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its curators have brought into parallel arrangement two ordered series, one
from biology and another from culture, that, technically speaking, do not
go together. The incrementum of physical evolution above has been made to
march in step with the incrementum of technical and scientific “evolution”
that lies just beneath it. Consequently, as these two series move toward the
present, they also converge; biological evolution ends with Descartes and
cultural evolution with the discovery of scientific method. By making this
scientific thinker evolution's end, the museum's curators also give pride of
place to science in biological history—the march of physical evolution ends
with homo scientificus .
I am going to argue that this identification of science with natural evo-
lution is an important pattern in science's public life, and I mean to sup-
port this claim by tracing the emergence of this pattern in modern science's
historical development—the very subject that the curators of the Musée de
l'Homme depict. I believe that the inclination to treat science as if it were
the very purpose or destiny of natural evolution itself is a symbolic pattern
fostered by the social conditions that have allowed science to emerge over
the past four centuries. The idea of evolution, in other words, is tied up with
the very idea of science, so that in the realm of public communication the
promotion of evolutionary ideas often adds up to the promotion of the scien-
tific enterprise as well. This gives evolution special rhetorical importance for
the culture of modern science. By “rhetoric” I do not intend to denote some
set of genres associated with political communication, but rather, following
such theorists as Jeffrey Walker and Dilip Gaonkar, qualities of persuasive-
ness or “rhetoricality” that any genre of discourse may exhibit. 3 The role of
evolutionary symbols in producing this rhetoricality for science is my subject.
The specific category of rhetoricality I am addressing here is ethos , a
term traditionally associated with Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric and used
to name the persuasive effects achieved when the character of a speaker is
projected through a message. 4 My concern is with how and why the scien-
tific character should enter into the message of evolution. Unlike the classi-
cal rhetoricians, who meant by ethos the character of the particular speaker,
I mean to enlarge this term, much as sociologists and cultural anthropol-
ogists typically do, to denote the collective identity of a culture—in this
instance, the scientific culture. But the traditional Aristotelian principle
still applies. The collective scientific ethos abides in scientific messages just
as much as that of any individual scientist-speaker would.
It has also been customary within this same social science point of view
to recognize that a society's ethos is vitally tied up with its religious symbols,
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