Agassiz vs. Gray: "America’s Battle Over Darwinism Was Personal"

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This is a remarkable historical piece in The Atlantic, in a newsletter called “Time-Travel Thursdays” that revisits interesting stuff from the archives of the magazine. The link below is a gift link, good for two weeks starting today (15 August).

In a past life, I did some basic research on Asa Gray and gave a public talk about him, arguing that his support for Darwin, and their correspondence, was worthy of consideration by Christians. (Asa Gray was a good Reformed Christian who attended our former church in Boston, Park Street Church.) I knew that he had defended Darwin in the States, writing in The Atlantic (then The Atlantic Monthly).

Defending Darwin in the States meant confronting the execrable Louis Agassiz, but I didn’t know much about that personal conflict. That alone was fascinating to read about, even if the ending was (to me) sad and frustrating:

Agassiz’s resistance to evolution diminished his reputation during his lifetime, but his racism posthumously doomed it. His name has been removed from schools and natural landmarks; Swiss towns have faced a call to rechristen the Agassizhorn mountain. But in 1860, that was all in the future. A change in The Atlantic Monthly’s editorial leadership shortly after the publication of Gray’s essays favored Agassiz; he contributed frequently to the magazine well into old age. Asa Gray, the victor in the fight over the American reception of Darwinism, and in some ways over the future of American science, never appeared in these pages again.

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Fascinating. I’m reading through the Atlantic article with great interest. Thanks for the post.

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An interesting article. I do remember bits of this conflict from Janet Brown’s biography on Darwin. As it happens, years ago I bought the old textbook Principles of Zoology, by Agassiz and Gould (A.A. Gould, mind you). First published in 1851. Mine was a later edition, although still quite old where someone wrote their name inside the front cover and dated it 1869. It’s weird to hold this old book. Among its illustrations is a very old figure of the geological record with terms not used any more, and of course no timeline.
I perused it for Godiness, and it is not hard to find. The Preface states that this effort is to “produce more enlarged ideas of Man’s relation to Nature, and more exalted conceptions of the Plan of Creation and its Great Author.” Later, Ch. 1 declares that the subject of Zoology has merit in that it is part of “divine thought”. And so it goes.
So here we see a kind of zenith of Creationist science, but, as this book edition dates to the 1860’s this science was already on its way out.

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