Faith in science triumphant, Carson implied, was a dangerous illusion. She wrote, “the road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end is disaster.” (Carson 227)

Biographer Linda Lear claims “Silent Spring … dealt a mortal blow to public confidence in ‘experts.’” (qtd. in Williams 296). But as Leo Marx notes, “On balance … the attitudes toward the environment sanctioned by the official culture of the United States continue to reflect the view, central to the belief in progress, that nature exists chiefly to satisfy human needs (Marx 1992, 465).

Despite its popularity, Carson’s critique did little to derail the dominant view of science as a progressive force. Later “eco-catastrophes,” such as Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb and Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” found a receptive audience among academics and a public prepared in part by Silent Spring. But the emphasis in these latter works on the impending peril of rapid human population growth, and the calls by their authors for direct and drastic action to counter that growth, owed little to Carson’s book. In fact it could be argued that Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published six years after Silent Spring represented a throwback to the harsh neo-Malthusian ideology embraced by early twentieth century eugenicists (see this recent critique).

Silent Spring was certainly a radical work. But it was radical within the literature, ironically, because it suggested that modest controls within a democratic framework could correct the damage science and technology had caused, a position in stark contrast to that held by her more apocalyptic contemporaries.

REFERENCES

Carson, Rachael. 2002 [1962]. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Commoner, Barry. 1966. Science and Survival. New York: The Viking Press.

Huxley, Julian. 1964. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Marx, Leo. 1992. “Environmental Degradation and the Ambiguous Social Role of
Science and Technology.” Journal of the History of Biology 25: 449-468.

Muller, Hermann J. 1949. “The Menace of Radiation.” The Science News-Letter
55: 374+379-380.

Smith, Michael B. 2001. “‘Silence Miss Carson!’ Science, Gender, and the Reception of
Silent Spring.” Feminist Studies 27: 733-752.

Williams, Michael. 1998. “The End of Modern History.”
Geographical Review 88: 275-300.

Parshley had his defenders, including Richard Gillman, a one-time neighbor, who in a 1988 article in the New York Times noted that Parshley, rather than hostile to Beauvoir, had encouraged Knopf to publish The Second Sex in English after reading it, in the original French, in 1949. In a note to Knopf, Parshley described the book as, “a profound and unique analysis of woman’s nature and position, eminently reasonable and witty.”

In an ironic turn, Parshley’s reputation has recently been restored, at least partially, through the publication of a new English translation of The Second Sex that was prodded into existence by Simons and other critics. The latest edition is complete and supposedly more sensitive to the original’s existentialist armature. However, at least one reviewer has admitted that the language of the new edition is literal to the detriment of felicity and coherence.

Whether Howard Parshley was the right man for the job (or whether any man was the right man for the job) will probably forever remain the subject of debate. But to the question of whether Parshley was a saboteur, the answer is clear. He was. Just not of feminism. The ideology Parshley undermined and sent careening into the gorge by translating The Second Sex was not Beauvoir’s, but his own.

Howard W. Parshley (1884-1953) came of age as a scientist and educator in the decade following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics. It was a heady time for biologists, and many embraced and promoted the notion that human behavior was, on balance, biologically based. Parshley was far from alone in his belief that societies could be beneficially managed through the broad dissemination of biological information leading to (mostly) voluntary reproductive control.

Parshley expressed a strong, if naïve, faith in science as the new foundation for ethics. From his first book, Science and Good Behavior (1928), through his college survey textbook, Biology (1940), Parshley unselfconsciously promoted the Progressive Era conceit that science could supply better answers to questions of morality than religion, philosophy … or even anarchic democracy. In 1928 he wrote, “There is no good reason to suppose that a new and still undreamed-of principle of regulation will appear to continue the series in which religion, taboo, morality, philosophy, ethics, et cetera, have so far appeared – and not altogether to advantage. Science, at least as far as we are concerned, completes and terminates the list” (1928, 215).

Along with many of his contemporaries, Parshley thought it was logical and perhaps necessary for societies to cede to the scientifically enlightened the task of determining public policy and managing human potential based on their capacity for rational and unemotional analysis.

Parshley represents the early stirrings of a movement Daniel Kelves has labeled “reform eugenics.” In contrast to “mainline eugenics,” which by the 20s had become a vent for noxious nativist and racist beliefs, reform eugenics embraced liberal cultural ideas, allowing life scientists to promote progressive political and social beliefs while retaining the authority to categorize, rank and judge individuals and their behaviors.

Parshley and his peers, including sociologist Frank Hankins, popular science authors Frederick Osborn and Amram Scheinfeld, and geneticists Hermann J. Muller and Bentley Glass, understood early the dangers of association with conservative cultural forces, and were careful to distance themselves from the xenophobes who had came to dominate eugenics. But this group never lost faith in the idea that cultural relationships and the social hierarchy was more or less a natural development, and that social rank was a fair approximation of genetic health.

If only everyone understood their place, and were educated relative to their genetically determined abilities, civilization could get about the businesses of continuing its advance. Parshley wrote, “Education, whether within or without the home, must impart knowledge specifically useful to the individual according to his peculiar nature, if it is to accomplish results ethically valuable” (1928, 263). In part, Parshley was pitching more “class-appropriate” education and a science-based ethics. He suggested “juvenile delinquency” was the result of being bored by lessons in “geometry and Caesar,” and that the solution was not old fashioned moralizing, but vocational education. “Given at fifteen a knowledge of automobile repairing and venereal disease, our case would have become a harmless and happy human being, likely enough, whether he ever went to church or not” (1928, 264).

But as this last line hints, at the end of the day, it all came back to reproduction and its management. The overriding fear among eugenicists, both mainline and reform, was “differential reproduction,” or the idea that the “less fit” were outbreeding the “most civilized.” Though Parshley was certainly not opposed to state-sponsored eugenic sterilization – praising the California law that led to the 19,000 coerced vasectomies and tubal ligations, and noting that such policies were more effective than “Christianity and Prohibition” in controlling births (1933, 274-275) – he remained optimistic that, properly educated, less fit people would control their own reproduction, knowing the health of “the race” was at stake. He wrote, “With all classes controlling the exuberant fecundity of nature we should see the end of that differential and dysgenic (racially injurious) population growth – that rapid increase in the relative numbers of the defective and subnormal – which so alarms all who recognize the inheritability of human traits … Certainly with better education in these respects, individual habit and interest will come gradually to eliminate the need for enforcement, except in pathological cases (1928, 109).”

It is fair to say that among life scientists, at least male life scientists, of the 1920s and 30s, Parshley’s ideas were fairly typical and relatively non-controversial. Critically, it was during this time that the establishment set itself to the task of “scientizing” ideas that had their birth in first-wave feminism and the social movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1930s, biologists had purged their ranks of birth control “amateurs” like Margaret Sanger and built protections against “emotional” movements like anti-vivisection. As Molly Ladd-Taylor writes, eugenicists like Paul Popenoe “particularly detested birth control’s feminist aspect” (Ladd-Taylor, 305).

In playing along, Parshley set the trap he would later spring on himself.

Parshley’s 1933 book, The Science of Human Reproduction,” was the author’s attempt to apply a scientific ethics to human sexual relations. Among his curious conclusions was the suggestion that the “natural” age for people to marry was 16 or 17 for girls, and 17 or 18 for boys. Somehow, with laws sufficiently “liberalized” to allow for and encourage such marriages, “our biological ideal would soon become an accomplished fact” (1933, 247).

The trap, however, lay in the necessity of those proposing eugenic utility to establish categories of humans, each possessing their own “peculiar natures.” Such categorizations, when pitched to the educated, were non-controversial, at least when they related to class, as all educated people could credit themselves with possessing those “progressed” eugenic characteristics that made them educable. Reform eugenicists were also able to extend charity to the lower classes and darker races by suggesting that the “extreme heterogeneity” of the human species meant that, though it was possible to judge a class or race generally, it was impossible to judge an individual specifically. According to reformers, gross phenotypic characteristics, like skin color, did not necessarily dictate genetic worth. This idea was forcefully outlined in Frank H. Hankins’ 1926 book, The Racial Basis of Civilization, a book Parshley read and critiqued prior to its publication.

As stated before, the idea of a sliding scale of eugenic fitness was relatively non-controversial, and a common “liberal” point of view. But as I wrote in an earlier essay, within this neat little ideology sat a ticking bomb. It was triggered by a simple question: “what about women?”

Unlike individual males within races or classes, whose differences in genetic natures and genetic worth were visible only to the scientist, preventing all but the scientist from passing judgment, differences between the sexes were “obvious,” which required reform eugenicists to lay their cards on the table.

What, according to Parshley, was a woman’s “peculiar nature?”

Well, first, women were naturally “more emotional” than men due to their “sensitive and continuously varying internal organization” (31-32). They were also less “variable” than men, neither reaching his lows or highs. According to Parshley, “From vagrancy to asceticism, all sorts of deviations are found more commonly among men” (1933, 33-34). Noting that a woman’s “creativeness may be normally found in the creation of new life” (33-34), Parshley did recognize that the demands of reproduction placed limits on a woman’s claim to power and authority, admitting the existence of “a certain disadvantage, especially marked in civilized humanity.” But he made sure to add that, “the function [of gestation, birth and primary child care] is an integral part of [female] mammalian biology, and its performance under favorable conditions is attended with the deep satisfaction that attends obedience to profound natural impulses. Difficulties, discomforts, and dangers which are very real do not alter the truth of this assertion, a truth to which a great many women will be found to testify” (149-150).

Yet, it was this same Parshley who would come to translate “The Feminist Bible,” rendering elegantly Beauvoir’s prose, including the statement, “the body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as a woman.”

In her book, When Sex Became Gender, Shira Tarrant writes, “After World War II, feminist thought and expression were constrained by McCarthyism in America, by postwar reconstruction in France and Britain, by French pronatalist impulses, and by a domestic ideology that attempted to revive earlier arguments for separate spheres in all three countries” (2).

Scholars are beginning to recognize that the “domestic ideology” Tarrant speaks of had a name, eugenics, which in its “reform” variant, more strongly than once imagined, influenced expectations and “naturalized” relations in post-war America. Popenoe, according to Ladd-Taylor, thought, “the main causes of marital troubles – sex, mothers-in-law, children, and money – could all be traced to ignorance about sexual difference and other misunderstandings of biology” (Ladd-Taylor, 316). Later in the same article Ladd-Taylor states, “It is ironic indeed that Popenoe’s eugenics-inspired efforts to enhance personal happiness in marriage contributed to an individualist politics and therapeutic culture that led to the undermining of the gender and family norms he saw as the basis of a eugenically sound society” (322).

The same irony holds for Howard W. Parshley. However, while Popenoe responded to the rise of second-wave feminism with “apocalyptic rants about the decline of civilization” (Ladd-Taylor, 320), Parshley responded by devoting the last 4 years of his life to sensitively translating a text that challenged and ultimately undermined his own life’s work.

The task literally killed him. Of Parshley’s final act, flawed though it may be, it seems uncharitable in the extreme to say anything but, “tres bien.”

REFERENCES

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex . Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hankins, Frank H. 1926. The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 2001. “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe.” Gender & History 13:22.

Parshley, Howard W. 1940. Biology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

–. 1933. The Science of Human Reproduction. New York: Eugenics Publishing Company.

–. 1928. Science and Good Behavior. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Tarrant, Shira. 2006. When Sex Became Gender. New York: Routledge.

These reconstructions of Java Man (Pithecanthropus), Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon Man were created around 1915 by Columbia University physical anthropologist J. H. McGregor for the American Museum of Natural History. They were designed not just to impress visitors with wonders of science, but also to promote the eugenic theories of the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn. The images were reproduced in many biology textbooks to support a narrative of racial progress. Pen-wielding students often “repurposed” them to illustrate their own stories.

I’M AN APE MAN

The sculpted busts of “early man” by J. H. McGregor, and the paintings of Neanderthal flint workers and Cro-Magnon artists by Charles R. Knight, alchemized imaginary beasts of centuries past into icons of progress that carried the imprimatur of science (Moser 1998). But the narrative they presented was conflicted from the start. Created between the years 1915 and 1920 under the guidance of Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, the images were designed to both celebrate scientific progress and alert visitors to the museum’s “Hall of the Age of Man” of an impending eugenic crisis. Osborn believed humans had reached an evolutionary peak in the caves of Lascaux, but that racial mixing was threatening to drag the species back (Clark 2008, Rainger 1991).

It was a downer of story, and the visiting public, or at least the white public, happily skipped past it. Instead they saw in Knight and McGregor’s images visual confirmation of their own racial, cultural and scientific superiority.

Knight and McGregor’s artwork, along with copycat images on display in museums across the country, became part our collective consciousness. These images found a welcoming home in most popular biology textbooks published from the 1920s on. But as notions of cultural relativity and racial equality began to seep into the life sciences, textbook authors began to struggle with how best to reconcile the contradictions so ably, if ironically, illustrated by these images.

MAYBE IF WE JUST IGNORE IT …

Biology textbook authors had three options when contemplating how best to address the conflicting rhetorical demands of the story of human evolution and the story of race: they could ignore both topics; they could favor a sensitive presentation of race at the expense of a progressive presentation of human evolution; or they could retrench and defend a hard line view of both the reality and utility of racial divisions.
The most popular biology textbook of the 1950s gained its status by following the first path.

This painting by Charles R. Knight, known as the Neanderthal Flint Workers, was one of three the artist created under the guidance of Henry Fairfield Osborn for the American Museum of Natural History’s “Hall of the Age of Man.” Osborn had Knight position the central figures in profile to highlight their “primitive” features: stooped posture, sloping foreheads and receding chins. Many of Osborn’s contemporaries, including Margaret Mead, were troubled by the racist character of the imagery. Knight’s painting made its first appearance in an American textbook in the 1947 edition of Modern Biology, but didn’t bloom into full color until that book’s 1960 edition.

In 1947, in a bald-face bid for market share, publisher Henry Holt trimmed Truman J. Moon’s venerable work, Biology for Beginners, to make it broadly acceptable, north and south, notably cutting back on the book’s presentation of the topics of race and evolution. Retitled Modern Biology, Holt’s revised textbook, under the guidance of new author James H. Otto, took full advantage of a post-World War II retreat from “activist” or “subversive” textbooks (Zimmerman 2002). The publisher and author made the book taller and wider, rearranged some content, but invested little in updating its science. Sadly, this proved to be a winning formula; by the mid-1950s, Modern Biology was being hauled about by half the tenth graders in the United States (see related story).

But Holt’s conservatism made it vulnerable.

Through few noticed when Modern Biology’s already meager middle section on human evolution was cut entirely in 1956, that edit proved one too many. When the Soviets launched Sputnik just one year later, the whole mood of the country changed. Overnight, Modern Biology became a symbol of how dangerously behind the United States had fallen in science education. The federal government began to funnel millions of dollars into new curriculum development efforts. And when the topic of human evolution got hot in 1959, due in part to the press generated by Mary and Louis Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge and the publicity surrounding the centennial of Darwin’s Origins, Modern Biology looked cooked.
Holt’s response? “Quick, put the cave men back in!”

In 1960, Holt restored and expanded Modern Biology’s section on human evolution. So not to upset its more conservative buyers, it added a spoonful of racism to help the evolution go down. For the first time since the 1947 revision, racial “types” were identified, including the Australoid type, with its “sloping forehead and prominent brow ridge [that] suggest a relationship to early man” (422). And to make the case clear, Holt put on gaudy display McGregor’s sculptures and Knight’s paintings (adding the illustration to the right in 1965), images created 40 years before to demonstrate the “natural” progress of human evolution from stooped to erect, from brutal to artistic, and from black to white.

The direct connection Modern Biology made between human evolution and “racial development” was remarkably out of step in 1960. But its authors were only the latest, and far from the last, to encounter trouble when trying to reconcile the two topics. Starting in the 1930s, and continuing through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, every author who attempted to promote a socially purposeful biology based on the science’s command of the topic of evolution faced similar difficulties. Those seeking to accommodate more progressive ideas about race found it necessary to dial back on an enthusiastic presentation of eugenics, soften the connection between organic evolution and cultural evolution and restrain themselves from telling speculative stories of early human behavior, which inevitably naturalized the present social order.

RECONCILING RACE AND EVOLUTION

The first American high school biology textbook to take a serious stab at reconciling the contradictions between a progressive view of organic evolution and a progressive view of human culture was Elsbeth Kroeber and Walter H. Wolff’s breakthrough Adventures with Living Things, published in 1938 by Heath.

Kroeber was the sister of famed cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Franz Boas’ first student, and his influence shows in her book. Kroeber and Wolff took great pains to communicate to their students that the concept of race was merely a construct, a convenience. As the authors state, “this classification into races is, of course, an artificial one” (752). And yet this claim is embedded in a section devoted to human evolutionary development leading to the text’s discussion of eugenics, titled “Possibilities of Betterment.” The section features McGregor’s reconstructions (though the authors, tellingly, did not include the very white Cro-Magnon bust), reproductions of Knight-inspired murals by John Warner Norton of Neanderthal hunters and Cro-Magnon cave artists, and a photo array by H. L. Shapiro from the American Museum of Natural History that positioned “the Caucasian stock” at the top and “the Negroid stock” at the bottom. This top to bottom ordering, with rare exceptions, was the rule well into the BSCS era.

1938 also saw the publication of Ella Thea Smith’s Exploring Biology, arguably one of the most innovative biology textbooks ever published. It certainly was one of the most impressive solo acts in textbook history. Smith developed her book independent of publisher support while teaching high school biology in Salem, Ohio in the 1930s. Smith would aggressively update and develop Exploring Biology across its first five editions, turning it into the only serious competitor to Modern Biology by the end of the 1950s.

Smith’s biology was radically non-deterministic, certainly relative to her peers. Through she devoted considerable real estate to the topic of organic evolution, more than any biology textbook before and possibly since, and though she did not shy away from discussing human evolution, Smith took great pains to suggest that manipulation of the organism was not a path to progress. The concept of race or racial progress is notably absent from the text.

Was Ella Thea Smith making a statement when she illustrated the “primary stocks” of the human species with an Igorot tribesman in 1943? Just a generation before, 1,100 Igorots were exhibited in a faux village at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, a display secretly funded by the administration of Theodore Roosevelt to promote the “progress” it had brought to the Philippines, partially through widespread slaughter of its natives (Bradley 2009).

In 1943, in response to a general movement within anthropology manifest in publications like Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s “The Races of Mankind,” Smith began to address the concept of race more directly. She solved the problem faced by Kroeber and Wolff by decoupling her discussion of race from evolution, placing race at the head of her text (pp. 102 – 112) and evolution at its close. Like Kroeber and Wolff, Smith referenced both H. L. Shapiro and Kroeber’s famous brother, Alfred, but was able to construct a far less conflicted narrative of evolution by taking the “racial proof” off the table.

RETRENCHMENT

Smith’s increased emphasis on racial equality correlated with a reduced emphasis on eugenics. Though she had enthusiastically embraced eugenics in the pre-publication version of textbook (1932), starting in 1938 she began to directly challenge the assumptions of the “science.” From the 1940s on, Smith devoted no more than a few sentences to the topic. The terrible consequences of ideologies of racial superiority were obvious to many even before the extent of Nazi atrocities were fully understood. Other 1940s authors responded similarly. Bayles and Burnett’s Biology for Better Living (1941), Gruenberg and Bingham’s Biology and Man (1944) and Vance and Miller’s Biology and You (1946), like Smith, included text that directly countered eugenic assumptions or, as in the case of Gruenberg, dropped the topic entirely.

But other authors were not so quick to abandon eugenics. Many apparently could not imagine biology without it. While Smith and others pursued general biological appreciation and topic mastery as empowering ends in themselves, other authors tried to square the circle, to find a solution that would allow them to continue to promote the necessity of reproductive management guided by the trained biologist despite the proximate horror of the application of that idea by its most prominent enthusiasts.
This proved a quixotic task. Regardless of what was written in a text, or how the idea was disclaimed, the photos, drawings and diagrams used to illustrate human evolution unavoidably communicated an arc of progress, a hierarchy of races; a linear history of cultures from the “cave man” to the Australian aborigine to Alan Shepard; an image series that inevitably terminated with a white, male biologist at its “natural” end (note the letterman in the illustration to the right has “BSCS,” for Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, printed across his chest).

“Retrenchment texts,” rather than building on an anthropology of cultural relativity as pioneered by Columbia’s Franz Boas and his students, like Alfred Kroeber, built instead on an anthropology of neo-racialism as promoted by Harvard’s Earnest Hooton and his students, like Carleton S. Coon.

A most remarkable example is John W. Ritchie’s 1941 Biology and Human Affairs, which was unapologetic in positioning the “Caucasian race” as superior and probably quite distant evolutionarily from the “Austaloids, Negroids, and Mongoloids.”

From Biology and Human Affairs (1941). The middle and rightmost diagrams illustrate what we today call the “multiregional hypothesis.” Carleton Coon promoted the idea that the races were evolving in parallel, progressively, albeit with the “Caucasoid” out ahead, having crossed an imaginary line into modernity some 200,000 years ahead the “Congoid.” Henry Fairfield Osborn promoted a similar idea. Despite solid genetic evidence to the contrary, the idea persists today.

Just as remarkable is Wolfgang F. Pauli’s 1949 The World of Life, a text edited by the future chairman of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), Bentley Glass (see related article), which suggested that programs to encourage greater reproduction by the most intelligent members of society could be modeled on the recently passed G. I. bill of rights (601). Though Pauli was careful to avoid typologically-based racial generalizations, a program such as the one he proposed presupposed that present culture represented a fair natural sorting. Later, Glass, along with Julian Huxley and other “liberal” thinkers, would suggest that pockets of intelligence exist within every racial group, and that the encouragement of higher reproduction rates among the intelligent would exposure and allow the development of superior traits no matter what color skin encapsulated those traits.

Wolfgang F. Pauli’s 1946 The World of Life included typical “retrenchment” imagery, including naked “Negroes,” “gnomes” and other images associated with the “freaks” of the American sideshow, pornography made safe for general consumption through conversion into objects of science. Primitive people were always black, “freaks” were always women or children.

THE BSCS FAIL

Ella Thea Smith struggled through the 1950s create a textbook that could compete with Modern Biology without violating her strong commitments to student empowerment and social evolution through education and cooperation. Following Holt’s decision in 1956 to delete most references to human evolution from its 1956 edition, Harcourt, Smith’s publisher, decided to follow suit in 1959. It regretted the decision almost immediately (Reid 1969). Though Smith had by that point incorporated evolution, including a sophisticated presentation of the modern synthesis, into her general discussion of genetics and heredity, the text’s scant mention of Darwin and the complete absence of the trendy topic of “early man” allowed the BSCS to lump her book together with Modern Biology for use as evidence as to why $6,000,000 in federal funds were necessary to update the country’s biology curriculum.

With the Cold War providing both pressure and opportunity, the story of progress from monkeys to men to spacemen proved too compelling a tale not to tell. Scientists, educators and publishers, through the BSCS, would make one last attempt to reconcile race and human evolution.

From the BSCS “green” version, supervised by Marston Bates (1963).

The BSCS did do its job efficiently, and the three textbooks it published in 1963, the “yellow,” “blue” and “green” versions as they are known, are remarkable documents. Though BSCS chairman Bentley Glass encouraged his authors to present race as a construct and all prejudice as unwarranted, narrative demands, unbridled enthusiasm and a desire to restore biology’s social purpose, prevented the group from embracing the concept promoted by Smith and others that race was merely a “superstition” or “myth.”

In the BSCS “yellow” version, supervisors John A. Moore and Bentley Glass himself re-linked organic evolution directly to cultural evolution, relying heavily on “just-so” stories influenced by Carleton S. Coon’s 50’s bestseller The Story of Man to make the transition.

The two other texts BSCS texts, the “green” and “blue” versions, relied too on images of racial progress to tell the story of scientific progress. The opportunity to pump purpose back into biology after the Nazis had forced a retreat overran any voices of caution, if indeed any were consulted. Though Smith was an original member of the BSCS steering committee, meeting minutes suggest her considerable insight and experience with the topic was never tapped.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST?

The BSCS success drove Harcourt to cease publication of Smith’s Exploring Biology after its 1966 edition. This sixth and final edition, which was produced after Smith had retired, did not discuss race but restored McGregor’s reconstructions, which Smith had dropped in 1949. Modern Biology was rearranged a bit in 1965 in an effort to fend of the BSCS challenge, and more thoroughly revised in 1969. It still pictured human evolution as terminating with a white male.

REFERENCES
Berman, Judith C. 1999. “Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic: Modern (Re)Constructions of the Cave Man.” American Anthropologist 101: 288-304.
Bradley, James. 2009. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Clark, Constance Areson. 2008. God – or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
–. 2001. “Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate.” The Journal of American History 87: 1275-1303.
Moser, Stephanie. 1998. Ancestral Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rainger, Ronald. 1991. An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Reid, James M. 1969. An Adventure in Textbooks. New York: R. R. Bowker Co.
Zimmerman, Jonathan. 2002. Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Alfred C. Kinsey’s 1926 An Introduction to Biology was the first American high school biology textbook organized not against concepts of progress, control and exploitation, but of unity, interdependence and conservation. Kinsey wrote that he believed it “a mistake to test the importance of knowledge by its known, dollars-and-cents application” (v-vi). Rather than promoting the “value of domestic animals” or “man’s improvement of his environment,” Kinsey’s stressed the “ecologic relations of organisms.” Where others focused on the history of vertebrates culminating with human dominance, Kinsey focused on the behavior of insects culminating with balance in nature. Still, the author made sure he didn’t come off as some kind of odd-duck bug lover. In his textbook, Kinsey promoted biology, at least as practiced by a taxonomist like himself, as a rugged sport, full of adventure and manly camaraderie, an antidote to the sissifying effects of the lab and the city.

One might suggest Kinsey was compensating for something. And more than a few have. [1]

It is not hard to read between the lines of Kinsey’s enthusiastic prose [2]. But biographers have gone rather too deeply into psychosexual analysis when trying to explain how Kinsey, author of the famous “Kinsey Reports,” transitioned seemingly overnight from a mild mannered collector of gall wasps to a world famous cataloger of orgasms. Scholars have tended to skip past the boring parts, like his textbook, in their rush to examine Kinsey’s later works … and the naughty bits of his personal life. That’s natural. Kinsey’s writings about sex are more interesting to the general reader than his writings about literal birds and bees. But the net effect has been to divide Kisney in two.

In this essay, I build on the recent work of Donna J. Drucker [3] to see what a deep reading of An Introduction to Biology might offer us in understanding both Kinsey the enthusiastic if overreaching entomologist, and Kinsey the groundbreaking if complexly motivated behavioral scientist.

A close examination of the scientific career of Alfred Kinsey reveals his trip from scholar of the genus Cynipidae to a social revolutionary was smoother than commonly supposed. I suggest that Kinsey’s determination to demonstrate the utility of his “pre-synthesis” evolutionary ideas and scientific methodologies motivated his mid-career shift and influenced the topic and research design of his sex studies as much as any desire to challenge social norms.

GETTING BETWEEN THE COVERS OF KINSEY’S TEXTBOOK

Alfred C. Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology, revised as New Introduction to Biology (1933 and 1938), was a successful and unique competitor in a crowded market. First published in 1926, the year after the Scopes trial, Introduction to Biology offered a solid alternative to the prescriptive economic and civic biologies of George W. Hunter, William H. Atwood and Clifton F. Hodge then all the rage. According to Drucker, Kinsey’s book, over its three editions, sold at least 250,000 copies. Wardell Pomeroy puts the number at 440,000. (Pomeroy, 1982, 52)

Kinsey, heir to the naturalist’s tradition, presented nature not as a resource to manipulate and plunder, but as a physical and intellectual landscape to explore. Through active study, including a healthy dose of field biology, students could discover lessons for living and the laws of life. Unlike textbooks that framed evolutionary history as a ladder leading to the crown of creation, Homo sapiens, Kinsey’s ecological perspective prioritized no species. The text’s non-anthropomorphic perspective allowed Kinsey to address problematic topics like evolution and reproduction by analogy, which made his text acceptable in all quarters of the country, particularly in the American south. [4] But Kinsey’s half-hearted presentation of Darwinism may have helped as well.

An Introduction to Biology has been widely lauded for its solid science. [5] But even for its era, a decade ahead of the dawn of the modern synthesis, Kinsey’s evolutionism was a little unsteady and confused. Though he expressed no doubt that evolution had occurred, he held out fairly strongly against natural selection as offering anything close to a complete explanation, and he maintained a lingering affection for Lamarckism. In 1926 he wrote, “There are two chief theories on this point (why change occur), and it is certain that neither of them is wholly correct, although each probably contains some truth” (202). Curiously, when forced by evidence to dismiss Lamarckism in 1933 (407), he simultaneously demoted Darwin. Kinsey apparently had his own ideas about the process of evolution. Favoring big jumps, saltations, he promoted a conflation of micro-mutation as demonstrated by Hermann Muller and macro-mutation as advanced by the Dutch biologist, Hugo de Vries.

In his discussion of eugenics, a standard topic in the era, Kinsey expressed a belief that behavioral variations, including gross behavioral differences between economic classes, were probably as much biologically based as culturally based. Somewhat famously he wrote, “The importance of heredity must never be forgotten. We only fool ourselves when we say that all men are born equal. While we may have equal rights legally, we greatly differ in our biologic equipments. There are really very few of us who have the necessary heredities to make good Presidents of the United States” (174). In his 1937 teachers manual, Methods in Biology, Kinsey made his position even clearer when he wrote, “While the mass of the socially worth-while individuals, and even some leaders have come from the middle classes, the data abundantly prove that most leaders have come from the group which is best equipped in hereditary capacity and environmental training.” (Kinsey, 1937b, 224).

Such thinking, particularly Kinsey’s belief in dramatic mutational jumps, with sub-speciation occurring after through hybridization, put Kinsey slightly out of step with the developing populational view of evolution. Indeed, Kinsey was ridiculed when he attempted to advance his transitional and taxonomy-based evolutionary ideas within the framework of the modern synthesis, triggering what historian Vern Bullough describes as “a kind of midlife crisis.” [6]

But before we get into that, let’s dig a bit deeper into Kinsey’s textbook to see what else it can tell us.

While most early biology textbooks marched through plants and animals phylogenetically, “up” an evolutionary chain from the simple to the complex, Kinsey favored a unit structure based on key sub-disciplines – morphology, physiology, genetics, ecology, distributional biology, etc. He suggested teachers could order and selectively emphasize these units based on “what is of especial interest and concern to the particular community” (1933, xv). Of course, Kinsey, the taxonomist, thought the unit on taxonomy should without question serve as the introduction the subject. And, tellingly, he pushed to have the unit on behavior serve as the conclusion. He wrote, “Certain it is that Behavior, the study of what organisms do, and why they do it, may be made a very exciting climax to a year of biology” (1933, xv).

Though scholars tend to focus on the genetics and ecology sections of Kinsey’s textbook, those being the units most relevant to our current cultural debates, it is perhaps his unit on behavior that is most revealing. In the final eight chapters of An Introduction to Biology, Kinsey discussed the topic by stepping students through the range of behaviors expressed by social wasps and bees, ants and termites, parasites, solitary wasps and bees, and finally, birds. Kinsey offered analogies between insect behavior and human behavior designed to resonate with his audience of high school sophomores. For example, when discussing parasitism, Kinsey wrote, “The poor little rich boy who has always had servants do things for him would find himself in an awkward circumstance if his servants should expire and there were no means in the wide world of ever getting other ones” (474). And Kinsey followed a path common to most biology textbook authors in the 1920s and 30s when discussing habits, good and bad. Higher reasoning, Kinsey suggested, allowed students to channel their “natural instincts” to positive habit formation and useful skills like “skating, swimming, diving, and typewriting” (433). Still, Kinsey did not promote habit formation as prudishly and prescriptively as his more preachy contemporaries. For example, in their 1924 textbook, Biology and Human Welfare, Peabody and Hunt, liberally quoting from William James, pushed the claim that “the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy” (Peabody, 552). Kinsey on the other hand promoted the loftier claim that, “… if you are able to apply what you have leaned in explaining the affairs of your every-day life, you prove yourself a superior person” (432).

If we want to read into Kinsey’s textbook, that quote would be a better place to start than those that supposedly telegraph the embrace of an alternate sexuality. If Kinsey was driven by his insecurities (and who among us isn’t?), they were likely as intellectual as sexual.

That Kinsey, an entomologist, would close his textbook talking mostly of his passion, insects, is unsurprising. But there is more to it. It is easy to argue that Kinsey climaxed with insects because he believed their study provided a complete laboratory of why. While T. H. Morgan was promoting the near invisible gene as a fundamental unit for evolutionary study, Kinsey seems to have been promoting observable insect variations, labeled and categorized by the taxonomist, as an equally valid data set. From the late 1920s through the 1930s, in a series of articles and a book, Kinsey advanced this idea. It played okay in a pre-synthesis period. But by the mid-30s, it no longer looked modern.

In 1937, Kinsey suffered a humiliating scientific spanking at the hand of George Gaylord Simpson, a paleontologist and key evolutionary theorist. In a polite but lethal critique, Simpson took apart a paper written by Kinsey, point-by-point, using Kinsey’s own words and illustrations against him, and as a foil to forward the paleontologist’s own historical generalizations. [7] It must have been clear then to Kinsey that any further scientific acclaim required finding a new path.

READY FOR A CHANGE

Kinsey closed his chapter on “human hygiene” in his 1926 textbook with the suggestion that students “keep busy,” “not stick to one job so long that you get tired of it,” and to “forget things that can’t be helped.” (1926, 159-60).

The “marriage course,” a non-credit lecture series Kinsey coordinated at Indiana University beginning in 1938, is often positioned as the pivotal event in the taxonomist’s life. But by the time it began, Kisney was probably ready for a change.

It was during the two years he spent shocking IU seniors with frank talk and explicit pictures that Kinsey collected his first sex histories. In counseling sessions with a few curious students, Kinsey discovered that his personality, predilections and the skills he had honed as a taxonomist were suited to the difficult task of soliciting and cataloging very personal information.

But was this a wholly new track for Kinsey?

In her 2008 dissertation, “Creating the Kinsey Reports,” Donna J. Drucker does an excellent job of connecting the two halves of Alfred C. Kinsey, the educator and entomologist of solid professional standing, and the behavioral scientist made world famous through his taxonomic studies of human sexuality. Drucker doesn’t shy away from describing those peculiarities of history and psyche that made the man who he was. But she situates Kinsey firmly within an interdisciplinary scientific tradition, and demonstrates a continuity of method, motivation and style that connect the collector to the college instructor to the explorer of human sexual variation.

As Drucker shows, Kinsey’s interest in the study human sexuality dated back to well before the marriage course. Starting in 1932, as part of his general interest in the “teaching problem,” Kinsey began to verse himself on the topic. By 1937, he had absorbed all the major studies, including Katherine Bement Davis’ Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women and Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam’s A Thousand Marriages. It seems likely that by the time IU president Herman B. Wells, under faculty and community pressure, pushed Kinsey in 1940 to choose between continuing his lectures and collecting more sex histories, Kinsey saw the choice more as an opportunity than a loss.

Did the controversy surrounding the marriage course get Kinsey fired up? Set him on his latter life mission? Was Kinsey motivated to move into sex studies in part by a personal desire open space within the culture for the acceptance of homosexuality? Perhaps. But it seems Kinsey also simply saw in this new area of collecting a way to recover from the slap administered by Simpson; a way to have a second bite at the apple that was relevance among his peers.

SEX AND THE MODERN SYNTHESIS

In the introduction to his landmark 1948 study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey linked himself rather obviously to the rising stars and key scribes of the modern synthesis, including Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr. He defined the study as a “taxonomic approach,” and used it to pitch taxonomy not as a quaint antique, but as an advance over systematics, which is generally thought of as more modern. He wrote, “Where the systematist used a single individual or a few individuals as the basis of his description and of his understanding of a species, the taxonomist undertakes population sampling on such a scale as may involve hundreds of individuals from each locality, and tens of thousands of individuals from the species as a whole” (Kinsey, 1948, 17). It is interesting to speculate how Kinsey’s curious transitional evolutionary ideas, combined with his faith in the utility of behavior studies to tease apart evolutionary species and sub-species relationships – suggested both by his textbook and more formal scientific work – conditioned his decision to analyze male sexual behavior across economic classes. It is also interesting to speculate as to whether the criticism he received for this class analysis drove him to abandon it too in his always slightly out of step quest to gain entry into biology’s inner circle.

NOTES

[1] The current somewhat sensationalized story of the life and career of Alfred C. Kinsey is the product of two recent biographies (see: Jones, 1997; Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan, Linda Wolfe, and Bill Condon, 2004.), a popular Hollywood movie and PBS documentary that focused more on the personality conflicts and sexual politics within the Institute for Sex Research (later the Kinsey Institute) in the 1040s and 50s, than on Kinsey’s rather straightforward career arc from the 1920s on.
[2] There is a temptation, knowing what we know now about Kinsey’s bi-sexuality and long-term cultural impact, to read with a wink passages like, “I have put up with lumberjacks and miners, slept with hermit prospectors whose blankets were undescribable (sic) and unforgettable, met cattlemen and sheep herders … even a few outlaws” (Kinsey, 1926, 47).
[3] I am indebted to Donna J. Drucker, not only for forwarding me her excellent dissertation on Alfred Kinsey (Drucker, 2008) and for her article, “‘A Noble Experiment’ – The Marriage Course at Indiana University, 1938-1940,” but also for the insights and suggestions she offered during the early research on this article. She was most helpful in steering me away from a few more sensationalistic theories and toward better-grounded ideas. For that, I thank her, even if she caused me quite a few long Sundays at the library.
[4] According to Drucker, Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology was most popular in Florida, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and California, all states with strong anti-evolutionary movements. The fact that Kinsey’s book was most popular in these states is counter-intuitive, but not difficult to explain. Competing textbooks were as a rule very anthropomorphic. They either told a linear story of evolutionary progress leading up a ladder to humans, or focused on the control of nature, the maximization of resources, the conquest of disease and conscious selective breeding leading to better crops, livestock and people. Inevitably, these textbooks connected “monkeys to men,” a serious no-no among anti-evolutionists. Kinsey focused mostly on insects and plants.
[5] See: Grabiner and Miller, 1974; Skoog, 1979.
[6] Bullough, 1998.
[7] See: Kinsey, 1937a; Simpson, 1937.

REFERENCES

Bancroft, John. 1998 “Alfred Kinsey’s work 50 years later.” New Introduction to Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Bullough, Vern L. 1998. “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: historical overview and lasting contributions.” The Journal of Sex Research.

Drucker, Donna J. 2008, “Creating the Kinsey Reports: Intellectual and Methodological Influences on Alfred Kinsey’s Sex Research, 1919-1953.” Dissertation.

–. 2007. “‘A Noble Experiment’ – The Marriage Course at Indiana University, 1938-1940.” Indiana Magazine of History 103: 3.

Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan, Linda Wolfe, and Bill Condon. 2004. Kinsey: Public and Private. New York: Newmarket Press.

Grabiner, Judith V., Peter D. Miller, 1974. “Effects of the Scopes Trial.” Science 185: 832-837.

Jones, James H. 1997. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Kinsey, Alfred C, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company.

–. 1937a. “Supra-Specific Variation in Nature and in Classification from the View- Point of Zoology.” The American Naturalist 71: 734.

–. 1937b. Methods in Biology. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.

–. 1933, 1938. New Introduction to Biology. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.

–. 1926. An Introduction to Biology. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.

Peabody, James Edward., Arthur Ellsworth Hunt. 1927. Biology and Human Welfare. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Pomeroy, Wardell Baxter. 1982. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Skoog, Gerald. 1979. “Topic of Evolution in Secondary School Biology Textbooks:
1900-1977.” Science Education 63: 621-640.

Simpson, George Gaylord. 1937. “Supra-Specific Variation in Nature and in Classification from the View- Point of Paleontology.” The American Naturalist 71: 34..

A couple of additional observations:

Scopes: As the chart indicates, the Scopes-era anti-evolution movement in the United States correlated with the peak of eugenic fervor in American biology textbooks. However, the movement was indiscriminate. Any textbook that contained an explicit mention of human evolution, whether that particular text promoted eugenics or not, was subject to censorship – from the most harshly eugenic, like William Atwood’s 1922 Civic and Economic Biology, to the sweet, like Gilbert Trafton’s wonderful 1923 Biology of Home and Community. The latter, though it featured no eugenic language, triggered controversy in North Carolina. Despite after the fact claims from creationists, eugenics does not seem to have concerned early fundamentalists.

The Rise of Nazism and World War II: Though Raymond Pearl criticized eugenics as far back as 1927, and the Nazi application of harsh negative eugenic measures pushed liberal scientists like Julian Huxley and Hermann Muller to frame a softer reform eugenics in the mid-1930s, the data demonstrate no sharp drop in the presentation of the topic through the 30s, 40s and 50s, only a gradual decline. This supports Wendy Kline’s claim from Building a Better Race (2001) that the eugenics movement was not “weak and discredited after 1930,” as many scholars contend, but had worked its way deeply into the popular consciousness.

Evolution vs. Eugenics: Though the topics of evolution and eugenics were tightly wed in the economic and civic biologies published from 1914 through the latter 1920s, textbooks with the strongest and most up to date presentation of evolution (Smith, Kroeber and Wolff) were significantly less eugenic than popular textbooks with poorer evolutionary content (Smallwood, Curtis and particularly Moon).

Moon: As with the data tracking the relative priority of the topic of evolution (see chart), the popular Moon text skews the results (see related article). Combined, the data suggest that though conservative regions of the country may have taken issue with the teaching of the topic of evolution, the teaching of eugenics, which discouraged mating across race and class lines, was less controversial.

[Table and notes below]

In his earlier works, Numbers demonstrated the utility of putting aside the martial metaphor. For example, in The Creationists (1992), Numbers examined the doctrinal politics leading to the development of modern “creation science” outside the war frame. Rather than implying that the movement’s leaders were ignorant yokels or members of some dark Southern Baptist Illuminati, as many “outsider” histories do, Numbers told a story of real people engaged in a more or less self-contained theological struggle. By doing so, Numbers was able to provide new insight on the resurgence and cultural power of literalism within fundamentalism, and opened numerous other productive avenues of historical research.

This is not to say Numbers suggests equivalence. He stops well short of asking us to take the radical step of viewing the complex of class, history and myth that define creationist or fundamentalist culture as a functional response to the modern world, no more or less valid than the complex of class, history and common stories that define, say, university culture. Others, like Christopher P. Toumey and Edward B. Davis, have stepped closer to the flame, suggesting we all create myths that “conjure a semblance of science” to, in the words of Jerome Ravetz, provide “comfort and reassurance in the face of the crucial uncertainties of the world of experience.”

Numbers is not so willing to say myths, or at least these myths, are a necessary component of culture. His work reflects the irritability of a man forced to cut himself free from the reassuring stories of his youth. Raised a Seventh Day Adventist, Numbers now claims no mooring faith. Adrift, though apparently not unhappily, in a world of contingency, the scholar wants to make sure the rest of us don’t commit the sin of relying on (historically and scientifically plausible, but no less false) myths when doing history or promoting our worldview.

Galileo Goes to Jail is dedicated to this Sisyphean task.

Of the 25 essays presented in the volume, about a quarter (your categorizations might vary) are devoted to undermining myths that support a secularist faith in the natural progress of science while warning of the lurking dangers of fundamentalism (myths 5, 7, 14, 17, 20, 24). About at third are devoted to challenging myths that suggest religion is naturally hostile and unsupportive of science or that science can be disentangled from the (typically religious) cultures in which it is embedded (myths 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 13, 18, 25). The rest are more or less equally split between those devoted to exposing myths now being fostered by the Discovery Institute and its allies (myths 15, 16, 19, 21, 23), and those that simply challenge the too pat views of supposed paradigm shifts or new age proofs (myths 6, 9, 12, 22).

Numbers is to be congratulated for attracting such an impressive array of major scholars from all points on the spectrum to the project. Of his essayists, Numbers notes, “nearly half, twelve of the twenty-five, self-identify as agnostic or atheist,” but that the rest include a couple evangelical Protestants, a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a couple impossible to categorize. Be warned though, despite the balance, the net effect of 25 back-to-back essays challenging conspiracy theories and conventional views can be a bit bullying, almost a comic everything you know is wrong, if consumed in just a sitting or two.

The only general complaint I have with Galileo Goes to Jail is the obviousness and tiredness of some of the topics. For anyone familiar with the literature, particularly historians of science, the idea “that medieval Christians taught that the world was flat,” or “that Catholics did not contribute to the scientific revolution” (Gregor Mendel anyone?), or even “that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for advocating Copernicanism” (territory Dava Sobel covered in her very popular Galileo’s Daughter), are not ideas that need to be challenged.

I found Edward Larson’s contribution, “that the Scopes trial ended in defeat for antievolutionism,” particularly irksome. But that should come as no surprise to regular readers, as that topic is the ax this blog regularly grinds. Still, Larson’s contention is very old news within academia. In fact it is the counter-myth, that the Scopes trial represented a defeat for science (see Grabiner and Miller, Skoog), that has dominated the literature for the last 40 years.

Though the constraints of the form work somewhat against the intent, Galileo Goes to Jail should entertain and challenge its readers to regularly stop and think. Some of the arguments are old hat, but the book does offer a generally contemporary digest of the academic challenges to conventional views. By his selection of essayists alone, Numbers has provided a good index of who to turn to when one is ready to think beyond the myths.

It is hard to deny that Haeckel’s embryos are an “icon of evolution,” true even if “icon” now evokes Jonathan Wells’ “travesty” of a book (see Matzke). The embryos were reproduced in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from the mid-1930s through at least the 1960s (See table). Generations of students took away the incorrect but easy to accept and generally cool idea that we pass through a fish-like stage, complete with gill slits, on our way to becoming human.

Creationists, forever seeking advantage, took a 1997 journal article challenging the residual utility of Ernst Haeckel’s iconic embryos (Richardson et al.) and fashioned it into a pointy stick to poke their favorite straw man, the “scientific elite” (Pennisi, 1997; Behe, 1998; Wells, 1999; Freeman, 2001a,b; Ojala, 2004). With fresh charges of “fraud” and “fake,” these anti-evolutionists pricked a few scientists and historians. But the “prickees” fought back, and with context and nuance on their side, made quick work of the critics (Hopwood, 2006; Blackwell, 2007; Richards, 2009). Charges of fraud against Haeckel are as old as the drawings themselves, the defenders noted, just another out of date argument in the creationists’ pitiful quiver of half-truths and rhetorical manipulations.

Thrust. Parry.

But we must be careful: creationist attacks tend to generate simplified and emotional responses that can constrain critical thinking.

Haeckel’s “icon” was and remains a potent and problematic image (see Ken Miller and Joe Levine’s note). Though it is true that Haeckel’s “schematic” illustrations gave way to better representations starting in the late 1940s, biology textbooks continued to present embryos, always vertebrates, side-by-side or in a comparative grid. It’s an arrangement that was designed to communicate Haeckel’s belief that embryonic development and evolutionary history were linked and that evolution was progressive. It is easy to argue that it still does, despite the disclaimers authors usually offer.

What is most curious is that the rise in popularity of Haeckel’s embryos happened just as biologists were distancing themselves from the kind of broad morphologically-based conjecture the “icon” was designed to support. Less than 20% of early American biology textbooks (1907-1932) included all or part of Haeckel’s original grid. But by the 1940s and into the 1950s, upwards of 60% of high school textbooks featured copies or close variations the 1874 original.

How do we explain this?

One explanation might be that biology textbooks, which are often authored by non-experts, are generally junk, always out of step and unrepresentative of the latest science. But not only is this not true, it does nothing to explain the increasing popularity of Haeckel’s drawings from the early to the middle of the twentieth century, nor the continued influence of his iconic scheme today.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see if we can find some real answers.

CONCEPTION

Haeckel’s embryos entered American biology textbooks not directly, but via a surrogate, George J. Romanes’ Darwin and after Darwin (published in 3 volumes between 1892 and 1898). Though Haeckel updated his array in 1891, it was the simple 8×3 grid from the 1874 edition of Anthropogenie, as copied by Romanes, that would serve as the template for nearly all versions published in the first half of the twentieth century.

Ironically, by the time Haeckel’s embryos appeared in an American textbook, Bigelow and Bigelow’s Applied Biology (1911), the “biogenetic law” the grid was created to illustrate – that the stage-by-stage development (ontogeny) of an embryo recapitulates its species’ evolutionary history (phylogeny) – was not just an anachronism, to a new generation of experimental biologists, it no longer qualified as science.

According to Garland Allen, the increasing focus on evidence-based research, exemplified by the work T. H. Morgan, was part of a generational “revolt from morphology.” Allen writes, “Controlled experimental conditions were seen by Morgan as providing the circumstances for detailed and quantitative analysis on limited, but answerable questions (Allen 67).

This might explain why Haeckel’s embryos were a relative rarity in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The grid appeared in just 3 of 26 high school and college textbooks published between 1907 and 1931.

However, it is likely more prosaic factors were at work as well.

As I discussed in “The Nervous Icon” (Part I, Part II), American publishers had tenuous and variable relationships with copyright law in the early years of the century. But after passage of the Copyright Act of 1909 publishers were careful not to simply lift art from competitors without permission or attribution. Generally.

And then there is the question of access and availability. Illustrations cost money to produce. Textbooks were (and are) a relatively low margin, and prior to the 1920s, low volume business. No doubt there was pressure to keep costs down. However, once an illustration was created, the house that paid for its creation could reuse it or even rent it out. Eventually “clear” copies multiply.

Fig. 1: Haekel’s original illustration or Romanes’ copy, though uncredited, certainly served as the source for the developmental grid that appeared in Benjamin Gruenberg’s Elementary Biology (1919). The Gruenberg illustration in turn seems to have served as the source art for the grid as it appeared in Truman J. Moon’s revised Biology for Beginners (1933), though Moon credited his version to the American Museum of Natural History.

TAXONOMY

After Applied Biology, Haeckel’s embryo’s did not make their next appearance until they were retraced (with all figures flopped right) and reproduced in Benjamin Gruenberg’s 1919 Elementary Biology. Though the re-illustration carried no credit (Fig 1), it was clearly based on Haekel’s 1874 original. However, a slight mutation suggests just how “schematic” Haeckel’s originals were. The sixth embryo set in the series, Haeckel’s calf (rind in German) became a sheep in Gruenberg’s version. Later, in Everyday Biology (Curtis et al. 1943, 574), the same embryo set would magically become a dog.

The faithful Gruenberg variation represented only the second appearance of Haeckel’s full embryo set in a high school text. Though the complete 8×3 grid would appear in many college level texts throughout the century, the final embryo set in the series, that of “man,” would not appear again in high school textbooks until it was pulled from the grid and represented in a much less schematic style in Kroeber and Wolff’s 1948 Adventures with Animals and Plants (UPDATE: the full 8×3 grid appeared in Frank M. Wheat and Elizabeth T. Fitzpatrick’s 1929 Advanced Biology published by the American Book Company). Later, all three 1963 BSCS texts, the “blue,” “green” and “yellow” versions would include “man” in their modified series.

One additional variation source was William B. Scott’s 1917 Theory of Evolution. Used only in Woodruff’s college level Foundations of Biology (1922, 1923, 1927, 1930 and 1936), the drawing depicted a single stage (II) of 3 quite different looking embryos, fish (shark), bird and man.

Except for Woodruff’s use of Scott, Haeckel’s 1874 original served as soruce for all variations of the vertebrate grid reproduced in high school textbooks published between 1911 and 1962, with the exception of Kroeber and Wolff’s Adventures with Animals and Plants (1948, 1950), which was later revised and retitled Biology (1957). Interestingly, though the Gruenberg variation clearly served as the source of the version that appeared in all Moon textbooks (Biology for Beginners, Biology and Modern Biology) published by Holt between 1933 and 1965, the books carried a credit that read, “Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.” It’s possible the museum acquired the rights to the image. But appropriation and “misattribution” of images was not an uncommon practice among publishers, particularly Holt.

DEVELOPMENT

How about this for irony? The first textbook, either at the high school or college level, to explicitly place Haeckel’s embryos in a section devoted to the topic of evolution was the much derided Biology for Beginners by Truman J. Moon (1933), the same textbook that dropped the use of the word evolution in favor of “racial development” (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: This poorly drawn 5×3 variation on Haeckel (by way of Gruenberg) appeared exactly as pictured here in all editions of Moon’s (et al.) popular textbook published between 1933 and 1965. Evidently without generating controversy.

Though earlier textbooks – Bigelow and Bigelow’s Applied Biology (1911), Gruenberg’s Elementary Biology (1919) and Atwood’s Civic and Economic Biology (1922) – presented the topic of evolution in a non-compromised pre-Scopes way, they did not use Haeckel’s grid to explicitly support acceptance of the theory of evolution. Instead the grid was deployed to illustrate a more general discussion of “development.” As they would throughout the century, “gill slits” (also called “gill-bars” and “gill arches”) centered the topic. Placed within the a discussion of development, Haeckel’s grid linked embryonic development with evolutionary development. The net effect was kind of a “recapitulation lite,” which could be forwarded but gently disclaimed. For example, both Gruenberg and Atwood were careful to caution against a literal application. Atwood stated, “the history is never perfectly repeated, and there are many short cuts and slight omissions” (19). Gruenberg, though he libelously referred to Haeckel’s theory as “Von Baer’s Law of Recapitulation” (Von Baer was famously critical of Haeckel), wrote, “strictly speaking, it is not true, for example, that you once passed though a hydra stage or a fish stage” (278). Later in the text, Gruenberg does refer back to his discussion of development as one point of evidence in support of evolution (467).

Moon’s inclusion of Haeckel’s grid in 1933 was part of his general expansion of the book’s section on evolution. In a chapter titled “The Facts of Racial Development Through the Ages,” Moon listed embryology along with fossils, homologous structures, vestigial organs, physiological similarities, environment, breeding, and experimentation (Hermann Muller’s experiments) all as evidence of evolution. The chapter following was dedicated to methods. It presented Larmarck’s acquired characteristics, Darwin’s natural selection and De Vries’ mutation theories as successive ideas. This presentation, though edited slightly and moved about, would remain virtually unchanged in Moon’s texts published through 1956.

The other high school texts published in the 1930s that included Haeckel’s grid – Curtis et al., Biology for Today 1934; Pieper et al., Everyday Problems in Biology 1936 – did not follow Moon’s lead in locking Haeckel’s embryos to a discussion of evolution. They instead linked the embryos to discussions of classification and reproduction. Not surprising for books published in the decade after Scopes. College texts however immediately picked up on, or at least paralleled, Moon’s lead. The first to do so, Rice’s An Introduction to Biology (1935), was remarkably Haeckelian. It linked taxonomy, ontogeny and phylogeny, and refereed to the “biogenetic law” with few disclaimers (506 – 513). The other contemporary college level texts that included the grid – Mavor’s General Biology (1936) and Stanford’s Man and the Living World were a little more modest in their presentation. Stanford wrote, “While the biolgenetic law – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – is not emphasized as much as it once was, it is still a useful generalization” (614).

One of the more interesting post-Haeckelian contextualizations of the gird occurred not in a college level text, as one might expect, but a remarkable (though evidentially not terribly popular) high school text, Downing and McAtee’s Living Things and You (1940). While virtually every biology textbook in the twentieth century discussed evolution relative to the evolution of animals (or just humans) alone, Downing and McAtee, included evidence from botany. Using it made undercutting recapitulation easy. They wrote, “botanists never have been very enthusiastic supporters of the idea that development of the individual recapitulates the history of the race to which the individual belongs” (455).

The use of embryological illustrations in support of classification, development or evolution diversified greatly from 1940 on. Many textbooks at both the high school and college level begin to abandon Haeckel’s schematic drawings in favor of more accurate models (Parshley, 1940; Kroeber and Wolff, 1948; Brown, 1956; Villee, 1957). Others simply did not include any comparative vertebrate embryo drawings at all. And of those that did publish variations of Haeckel’s originals, most cautioned against the embrace of hard-line recapitulation. Karl Ernst Von Baer and his more general laws of embryological development were commonly mentioned to soften assumptions of recapitulation and salvage comparative embryology.

There were exceptions however. A few high school and college level texts held on to old ideas and promoted the “biogenetic law” with few disclaimers late into the century. These include Ritchie’s Biology and Human Affairs (1941), Jean’s (et al.) Man and His Biological World (1952) (Fig. 3), and Ruth Dodge’s update to Smallwood, Elements of Biology (1952). The latter represented a real throwback. As if making up for lost time without learning a thing along the way (earlier Smallwood text’s were light on evolution), Elements of Biology presented a prescriptive progressionist evolutionism that would have made Haeckel proud.

Fig. 3: Man and His Biological World (Jean et al. 1952) illustrated Haeckel’s “biogenetic law” not only with his grid of embryos, but with this photo of “the body of boy covered with hair” (411). This photo reinforced the idea that human embryos could get “stuck” before fully transitioning to a “completely evolved” modern form.

Smith’s generally up-to-date Exploring Biology, after ignoring Haekel through its first two editions (1938, 1943), half-heartedly presented Haeckel’s embryos in its 1949 and 1954 editions. Though the text always featured a strong presentation of the topic of evolution, only the 1954 edition coupled the drawings with that topic.

Fig. 4: The grid grew considerably in the 1963 BSCS “green” and “blue” versions. “Man” was restored after he had disappeared from high school textbooks published after 1919. Though the individual drawings are more accurate and feature strong variables like yolk sacs, the left to right, top to bottom scale-adjusted developmental grid remained fixed.

Haecekel’s grid was updated in the BSCS textbooks published in 1963 (Fig. 4). All three restored “man” to a grid that also featured more accurate and detailed embryo drawings. Though the authors “normalized” the embryos to make them all the same size (only the “green” version noted the scale shift), obvious pains were taken to illustrate the differences between each. While the “yellow” version continued to use its grid as evidence of evolution, the “green” and “blue” versions associated the gird with “development” and “adaptation” respectively. Of note: the “yellow” version broke from tradition by placing “man” not at the bottom right of the gird, but at the bottom left. The “yellow” version also mixed its 4 embryo sets – man, pig, salamander and chicken – countering the idea of evolutionary progress implied by Haeckel’s original.

CONCLUSION

As a rule, textbooks that traced their ancestry to editions published prior to 1938 had a hard time giving up on Haeckel and hard-line recapitulation. In one case, Moon’s series, the presentation of recapitulation coupled with Haeckel’s illustrations remained unchanged and unchallenged across the many editions published from 1933 into the 1960s.

It is interesting that the more scientifically up-to-date (and often less popular) books tended to include more sophisticated embryonic illustrations, or avoid comparing vertebrate embryos altogether. Those that did include variations on Haeckel’s gird generally did a good job of disclaiming or contextualizing recapitulation. In weaker, and unfortunately more “acceptable” books, like Modern Biology, Haeckel’s original grid was ironically more common.

The inclusion of Haeckel’s grid, minus “man,” in the perennially and preternaturally popular Moon series suggests that the image, badly drawn, represented the well-negotiated middle ground. It seems, despite their recent noise, creationists and their forebears cared little about this particular “icon of evolution” during its heyday. Embraced it even (Modern Biology was shamefully popular). The only textbooks they had trouble with were the better ones.

The author wishes to thank Nick Matzke for suggesting the topic of this article.

REFERENCES

This table includes data on the inclusion (or not) of variations of Ernst Haeckel’s grid of vertebrate embryos in 91 American high school and college biology textbooks published between 1907 and 1969. The column labeled “Haeckel’s Embryos” categorizes inclusion as follows: Y if yes, a variation of or reference to Haeckel’s gird is present; NH if the text includes a vertebrate embryo series, but not Haeckel’s; and N if the text does not include a developmental series.

The column titled “Source and Order” lists the illustration source and the order in which the embryos appear.

This table accompanies the article Haeckel’s Embryos in High School and College

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The Revolution Will Be Animated from Marine Lormant Sebag on Vimeo.

Historians, bloggers and critics can “reuse” bits of culture under “fair use.” But creative artists must secure the rights to any work they “sample.” Why is that?

This is a question not so easily answered.

The documentary linked above features Nina Paley, writer, animator and director of the movie Sita Sings the Blues. Paley has adopted a novel approach to distribution of her film, in part to challenge current copyright practices. The story generated a bit of “comment controversy” on Cartoon Brew. Paley offered this interesting link. My two cents as posted on CB below.

Copyright law always (or from 1909 to Bono anyway) attempted to split the difference between the artist’s right to profit and the public’s right to participate.

This whole thing relative to Sita sounds a bit like an accidental mission. Nina used the 1928 recordings, got in trouble, found a cause.

But the questions she is raising are important. Naive or not, Nina is to be admired for at least challenging the “new” assumptions regarding our blind consent to the perpetual private ownership of the sights, sounds and symbols of our culture.

Related links: “The Nervous Icon” Part I | Part II

[NOTE: Article originally published 01/17/2010. Date altered to force a WordPress resort.]

Each entry includes a brief observational note and a 0-5 ranking based on a qualitative assessment of the presentation of the topic of evolution. The table also includes title, copyright date, author(s) and category: P for phylogenetic, E for economic, U for unity of life, and N for normative. I will be writing more on this categorization scheme shortly.

For criteria and analysis, see The Topic of Evolution in Secondary Schools Revisited.

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*Title reviewed via Google Books. All others physically reviewed.