Peter Sachs Collopy

Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives

2022-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

I presented two versions of this essay in 2022, one in a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting and the other for a video produced by the Consortium of History of Science, Technology and Medicine. The video below is of the CHSTM version, while the text is of the longer and more detailed AAAS version. {% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} In November, Caltech renamed a building and other assets named after one of its most prominent faculty, American physicist Robert A. Millikan. Over the last year and a half, student and alumni advocacy at Caltech for removing names from the campus landscape has prompted new historical interest in Millikan and in Caltech’s relationship through him and others to the Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated for involuntary eugenic sterilization.[^1] This paper is one manifestation of that renewed interest. In the context of a session otherwise devoted to Lise Meitner and the roles of discrimination against women in science, I'm going to focus on how Millikan, as a powerful scientist and administrator, himself addressed questions of sex and gender in physics, coeducation, and eugenics. In the 1920s and 1930s, Robert A. Millikan was the most prominent scientist born in the United States. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1923 for his determination of the charge of an electron and for research on the photoelectric effect, an effort to disprove Albert Einstein’s corpuscular theory of the light which instead produced evidence supporting it. He was leading the California Institute of Technology to a central position in physics and in American science. And his research on cosmic rays—a term he coined—had long made headlines, as had his blending of science and religion in describing them as "birth cries" of atoms continually being created.[^2] When Duke University hired the German refugee physicist Hertha Sponer in 1936, Millikan wrote to department chair Charles W. Edwards questioning the decision. Edwards shared a paragraph with the university's president, William Preston Few, who wrote to Millikan to ask for further advice.[^3] Millikan did not elaborate further on his concerns about Sponer, but rather argued generally against hiring women in American university physics departments. “At least 95% of the ablest minds that are now going into physics are men,” he wrote, and they needed men for mentors. There were, Millikan conceded, exceptional women physicists, and indeed, he wrote, “Fraulein Meitner of Berlin and Madam Curie of Paris are in the front rank of the world's recognized physicists.” But since “no other living women” had achieved as much as Meitner, he suggested, no other was qualified for a professorship.[^4] As Margaret Rossiter writes, “rather than ‘opening the doors’… these two examples… justified continued exclusion, for, to Millikan at least,” their achievement now marked “the minimum acceptable level.”[^5] Ultimately, when Few replied that he generally agreed but that Duke's circumstances were exceptional because it operated a separate women's college as well as one for men rather than embracing coeducation, Millikan conceded the point.[^6] Only a year later, in 1937, Millikan took the opposite side on an issue of women and higher education in an internationally broadcast speech on the centenary of admission of women to his alma mater, Oberlin College, and thus the introduction of coeducation to American colleges. In his lecture, Millikan argued that “intelligent men” at Oberlin admitted women because they saw that “the Mississippi Valley… needed an educated womanhood for its fullest development,” and that others expanded coeducation because “a new scientific world” similarly “needed education and brains among women as well as men.” It was the imperial expansion of America west and the intensification of its industry, in Millikan's account, which liberated its women’s minds. In turn, education and the operation of markets led to the “economic” and “physical emancipation” of women from poverty, dependence, and “hampering and unwholesome social custom” such as “unhygienic dress” and prohibitions on athletics. Progress did not come, argued Millikan, from “hatchets and brickbats and strikes” by militant feminists, or even from legislation mandating suffrage and the right to own property. “Fortunately,” he suggested, suffrage hadn’t actually had a political effect, because women’s voting patterns mirrored men’s; “if there were a sex vote,” he added, “women’s suffrage would be a curse.” Rather, progress in women’s rights came from the continuous expansion of science, technology, and capitalism.[^7] Taken together, Millikan’s stances on women in higher education suggest that he celebrated inclusion and, as he put it, “liberation,” as long as these trends towards equality did not threaten men’s power and professorships. And while by 1937, “404 of the country’s 625 institutions of collegiate grade are coeducational,” as Millikan noted in a footnote, his own Caltech was not among them: it would first admit a woman graduate student in 1953, after Millikan left the presidency, and would not admit women as undergraduates until 1970.[^8] While Caltech excluded women, it very much embraced the vision of American expansion in the west which Millikan described as Oberlin’s initial reason for educating them. In a 1924 fundraising document, Millikan described “Some Exceptional Opportunities in Southern California,” a location he argued was uniquely suited for science and industry. Lacking coal, Millikan predicted presciently, it would be a major site for the development of new forms of energy, including solar power. “On account of the climatic conditions existing in the southwestern region,” he wrote, “and the character of the race that inhabits it, the solution of that problem may be expected to come from California.”[^9] That race was, Millikan wrote, “Nordic,” “Anglo-Saxon,” and “Arian,” ethnicities with which Millikan associated both himself and ideals of “progress,” “responsibility,” and “individual initiative.” Conversely, in his 1924 book *Science and Life*, Millikan associated Asia with “static civilizations” of irrational and suffering people.[^10] Decades later, in a 1946 letter to *Life* publisher Henry Luce regarding British rule in India, Millikan argued for the necessity of colonialism. Only “Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, Holland and Switzerland,” he wrote, were capable of “constitutional, representative government,… but the rest of the world… must be handled by something that approaches dictatorship.”[^11] All could make progress towards democracy eventually, but it must be extremely gradual, over many generations; Britain, Millikan said in 1942, had the world’s most successful democracy because it had developed over 200 years “by this evolutionary rather than revolutionary process,” while revolutionary countries “are certainly now hundreds of years behind.”[^12] In a 1951 letter to his wife Greta, Millikan expressed similar concern about self-government by Mississippi’s Black majority, “an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are.”[^13] Despite his rhetoric of progress towards women’s liberation for the Oberlin centennial in 1937, Millikan’s authoritarianism influenced his approaches to sex and gender as well. Among the benefits of “physical emancipation” Millikan listed in 1937 was the demise of “the sex slavery that denied to women the control of when and how she was able to bear her young.”[^14] The following year, though, he became a trustee of an organization which, in the name of scientific progress and small government, advocated for denying both men and women reproductive autonomy. This was the Human Betterment Foundation. In 1909, California had become the third state to pass a bill authorizing superintendents of asylums and prisons to sterilize patients and inmates without their consent. Over the decades to come, the state sterilized increasing numbers of people, totaling over 20,000 by the 1960s, a third of the national total. Legislators and administrators increasingly articulated their motivations for sterilization in terms of eugenics, selective breeding to improve the fitness of the human population.[^15] Among eugenic sterilization’s enthusiastic supporters were Pasadena lawyer and rancher Ezra Gosney and biologist Paul Popenoe. In the late 1920s, the two men visited state institutions, obtained copies of their medical records, and began statistical analysis to measure and demonstrate the individual and social benefits of sterilization. They also incorporated the Human Betterment Foundation, recruited a board of trustees which shared members with Caltech’s, and began publishing and distributing books and pamphlets advocating for the expansion of “eugenic sterilization of the hereditary defective.”[^16] In the early 1930s, the Foundation mailed pamphlets advocating sterilization to Nazi administrators and influenced Germany’s 1933 eugenic sterilization law.[^17] In their 1938 pamphlet *Human Sterilization Today*, the Foundation presented sterilization as a solution to the economic problem that “births among families habitually living on public charity are often 50% higher than births among self-supporting families.”[^18] In a draft of the pamphlet, they expressed an additional racial motivation; “native whites in California,” they wrote, “produce only 69% enough children to take the place of those who die.”[^19] Enacting this anxiety about the demise of the white race, the state of California disproportionately sterilized Mexican and Mexican-American people; state institutions also disproportionately sterilized women.[^20] 1938 was also the year in which Millikan joined the Foundation’s board of trustees.[^21] He thus lent the organization his scientific reputation and formally took responsibility for its work. While Millikan sometimes missed meetings of the Foundation, in letters to Gosney he expressed his enthusiastic support.[^22] “May I congratulate you and the Trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation,” he wrote in one, “on the generous gift that you are making to a great cause.”[^23] In his insightful *Rise of Robert Millikan*, Robert Kargon writes that Millikan “saw himself as a progressive-conservative” and that his approach to research also embodied this duality, as he strived to contribute both to the new physics with its emphasis on theorizing the subatomic and to the distinctly American, pragmatic, measurement-oriented physics of his mentor A. A. Michelson. “Millikan’s choice of the measurement of *e* as a research program reflects his decision to serve two masters,” writes Kargon, while his unsuccessful attempt to falsify Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, which Millikan described as “unthinkable,” “bold,” and “reckless,” “was undertaken to restrain the excesses of modernity.” In his own writing, Millikan argued against the popular rhetoric of “revolutionary discoveries.” “The growth of science,” he wrote, “is in general by a process of accretion, almost never by revolution.”[^24] Millikan and the Human Betterment Foundation found common cause because of their shared belief in progress within existing hierarchies, progress without egalitarianism. Millikan often referred to this progress as evolutionary, and here too his vision matched that of the Foundation.[^25] Gosney and Popenoe identified the reproduction of poor people and people with disabilities as a threat to this gradual human progress, and they advocated an evolutionary intervention, reducing reproduction through involuntary sterilization. Consistently with his visions of progress within science and politics, Millikan granted them his support. [^1]: Nidhi Subbaraman, “Caltech Confronted Its Racist Past. Here’s What Happened,” *Nature*, November 10, 2021. [^2]: Robert H. Kargon, *The Rise of Robert Millikan: Portrait of a Life in American Science* (Cornell University Press, 1982), 66, 70–72, 139–144, 148. [^3]: W. P. Few to Robert A. Millikan, June 11, 1936, W. P. Few Correspondence file, Personal Correspondence series, box 39, folder 13, Robert A. Millikan Papers, Caltech Archives and Special Collections. [^4]: Robert A. Millikan to W. P. Few, June 24, 1936, William Preston Few Papers, Duke University Archives, reproduced in Margaret W. Rossiter, *Women Scientists in America, Volume 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940* (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 192–193. [^5]: Rossiter, *Women Scientists in America, Volume 1*, 191. [^6]: W. P. Few to Robert A. Millikan, July 9, 1936, and Robert A. Millikan to W. P. Few, July 14, 1936, both in W. P. Few Correspondence file. [^7]: Robert A. Millikan, “Women’s Century,” October 8, 1937, Speeches and Articles series, box 60, folder 20, Millikan Papers. [^8]: Millikan, “Women’s Century”; Amy Sue Bix, *Girls Coming to Tech\! A History of American Engineering Education for Women* (MIT Press, 2013), 194, 213. [^9]: \[Robert A. Millikan\], “Some Exceptional Opportunities in Southern California,” April 11, 1924, Institute Official Papers file, Correspondence Regarding Caltech series, box 27, folder 9, p. 1. [^10]: \[Millikan\], “Some Exceptional Opportunities,” 1, 5; \[Robert A. Millikan\], “California Institute of Technology: Its Direction, Aims, Accomplishments, Needs, and Financial Condition,” Institute Official Papers file, box 27, folder 8, Millikan Papers, p. 4; Kargon, *Rise of Robert Millikan*, 104; Robert Andrews Millikan, *Science and Life* (Pilgrim, 1924), 11. [^11]: Robert A. Millikan to Henry Luce, March 18, 1946, Henry Luce file, Personal Correspondence series, box 41, folder 13, Millikan Papers. [^12]: Robert Andrews Millikan, “Evolution Versus Revolution,” *Bulletin of the California Institute of Technology* 51, no. 3 (September 1942): 7. [^13]: Robert A. Millikan to Greta B. Millikan, November 17, 1951, Robert A. to Greta B. Millikan file, Millikan Family Correspondence series, box 50, folder 12b, Millikan Papers. [^14]: Millikan, “Women’s Century.” [^15]: Alexandra Minna Stern, *Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America*, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2016), 83–84, 99–100. [^16]: Stern, *Eugenic Nation*, 104–108. [^17]: Stefan Kühl, *The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism* (Oxford University Press, 1994), 42–44, 45, 58. [^18]: Human Betterment Foundation, *Human Sterilization Today* (Human Betterment Foundation, 1938), 2. [^19]: “Human Sterilization Today,” Articles by Staff file, box 1, folder 6, Human Betterment Foundation Records, Caltech Archives and Special Collections. [^20]: Stern, *Eugenic Nation*, 120–122. [^21]: Human Betterment Foundation Notice of Annual Meeting, January 29, 1938, Annual Meetings 1937–1939 file, box 1, folder 2, HBF Records; HBF, *Human Sterilization Today*, 6. [^22]: Proxy forms signed by Robert Millikan, 1939, Annual Meetings 1937–1939 file, folder 1; 1941, Annual Meeting 1941 file, folder 3; January 29, 1942, Annual Meeting 1942 file, folder 4; R. A. Millikan to E. S. Gosney, March 24, 1942, Annual Meeting 1942 file; all in box 1, HBF Records. [^23]: R. A. Millikan to E. S. Gosney, February 11, 1942, Annual Meeting 1942 file. [^24]: Kargon, *Rise of Robert Millikan*, 59, 66, 74–75, 81. [^25]: Kargon, *Rise of Robert Millikan*, 147.

Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives

2020-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} In this event, members of the Caltech community presented their reflections on a collection of digitized materials curated from the Caltech Archives. The “uncomfortable things” selected for this discussion were artifacts of experiences of exclusion, inequality, discrimination, and bigotry in the history of Caltech. In this session, we acknowledged that the legacy of Caltech is intertwined with stories of injustice. By asking participants to personally reflect on that legacy, this event highlighted how there is no single solution or perspective sufficient to answer the multitude of questions and concerns that our community has about its history. This event took place on October 2, 2020 as part of the series “Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science,” sponsored by the Caltech Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Evolution Debates

2017-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

As the evolution of life generally and humanity in particular became scientific orthodoxy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists and other intellectuals debated what this meant. Some conceptions of God were compatible with evolution and others were not, for example, but the inverse was also true: certain conceptions of evolution were compatible with God and others were not. And at the same time, some conceptions of evolution emphasized cooperation and suggested humans would achieve the happiest lives through socialism, while others emphasized the roles of competition and “survival of the fittest” and suggested that capitalism was a better system for human achievement. Some theories of human evolution justified white supremacy, while others suggested racial equality. As a result, debates about biology were often also debates about religion and politics, and the three fields were repeatedly re-formed together.

This is a syllabus for The Evolution Debates, a course offered for four units of credit in spring 2017 as HIST 255g at the University of Southern California. This course will explore the history of ideas about evolution and human origins from about 1800 to the present. We’ll focus on debates and controversies, both within biology and geology and at intersections of science, religion, and politics, as well as famous incidents like Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and the Scopes Monkey Trial. More broadly, we’ll study the development of evolutionary theory, the histories of creationism and theistic evolutionism, and the roles of debates about human evolution’s political consequences in the histories of eugenics and scientific racism.

This is a General Education course in the category of Humanistic Inquiry. We’ll use the history of evolutionary thought to understand how scientists, theologians, and others have thought about what it means to be human and to live together in organized societies—and about how we became such social animals. In the process, we’ll interpret not only scientific texts for both professional and popular audiences, but also novels, visual art, film, and works of philosophy and theology. We’ll read carefully in order both to understand how arguments work and how the ideas of evolutionary thinkers have been shaped by the particular times, places, and experiences in which they lived, as well as by changing media and systems of publishing and scientific communication.

The course will meet for lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, 9 to 9:50, from January 9 to April 28, in Von Kleinsmid Center room 102. I will be available for office hours on Mondays from 10:00 to 12:00 in Social Sciences Building room 281, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

This course is organized around substantial reading assignments of primary sources, which is to say texts written by biologists, geologists, philosophers, theologians, and other participants in the evolution debates. We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Each week I will expect you post a short reaction to the reading by Sunday (or by Tuesday on weeks when the class doesn’t meet on Monday) using Blackboard’s blog feature. You can use this as an opportunity to raise questions, to comment on arguments you found particularly surprising or compelling, or to suggest ways the reading might relate to previous readings or forthcoming assignments.

You are required to buy two books, both of which are also available at the USC Bookstore. Please buy these specific editions, so we can refer to the same page numbers and editor’s notes:

Selections from Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009).
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008).

All other required readings for the course will be available online; for the first half of the semester, we’ll mostly be reading texts available through the web repository HathiTrust (and linked to below). When we get to more recent texts, I’ll make scanned copies of the excerpts we’re reading available to you.

My lectures will provide historical context for these readings, introduce you to debates between historians about their significance, and describe the roles of historical figures beyond those whose work you’re reading. You’re therefore not required to read a textbook for the course, but if you’d like one to refer to or to follow along in for an additional perspective on this history, I’ve included page numbers below for relevant sections of Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), which is available from the USC Bookstore and on reserve at Leavey Library’s circulation desk, and listed with them some other books for further reading or as sources for writing papers. Two other useful reference sources will be the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, each of which is useful for finding introductory information on particular scientists and philosophers and citations for books and articles that provide more detailed information.

Your first substantial writing assignment, due February 10, will be a paper approximately five pages long in which you develop your own analysis of a review of The Origin of Species, contextualizing it in the life of its author, with attention to their other scientific, religious, political, and philosophical interests and commitments, and in the editorial agenda of the publication in which it appears. We’ll spend some time in class looking at different ways you might find such reviews and research their authors and publications.

Your second writing assignment, due April 7, will be an online exhibit on a particular book in the evolution debates as a material text. In this exhibit, you’ll demonstrate what you can learn from looking at a physical book about its intended audience and how it was meant to be read. We’ll spend some time in class in advance of this assignment thinking about books in precisely this way, and will visit the USC Libraries’ Special Collections to look at original editions of books on evolution including some of those we’ve read ourselves. You’ll also have an opportunity to present the book you’re thinking about to the class on March 3.

Your last essay assignment, of approximately five pages and due April 28, will be to analyze what was at stake in a particular controversy about evolution. What did the people involved care about? What did they want to persuade others of? How did they use the idea of evolution to do so?

Additionally, there will be a midterm exam during class on March 10 and a final exam on May 5. These exams may involve short answer questions, longer essay questions, or a combination. In any case, the purpose will be more to evaluate your understanding of how ideas about evolution and its scientific, social, and religious consequences have changed over time, and less to test your memory of specific names or dates.

Your grade for the course will be based 15% on each of the two essays, 15% on the online exhibit, 15% on each of the two exams, 10% on reading responses, and 15% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

Monday, January 9: What Are the Evolution Debates?
- Reference: Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), 1–26.

Is Nature Stable or Changing?

Wednesday, January 11: The Great Chain of Being and the System of Nature
- Charles Bonnet, The Contemplation of Nature (1764), translated and abridged in John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1777), volume 4, 49–51, 58–62, 87–96.
- Carl Linnaeus, A General System of Nature (1735–1768), revised by Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1788–1793) and translated by William Turton (1800), volume 1, 1–11.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 48–71; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966; 1970); Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History” (1993).
Friday, January 13: Evolution in an Age of Revolutions
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809), translated by Hugh Elliot (1914), 1–8, 35–46, 68–70, 106–114.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 71–95; Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (1989).
Monday, January 16: No class for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Wednesday, January 18: No class
Friday, January 20: Natural Theology
- Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), 11–17, 356–371.
- William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), 1–21, 454–459, 467–469, 473–481.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 96–106.
Monday, January 23: Catastrophe and Uniformity
- Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), translated by Robert Kerr (1815), 5–17.
- Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, volume 1 (1830), 1–4; volume 2 (1832), 18–32; volume 3 (1833), 1–7.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 106–134; Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (1951); Martin S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005) and Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (2008).
Wednesday, January 25: Popular Evolutionism
- Robert Chambers, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), 113–119, 145–147, 153–161, 174–178, and 268–291.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 134–140; James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000).

Darwin and Wallace’s Answers

Friday, January 27: The Voyages of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace
- Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks (1839), 453–457, 461–465.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 141–155; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995).
Monday, January 30: “One Long Argument”
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009), 5–7, 13–26, 31–42, 47–65, 71–77, 83–94, 99–105.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 155–176; Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (2014), 1–65; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002).
Wednesday, February 1: The Reception of Darwinism
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 177–202; Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1958); David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (1973); The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, edited by Thomas F. Glick (1974); Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (1999); The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, edited by Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (2008).
Friday, February 3: Introduction to Special Collections
- Meet in USC Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library room 206.

Is Darwinism Atheistic?

Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 202–207; James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (1979); Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (1988).
Monday, February 6: Anti-Evolutionism
- Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (1874), 1–2, 40–48, 52–53, 168–178.
Wednesday, February 8: Christian Darwinism
- George Frederick Wright, “Concerning the True Doctrine of Final Cause or Design in Nature,” Bibliotheca Sacra 34 (1877): 357–385.
Friday, February 10: The Evolution Debates in Special Collections
- Meet in USC Special Collections.
- Paper due contextualizing a review of The Origin of Species.

How Did Humans Evolve?

Monday, February 13: Monogenism and Polygenism
- Louis Agassiz, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 110–113, 126–128, 136–138, 141–145.
- Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (1854), 9–10, 12–18, 34–35.
- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), volume 1, 9–10, 220–227.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 207–216, 292–297.
Wednesday, February 15: Sexual Selection
- Darwin, Descent of Man, volume 1, 245–251, 263–266; volume 2, 301–302, 310–314.
- Eliza Burt Gamble, The Evolution of Woman (1894), 19–31.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 313–315; Hale, Political Descent, 106–154; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989); Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014).
Friday, February 17: Herbert Spencer’s Universal Evolutionism
- Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), 146–174. (An earlier version of this chapter, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review 67 (1857), is also available.)
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 220–223; Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2007); Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist, edited by Bernard Lightman (2015).
Monday, February 20: No class for Presidents Day

The Politics of Evolution: Competitive or Cooperative?

Wednesday, February 22: Individualism
- Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851), 16–38.
- Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (1864), volume 1, 443–445.
- Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, volume 3 (1896), 608–611.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 274–277, 298–302; Hale, Political Descent, 66–105.
Friday, February 24: Liberalism
- Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence: A Programme,” Nineteenth Century, February 1888, 161–180.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 216–220; Hale, Political Descent, 155–221.
Monday, February 27: Socialism
- Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid Among Animals,” Nineteenth Century, September 1890, 337–349, 354; November 1890, 709–719.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 305–307, 315–317; Hale, Political Descent, 222–251; Daniel Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (1989).
Wednesday, March 1: Communism
- Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877), 3–18, 551–554.
- Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), translated by Ernest Untermann (1902), 102–103, 116–119.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 284–292.
Friday, March 3: Presentations on Special Collections
- Meet in USC Special Collections.

The Eclipse of Darwinism: What Are the Mechanisms of Evolution?

Monday, March 6: Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism
- Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1868), translated by Edwin Ray Lankester (1876), volume 1, 280–292.
- Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), excerpted in H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008), 160–163.
- H.G. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression” (1891), excerpted in Wells, Time Machine, 133–135.
- August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity (1892), translated by W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt (1893), ix–xv.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 224–256; Hale, Political Descent, 252–353; Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (1983).
Wednesday, March 8: “The Deathbed of Darwinism”?
- Alexander Patterson, The Other Side of Evolution (1903), vii–xix, 120–136.
- Vernon Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (1907), 1–7.
- Reference: Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (1992; 2006).
Friday, March 10: Midterm exam
March 12–19: No class for spring break
Monday, March 20: Evolutionary Fiction
- H.G. Wells, Time Machine (1895), 1–71.
Wednesday, March 22: Genetics and Eugenics
- Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine, June 1865, 157–166.
- William Bateson, “Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 25 (1900): 54–61.
- Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), iii–vi, 1–5.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 256–273, 307–313; Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (1995).
Friday, March 24: No class
Monday, March 27: Creative Evolution
- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), ix–xv, 84–97, 163–165, 176–185, 251–271.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 317–322; R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (1988).
Wednesday, March 29: The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Revival of Creationism
- William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (1922), 86–94, 102–109, 122–127, 132–135.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 375–381; Numbers, Creationists; Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997); Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013).

The Evolutionary Synthesis: Is Evolution Progressive?

Friday, March 31: Population Genetics and the Modern Synthesis
- R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), vii–x, 256–258.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), 3–12.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 325–340; Vassiliki Betty Smokovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (1996); Robert D. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (1994).
Monday, April 3: Evolutionary Progress
- Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), 556–569, 575–578.
- George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (1949), 240–246.
- George Gaylord Simpson, “The Concept of Progress in Organic Evolution,” Social Research 41 (1974): 46–51.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 340–346; Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996).
Wednesday, April 5: The Teilhardian Synthesis
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1938/1955), translated by Bernard Wall (1959), 11–14, 27–28, 180–184, 237–245, 257–272, 291–299.
- Peter Medawar, review of The Phenomenon of Man, Mind 70 (1961): 99–106.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (1967), 114–122, 133–137.
Friday, April 7: No class
- Online exhibit due on an evolutionary book as a material text.
Monday, April 10: Scientific Creationism
- John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (1961), xix–xxii, xxv–xxix, 63–70.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 125–129.
- Reference: Numbers, Creationists.
Wednesday, April 12: The Evolution of Human Race
- Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961), vii–viii, 1, 36–37, 40–41.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Bogus ‘Science’ of Race Prejudice,” Journal of Heredity 52 (1961): 189–190.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (1962), 253–257, 266–271, 285–286.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Debatable Account of the Origin of Races,” Scientific American, February 1963, 169–170, 172.
- Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 381–387, 396–397.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 278–284, 302–305, 353–356; Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1998); John P. Jackson, Jr., Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education (2005).
Friday, April 14: Periodic Extinctions and Punctuated Equilibria
- Niles Eldridge, “‘A Battle of Words,’” in The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman (1995), 120–125.
- Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, edited by Thomas J.M. Schopf (1972), 83–98, 108–115.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 347–353; David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (2012).

Adaptationism: Does Natural Selection Explain All Traits?

Monday, April 17: Biology as an Information Science
- George C. Williams, “‘A Package of Information,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 39–47.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), 1–11.
- Richard Dawkins, “‘A Survival Machine,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 75–86.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 356–361.
Wednesday, April 19: Sociobiology
- E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology (1975), 3–6, 547–551, 559–565, 574–575.
- Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People, “Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism,” BioScience 26 (1976): 182, 184–186.
Friday, April 21: The Descent of Woman
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (1972), 1–13, 26–33.
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), 1–15, 189–191.
- Reference: Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Erika Lorraine Milam, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (2010).
Monday, April 24: Critiques of Adaptationism
- Stephen Jay Gould, “‘The Pattern of Life’s History,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 52–64.
- Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 205 (1979): 581–597.
- Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 361–374.
Wednesday, April 26: The Revival of Natural Theology
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 1–9.
- William A. Dembski, “The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design,” in Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (2004), 311–329.
- Michael J. Behe, “Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution,” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 352–355.
- Kenneth R. Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,’” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 81–95.
- Reference: Numbers, Creationists.
Friday, April 28: Symbiogenesis
- Lynn Margulis, “‘Gaia Is a Tough Bitch,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 130–140.
- Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (2002), xi–xvi, 11–23, 51–56, 201–205.
- Paper due analyzing the stakes of a particular evolution controversy.
Friday, May 5: Final exam from 8:00 to 10:00

Peter Sachs Collopy

Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives

Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives

The Evolution Debates

Assignments

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

Monday, January 9: What Are the Evolution Debates?

Is Nature Stable or Changing?

Wednesday, January 11: The Great Chain of Being and the System of Nature

Friday, January 13: Evolution in an Age of Revolutions

Monday, January 16: No class for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Wednesday, January 18: No class

Friday, January 20: Natural Theology

Monday, January 23: Catastrophe and Uniformity

Wednesday, January 25: Popular Evolutionism

Darwin and Wallace’s Answers

Friday, January 27: The Voyages of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace

Monday, January 30: “One Long Argument”

Wednesday, February 1: The Reception of Darwinism

Friday, February 3: Introduction to Special Collections

Is Darwinism Atheistic?

Monday, February 6: Anti-Evolutionism

Wednesday, February 8: Christian Darwinism

Friday, February 10: The Evolution Debates in Special Collections

How Did Humans Evolve?

Monday, February 13: Monogenism and Polygenism

Wednesday, February 15: Sexual Selection

Friday, February 17: Herbert Spencer’s Universal Evolutionism

Monday, February 20: No class for Presidents Day

The Politics of Evolution: Competitive or Cooperative?

Wednesday, February 22: Individualism

Friday, February 24: Liberalism

Monday, February 27: Socialism

Wednesday, March 1: Communism

Friday, March 3: Presentations on Special Collections

The Eclipse of Darwinism: What Are the Mechanisms of Evolution?

Monday, March 6: Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism

Wednesday, March 8: “The Deathbed of Darwinism”?

Friday, March 10: Midterm exam

March 12–19: No class for spring break

Monday, March 20: Evolutionary Fiction

Wednesday, March 22: Genetics and Eugenics

Friday, March 24: No class

Monday, March 27: Creative Evolution

Wednesday, March 29: The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Revival of Creationism

The Evolutionary Synthesis: Is Evolution Progressive?

Friday, March 31: Population Genetics and the Modern Synthesis

Monday, April 3: Evolutionary Progress

Wednesday, April 5: The Teilhardian Synthesis

Friday, April 7: No class

Monday, April 10: Scientific Creationism

Wednesday, April 12: The Evolution of Human Race

Friday, April 14: Periodic Extinctions and Punctuated Equilibria

Adaptationism: Does Natural Selection Explain All Traits?

Monday, April 17: Biology as an Information Science

Wednesday, April 19: Sociobiology

Friday, April 21: The Descent of Woman

Monday, April 24: Critiques of Adaptationism

Wednesday, April 26: The Revival of Natural Theology

Friday, April 28: Symbiogenesis

Friday, May 5: Final exam from 8:00 to 10:00