Ideas · Natural History · Mucholapka
Darwin, Agassiz,
and the Trouble with Creation
From glaciers and Harvard to biology by the sea.
By Chuck White
Louis Agassiz could see glaciers where there were none.
Stranded boulders, scratched rock and strangely shaped valleys told him that ice had once covered landscapes now occupied by farms and towns. Building on other Alpine observers’ discoveries, he helped reveal an Earth dramatically different from the familiar one.
Charles Darwin admired him. In 1841, Darwin wrote that Agassiz’s work on glaciers had “filled me with admiration.” Eighteen years later, he sent him a book that would test how far that admiration could travel.
By then, Agassiz had become a Boston scientific celebrity. Harvard gave him a base; his marriage to Elizabeth Cabot Cary strengthened his place in the city’s influential circles. He built the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Elizabeth would help establish Radcliffe. His daughter Ida married Henry Lee Higginson, the future founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Follow the family and science soon leads into education, money and music.
Then On the Origin of Species arrived.
Agassiz could accept that glaciers had transformed the planet. He could accept extinction. But Darwin’s argument that species changed through descent challenged the divine order he believed nature revealed. He demanded better evidence and resisted the conclusion.
Across Harvard, botanist Asa Gray read the same book with enthusiasm. Gray was a devout Christian. Faith, apparently, did not tell everyone to take the same side.
The disagreement might seem destined to remain among professors, fossils and penciled objections. But Agassiz taught people to look closely—and some began seeing beyond their teacher.
That trail leads out of Cambridge, onto Penikese Island and toward Woods Hole. People who studied at Agassiz’s summer school would help shape the Marine Biological Laboratory.
How did a scientist who resisted evolution help prepare its next generation of investigators?
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