BSCS

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. But the narrative they supported was conflicted from the start.

This analysis, focused on the work of anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, geneticist Bentley Glass, and naturalist Marston Bates, provides insight into the constructed nature of scientific ideas and the limits of science-based claims to authority. Keying into Cold War cultural anxieties, life scientists in the United States between 1945 and 1963 tried to compete with the “hard” sciences for prestige and funding by proposing solutions to perceived social ills based on the claim that they understood the evolutionary process and could apply their knowledge to guide human biological and cultural development. Positioning themselves as critical to the mitigation of political and environmental problems associated with rapid human population growth, biologists and anthropologists modified Progressive era ideologies to address changing attitudes toward race and class without altering the underlying premise that human culture, particularly “industrial civilization,” was an anomalous evolutionary product that threatened the natural order, dictating scientific management and control.

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. The embryos were reproduced in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from the mid-1930s through at least the 1960s. 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.

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.

Two influential articles published in the 1970s suggested that pressure from Christian fundamentalists, subsequent to the Scopes trial of 1925, forced American high school biology textbook authors and publishers to significantly limit discussion of the topic of evolution. The conclusions reached by these studies have become foundational for historians examining the interplay between science and religion in the United States in the twentieth century. However, a reexamination of key twentieth century biology textbooks suggests that the narrative that the treatment of the theory of evolution was held hostage to anti-rational cultural forces is largely a myth, created first as part of a public relations effort by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) to differentiate, defend, and promote its work, and later as part of an attempt by scholars to sound a warning concerning the rise of the religious right. A focus on this narrative has not only allowed biologists to sidestep uncomfortable questions regarding the race-biased and class-biased assumptions embedded within the concept of evolutionary progress, it has also limited reliance on the texts in question as reliable reflections of the cultural assumptions of educators and scientists. A reexamination of the most popular American biology textbooks from 1907 to 1963, particularly the work of Ella Thea Smith, provides evidence in support of these contentions.