statement paled before others, such as his closing remark: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”23
Though Darwin did not directly discuss human evolution until 1871 in The Descent of Man, it did not take much creativity to conclude that natural selection had worked upon humans just as it had on animals. Doubts about natural selection persisted until the 1930s and 1940s. One of the main obstacles to the acceptance of natural selection among scientists was a continued view of evolution as progressive.24 In the decades after Darwin first proposed natural selection, non-Darwinian theories of evolution had upheld progress as inherent within the process and did not require as long of a time scale for their operation flourished.25
By the end of the 1800s, “neo-Darwinian” became the label for scientists who explained evolution through the transmission of characteristics produced by natural selection.26 Darwin himself did not attribute evolutionary change to natural selection alone, and at times he leaned toward aspects of Lamarckism, or the idea that when a member of a species acquired a characteristic through use (or disuse), it could be inherited.27 Lamarckism, which came from the evolutionary theories of a French natural historian published in 1800, was consistent with a progressive worldview because it suggested that, as they adapted to their environments, organisms became increasingly complex.28 Alongside a continued regard for Lamarckism arose another rival interpretation to natural selection. Believers of orthogenesis attributed evolution “to a built-in tendency or drive toward progress and ever greater perfection,” according to the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.29
Although Darwin rejected the idea of a deity directing evolution toward a particular goal, he did see evolution as progressive, culminating in Homo sapiens.30 His belief in progress lent credence to the notion that evolution was teleological. While “Darwin’s bulldog,” the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, tried to avoid talking about evolution as though it inexorably led to superior forms of species, Darwin himself tended to talk about the “perfection” of species, juxtaposed “civilized races” to “savages,” and upheld women as evolutionarily inferior to men.31
Theistic evolution, the concept that God directed evolution, was a popular way for people in the late nineteenth century to satisfy their desire to see design in the development of life. The biologist Asa Gray in the United States argued that God could have injected commands into the blueprints for organic development so that evolution would proceed according to His divine will. Theistic evolution, however, was not always an adequate answer to the theological questions that arose from evolution.
The Democratic politician and creationist William Jennings Bryan in 1922—three years before the Scopes “monkey trial”—asserted that the widespread acceptance of evolution could result in feeling that existence was pointless even if evolutionists retained a belief in God as Creator. To Bryan, evolution deprived humanity of a “personal God” by removing the supernatural and miraculous from everyday life.32 Bryan concluded that placing God at such a far remove could lead to agnosticism or atheism.33 However, even for evolutionists who avoided such spiritual pitfalls, in Bryan’s opinion the lack of a personal God still could deprive a life of meaning. Bryan wrote, “Darwinism offers no reason for existence and presents no philosophy of life; the Bible explains why man is here and gives us a code of morals that fits into every human need.”34
Eroding the idea that humans were created in God’s image, evolution triggered doubts about the practicality of social progress, especially in one individual’s life given the age of the Earth, and about the presence of a design for humanity (since even theistic evolution suggested that God had long stopped intervening in earthly events).35 Theistic evolution largely faded among evolutionary theorists by 1900, but it was indicative of the continued craving for design and progress in evolution.36
When Bryan referred to “Darwinism,” he alluded not to the theory of natural selection but to evolutionary theory as a whole. In fact, it would have been remarkable if Bryan had challenged natural selection; while evolutionary theory largely overcame opposition by the 1870s, the theory of natural selection encountered resistance even from many professional scientists until the 1940s.37 The discovery of Mendelian genetics at the turn of the twentieth century at first presented a challenge to neo-Darwinism, but in the 1930s and 1940s biologists fashioned the “evolutionary synthesis,” an integration of genetics into the theory of natural selection. The evolutionary synthesis was an intellectual development that put neo-Darwinian theory at the core of the biological sciences.38
Even with the enunciation of the evolutionary synthesis that made natural selection the accepted means of evolution, the tendency to see progress in evolution remained. The grandson of Thomas Huxley and a biologist at Oxford University in England, Julian Huxley, wrote Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, one of the works in the 1940s that articulated the evolutionary synthesis. Discussing the issue of teleological tendencies among evolutionists, Huxley remarked on one troubling implication: “If man were wiped out, it is in the highest degree improbable that the step to conceptual thought would again be taken, even by his nearest kin.”39 Huxley shied away from asserting that evolution necessarily leads to the creation of humankind, but, as Huxley made clear, our present evolution ended with the development of sentience, an important advance that we must not take for granted.
Huxley’s warning may have been necessary because after the publication of Origin of Species, Western writers began to speculate that another species might displace Homo sapiens. It is in this realization—that natural selection meant humans might not exist in the future—that the origin of a scientific apocalyptic lies. Scholars have not agreed on the origins of secular apocalypticism. The literary scholar W. Warren Wagar saw the development of what has been called the “secular apocalypse” as dating to 1826 with Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, one of a series of “last man” novels written by British and European Romantics in the nineteenth century.40 These works contained depictions of the end of the world from the perspective of a lone survivor.
Other scholars have concentrated on twentieth-century trends as the source of a secular apocalyptic. The political scientist Michael Barkun sees secular apocalypticism emerging from scientists during the 1960s and 1970s due to the environmental movement, the turmoil of the civil rights movement and antiwar movement, and the oil shortages of the 1970s. He says scientists became convinced of a pessimistic future: “The scientific world view, which had grown accustomed to increasingly effective future predictions, became the victim of its virtues as extrapolations of present trends pointed toward global calamity.”41 Spencer Weart, a physicist who writes science history, pinpoints the beginning of speculation regarding the destructive (and hopeful) possibilities of atomic power at the beginning of the twentieth century as the real beginning of a secular apocalyptic in Nuclear Fear.42
The historian Chris Lewis responded to Barkun’s analysis in a 1992 article. He places the origin of secular apocalypticism in the 1930s, seeing it as part of a backlash against science.43 He considers this backlash to be a part of a long intellectual tradition in Western society: “What Barkun calls secular apocalypticism, and I call ecological apocalypticism, grew out of the fear of sixteenth and seventeenth century Christian and cultural critics that human domination of nature would cause the decay and death of the natural world.”44 Unlike Wagar, Lewis argues that the last man stories “are not really secular stories because it is almost impossible to determine whether the end of the world is caused by nature alone or by God’s punishment of humanity through nature for its sin and arrogance.”45
