant changes in genetic characteristics upon which Natural Selection could act. The chapter also describes that most Christian denominations came to accept the theory of evolution, but strong objections to the theory arose among Conservative Christians in America in the early 1920s. Their objection to the concept of evolution, which is predicated on their literal interpretation of the description of God’s creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, has been expressed in educational movements in the U.S. that oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools, including “Creation Science” and “Intelligent Design.”