| Only recently have historians begun to explore the relationship between science and the public, a relationship brought into focus and redefined in the debate culminating in the Scopes evolution trial of 1925. This dissertation focuses on scientists' responses to the evolution controversy, exploring biologists' efforts to communicate with a larger public about evolution, both through words and through visual images, and the changing appearance of evolutionary images as they passed through different lenses into popular culture.;The Scopes trial came along at an awkward moment for biologists, catching evolutionary theory in conceptual disarray, biology in a state of disciplinary fragmentation, and scientists, like many other Americans, profoundly ambivalent about the expanding influence of the media. Not all biologists chose to participate in the debate; nor did all participants enjoy equal access to the media. Those who did adopted a rhetorical strategy at odds with the agendas of nonscientist evolutionists, and with those of some colleagues as well.;Many of the scientists most active in the debate, following the lead of Henry Fairfield Osborn, responded to anti-evolutionists by attempting to weave God into the fabric of evolutionary theory. Evolution was no threat to Christian values, they argued, because it provided a reassuring message about the meaning inherent in evolution.;Osborn was a central figure in the debate not because he was typical of scientists, but because of the ways in which he was anomalous. He was not just a powerful evolutionist—he was an evolutionist with a museum. At this moment of general uneasiness about mass culture and a nascent “hieroglyphic civilization,” images and objects spoke loudly, often eloquently, but not necessarily in predictable ways. Images played an important role because the debates were, ultimately, about symbols.;The evolution debates of the 1920s were contentious because they were not only about evolution. Evolution carried significant symbolic weight, for scientists as well as for their varied publics. |
