The 10 chapters of this book, by different authors, deal with the reaction to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), principally in the USA and Canada but also in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, up to the end of the 19th Century. The objection to “Darwinism” was that it was inconsistent with the account of creation in Genesis, and there are notes on the numerous writers and others involved in the controversy. For anyone who believed that the Bible story was literally true, and that the whole world had been created by God in six days, there really is no room for argument. Some however were ready to concede that the “days” represented much longer periods of time although the order in which things were created was more or less correct, which to some extent would still be acceptable. Others allowed that evolution by natural selection might indeed have occurred as Darwin suggested except that Adam and Eve, representing the human mind and soul, had been separately created by God in his own image.

There is almost nothing about any strictly scientific objections to Darwinism, which at the time carried considerable weight. For example, there was little fossil or other evidence of intermediate forms between existing species, which there must have been if they had evolved as Darwin proposed. Also, blending inheritance couldn’t have worked, and Darwin himself was never happy about this: it was only much later that Mendel provided the answer. And so far as the descent of Man from the apes was concerned, there was no evidence of any missing links. Although the Neanderthal fossil had been found at about that time, it was unquestionably human, and there were anyway doubts about its antiquity. It wasn’t until the 1920s and later that the australopithecines were discovered, which really could be regarded as “missing links”.

Most of the objections to Darwinism were from protestant fundamentalists in America, where even nowadays they have considerable influence on public policy, especially in schools; although that is outside the period dealt with by this book. But so far as the Church of England was concerned any opposition, which was never very strong, is now no more than a matter of history. And the Roman Catholics have had the good fortune largely to keep out of the controversy. This was principally because at that time in Rome they were concerned with what then seemed much more important matters, to do with papal authority and infallibility, and the errors of “modernism”, which did include evolution, had to take second place: it was only in Canada that there was any serious opposition to Darwinism. So by the time that the scientific arguments were effectively over, the Roman Catholics were are able to disengage themselves, notably with the Encyclical Humani Generis by Pius XII in 1950. This effectively settled the question of evolution, by ruling that “it is acceptable within the framework of Christian doctrine, as long as Catholics confess the individual creation of each human soul, the authority of revelation in speaking to us of the source of our being, and the unity of the human race”.

This is rather a peculiar book, sound enough on what it is trying to do, which is to give an account of the 19th century religious and philosophical arguments about Darwinism, with copious references to the publications involved, and these will be useful to anyone researching the history of those concerned, most of whom are long since forgotten. What it doesn’t pretend to do, however, is to present a balanced picture of the whole controversy, including the scientific arguments which did in the end prevail. And it isn’t cheap, at £35!

C. B. Goodhart