Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
that “remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are
now meeting with success in this country.”
38
Had Bryan merely protested such social applications of evolutionary
science, he might have a more favorable place in historical memory since we
now recognize that the scientific authority that the eugenics movement took
from evolution was unwarranted. But Bryan chose to go after evolutionary
science instead. Bryan agreed with Hunter, Osborn, and the vast majority
of their scientific contemporaries that evolution had moral implications of
this kind, but for him this was only one additional sign of its falsehood.
It seems not to have occurred to him that perhaps much that was claimed
for evolution came from cultural sources far removed from the scientific
enterprise. The temptation to locate the root of such evils in evolutionary
science itself was simply irresistible. We are likely to blame this on his reli-
gious fundamentalism, but his convictions were just as strongly reinforced
by the evolutionism of his day. The alternative notion that evolution is one
thing and evolutionism another was closed off to actors on both sides of
this controversy. Once this had occurred, there was no point in challenging
the justice of eugenics policies, racism, or any other might-makes-right social
philosophy on merely moral grounds; such abuses could only be remedied
by toppling evolutionary science itself.
t
he
s
cientific
m
eta
-
PaRaDigm
From a historical standpoint, we might explain conflicts between science
and religion such as occurred in 1925 by saying that creationism and evo-
lutionism descend from a common tradition of natural theology. The fact
that this tradition once provided a vital basis for scientific patronage is key
to understanding its durability. This also means that evolutionism is not
entirely expendable. It is a constitutive ideology; to discard it would be
to abandon a set of ideas that has become a crucial part of the scientific
identit y.
This brings me to my third proposition, that evolutionism functions
as a kind of
meta-paradigm
for science and is therefore especially likely to
infiltrate science education. Evolutionism is
not
a paradigm in the exact
sense that Thomas Kuhn meant that term. It is something larger, the ideo-
logical center of an analogous and superordinate system of meanings that
is indirectly crucial to the advancement of science because it sustains its
professional ethos. As systems, Kuhnian paradigms are not just particular
bodies of theory; more precisely, they consist of the various intellectual,
