A Tale of Two Worksites

These two utterly disparate stories -- half a century and an ocean apart, and maximally contrasting an industrial tragedy with an academic confrontation -- might seem to stand as the most unrelatable of items: the apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese (the British version), of our mottoes. Yet I feel that the two stories share an intimate bond in illustrating the opposite poles of a central issue in the history of evolutionary theory: the application of Darwinian thought to the life and times of our own troubled species. I claim nothing beyond personal meaning -- and certainly no rationale for boring anyone else -- in the accidental location of my two offices in such sacred spots of history. But the emotion of a personal prod often dislodges a general theme worth sharing.

The application of evolutionary theory to Homo sapiens has always troubled Western culture deeply, not for any reason that might be called scientific (for humans are biological objects and must therefore take their place with all other living creatures on the genealogical tree of life) but only as a consequence of ancient prejudices about human distinctiveness and unbridgeable superiority. Even Darwin tiptoed lightly across this subject when he wrote the Origin of Species in 1859 (although he plunged in later, in 1871, with a book entitled The Descent of Man). The first edition of the Origin says little about Homo sapiens beyond the cryptic promise that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," (Darwin became a bit bolder in later editions and ventured the emendation, "Much light will be thrown ......)

Troubling issues of this sort often find their unsurprising resolution in a bit of wisdom that has permeated our traditions from such sublime sources as Aristotle's aurea mediocritas (golden mean) to the vernacular sensibility of Goldilocks's decisions to split the difference between two extremes and find a solution "just right" in the middle. Similarly, one can ask either too little or too much of Darwinism in trying to understand "the origin of man and his history." As usual, a proper solution lies in the intermediary position of "a great deal, but not everything." Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire gain their odd but sensible conjunction as illustrations of the two extremes that must be avoided -- for Wilberforce denied evolution altogether and absolutely, while the major social theory that hindered industrial reform (and permitted conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire) followed the most overextended application of biological evolution to patterns of human history -- the so-called theory of social Darwinism. By understanding the fallacies of Wilberforce's denial and social Darwinism's uncritical and total embrace, we may find the proper course between.

They didn't call him Soapy Sam for nothing. The orotund Bishop of Oxford saved his finest invective for Darwin's attempt to apply his heresies to human origins. In his review of the Origin of Species (published in the Quarterly Review, England's leading literary journal, in 1860), Wilberforce complained above all: "First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as wen as to the animals around him." Wilberforce then uncorked a passionate argument for a human uniqueness that could only have been divinely ordained: