What does the dreaded "E" word mean, anyway

Natural History, Feb, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould

A reverie for the opening of the new Hayden Planetarium.

Evolution posed no terrors in the liberal constituency of New York City when I studied biology at Jamaica High School in 1956. But our textbooks didn't utter the word either--a legacy of the statutes that had brought William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow to legal blows at Tennessee's trial of John Scopes in 1925. The subject remained doubly hidden within my textbook--covered only in chapter 63 (of 66) and described in euphemism as "the hypothesis of racial development."

The antievolution laws of the Scopes era, passed during the early 1920s in several southern and border states, remained on the books until 1968, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. The laws were never strictly enforced, but their existence cast a pall over American education, as textbook publishers capitulated to produce "least common denominator" versions acceptable in all states--so schoolkids in New York got short shrift because the statutes of some distant states had labeled evolution dangerous and unteachable.

Ironically, at the very end of this millennium (I am writing this essay in late November 1999), demotions, warnings, and anathemas have again come into vogue in several regions of our nation. The Kansas school board has reduced evolution, the central and unifying concept of the life sciences, to an optional subject within the state's biology curriculum--an educational ruling akin to stating that English will still be taught but that grammar may henceforth be regarded as a peripheral frill, permitted but not mandated as a classroom subject. Two states now require that warning labels be pasted (literally) into all biology textbooks, alerting students that they might wish to consider alternatives to evolution (although no other well-documented scientific concept evokes similar caution). Finally, at least two states have retained all their Darwinian material in official pamphlets and curricula but have replaced the dreaded "e" word with a circumlocution, thus reviving the old strategy of my high school text.

As our fight for good (and politically untrammeled) public education in science must include our forceful defense of a key word--for inquisitors have always understood that an idea can be extinguished most effectively by suppressing all memory of a defining word or an inspirational person--we might consider an interesting historical irony that, properly elucidated, might even aid us in our battle. We must not compromise our showcasing of the "e" word, for we give up the game before we start if we grant our opponents control over basic terms. But we should also note that Darwin himself never used the word "evolution" in his epochal book of 1859. In Origin of Species, he calls this fundamental biological process "descent with modification." Darwin, needless to say, did not shun "evolution" from motives of fear, conciliation, or political savvy but rather for an opposite and principled reason that can help us appreciate the depth of the intellectual revolution that he inspired and some of the reasons (understandable if indefensible) for the persistent public unease.

Pre-Darwinian terminology for evolution--a widely discussed, if unorthodox, view of life in early nineteenth-century biology--generally used such names as transformation, transmutation, or the development hypothesis. In choosing a label for his own, very different account of genealogical change, Darwin would never have considered "evolution" as a descriptor, because that vernacular English word implied a set of consequences contrary to the most distinctive features of his proposed revolutionary mechanism of change.

"Evolution," from the Latin evolvere, literally means "an unrolling"--and clearly implies an unfolding in time of a predictable or prepackaged sequence in an inherently progressive, or at least directional, manner (the "fiddlehead" of a fern unrolls and expands to bring forth the adult plant--a true evolution of preformed parts). The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word "evolution" to seventeenth-century English poetry. Here the word's key meaning--the sequential exposure of prepackaged potential--inspired the first recorded usages in our language. For example, Henry More (1614-87), the British philosopher responsible for several of the seventeenth-century citations in the OED entry, stated in 1664,"I have not yet evolved all the intangling superstitions that may be wrapt up."

The few pre-Darwinian English citations of genealogical change as "evolution" all employ the word as a synonym for predictable progress. For example, in describing Lamarck's theory for British readers (in the second volume of his Principles of Geology, 1832), Charles Lyell generally uses the neutral term "transmutation"--except in one passage, where he wishes to highlight a claim for progress: "The testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them by gradual evolution were improved into those inhabiting the land."