Chicago reprises historic Darwin gathering
Silence fell over Rockefeller Memorial Chapel 50 years ago as Sir Julian Huxley delivered a rousing Thanksgiving Day address on the centrality of evolutionary theory to the future of human thought.
Huxley’s provocative talk was the keynote of a pivotal centennial celebration of Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, and it foreshadowed another historic Darwin conference that begins Thursday, Oct. 29, also at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Organizers of the new conference are embracing the aura of that 1959 event, which is now widely viewed as a key moment in the history of evolutionary studies, helping to solidify the hugely influential “modern synthesis” of genetics and natural selection.
Darwin in the 21st Century
In many ways the event for the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species is as ambitious as the 100th anniversary conference was in its scope and impressive speaker lineup. This conference will feature evolutionary ideas that no one could have imagined in 1959, such as “Genomics and Darwin in the 21st Century,” and subjects that would have sounded familiar even to Darwin, including the finches he studied on the Galapagos Islands.
Although this year has seen other celebrations of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the anniversary of his book’s publication, the “Darwin/Chicago 2009” conference stands out because of Chicago’s special place in evolutionary lore, said conference organizer Robert Richards, one of the world’s most accomplished Darwin scholars.
“The 2009 meeting will prove as important in setting the direction of biology in the foreseeable future as the earlier meeting was in its own time,” said Richards, the Morris Fishbein Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University.
Richards pointed out that the earlier meeting included biologists, paleontologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, but it had no philosophers or historians of biology. Those fields account for half of this meeting’s invited participants.
“These fields have become extremely prominent in interpreting the new biology to a wider public, especially as regards relation to religion and politics, and their work has even influenced the science itself,” Richards said.
Then and Now, Charting a New Course on Darwin
Speakers for the 1959 meeting were carefully selected to reinforce the modern evolutionary synthesis, which had begun forming around the 1920s and 1930s, Richards said. Julian Huxley—a grandson of biologist T.H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his backing of evolution—was a leader of the modern synthesis, as were conference speakers Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, G. Ledyard Stebbins, and Sewall Wright.
Before the advent of the modern synthesis, many biologists believed that the emerging field of genetics made Darwin’s old ideas of natural selection largely irrelevant. But when biologists such as Dobzhansky used new mathematical tools to study the genetics of natural populations, they found that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection was an important force driving evolutionary change.
Such ideas got their widest airing to date at the 1959 conference, which was covered on the front page of The New York Times and included special programs for more than 160 high school science teachers from around the country. The University of Chicago Press published a three-volume collection of the papers presented at the conference.
The 2009 meeting will be far less tailored to advance one particular vision of evolutionary biology, Richards said, in part because the modern synthesis is now thoroughly embedded in the study of evolution. But this conference features an equally impressive roster of leading scholars on evolution, including some from the University’s world-renowned group of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists—such as Jerry Coyne, Neil Shubin, David Jablonski, and Paul Sereno. The opening night on Thursday, Oct. 29 includes a welcome by President Robert J. Zimmer, and addresses by Harvard University biologist Richard Lewontin, University of Wisconsin historian of science Ronald Numbers, and Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, slated to give a talk on the biological origins of moral intuitions titled, “From Where do Morals Come? NOT Religion!”
Recalling a Day of Darwin, Speech and Song
Hauser’s talk harks back to Huxley’s 1959 “sermon,” titled “The Evolutionary Vision.” Speaking from the same Rockefeller pulpit that Hauser will use, Huxley pointedly criticized religion, saying, “Religion of some sort is probably necessary, but it is not necessarily a good thing.” But he also hoped that religion would evolve into more rational forms by recognizing that “in the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural.”
That speech caused a minor sensation, with one local newspaper reporting on its front page that Huxley “went around knocking down some of Western man’s most cherished ideals.” The New York Times focused on Huxley’s call for a “new ideology” grounded in evolution, essential to deal with “threats of nuclear war, overpopulation, and the spread of Communist ideology.”
After Huxley’s talk, the organizers arranged for Thanksgiving dinner for 400 people in Hutchinson Commons. The guests also were treated to a performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired operetta, Time Will Tell, written especially for the conference. The late Robert Ashenhurst, Professor Emeritus at Chicago Booth, co-wrote the lyrics of the piece.
Sol Tax, a Professor of Anthropology who organized the 1959 conference, was aware that the event might be discussed for years to come. “We want to make this a celebration worthy of the occasion, and use the opportunity not only to reach a new plateau of understanding about evolution at all levels, but also to transmit this knowledge directly to the public,” Tax said.
Fifty years later, the organizers of “Darwin/Chicago 2009” are taking up many of the same challenges, and once more striving to leave a legacy worthy of the occasion.
By Bill Harms
