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Lessons From the Gilded AgeWhat Social Darwinists didn't get about evolution.

By Adam KirschPosted Monday, Feb. 9, 2009, at 6:53 AM ET

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The irony was that this complacency rested on a complete misunderstanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwinian evolution is anti-teleological—a mindless process with no goal or direction. Yes, evolution gave rise to complex animals like human beings, but it would be a mistake to say that humans are "higher" creatures than apes in any moral sense: All living things are equally "successful" insofar as they manage to reproduce themselves. The whole thrust of Spencer's thought, on the other hand, was that, in the words of his American disciple and popularizer Edward Youmans, "life, mind, man, science, art, language, morality, society, government, and institutions are things that have undergone a gradual and continuous unfolding, and can be explained in no other way but by a theory of growth and derivation."

Oddly, Banquet at Delmonico's never really offers a clear explanation of Spencer's views on social evolution and the ways they differed from Darwin's understanding of biology. (Spencer himself recognized the difference and even insisted on it: He was always reminding people that he came up with his version of evolution years before The Origin of Species appeared in 1859.) Werth is more interested in anecdotes than ideas, and he devotes much more space to Spencer's rambling letters about his health problems than to his philosophical work.

Yet this lingering confusion is also oddly appropriate, since, as Werth shows, Gilded Age intellectuals themselves often used terms like evolution and positivism with no clear sense of what they really meant. As with so many intellectual buzzwords, from transcendentalism to deconstruction, evolution was not so much the name of an idea as a badge of identity. If you believed in it, you were on the side of science and progress; if you attacked it, you were superstitious or reactionary. Noah Porter, the president of Yale, set off the nation's first battle over academic freedom when he forbade a young professor from using Spencer's The Study of Sociology as a textbook on the grounds that it was "substantially atheistic."

All this, of course, has a weirdly contemporary feel. The kind of opposition that the theory of evolution provoked in the 19^th century—passionate, personal, and wholly unscientific—it continues to provoke today. The difference is that now, no Yale president would be caught dead banning a book for being atheistic. The whole religious, scientific, and intellectual establishment is behind Darwinism now, and the only opposition comes from the margins—from religious fundamentalists and small-town school boards. Yet Werth's book reminds us that, in the past, the "progressive" doctrine of Darwinism authorized a very reactionary politics—culminating in the eugenics movement and the forced sterilization of unfit mothers. It is worth remembering that the most advanced members of society, intellectually speaking, are not always the wisest or the best.