Evolution and Religion

        This cartoon agrees with one of the messages from the tale of the Water Babies in the fact that religion and evolution can coexist. 

Reverse Monkey Cartoons

                This is an example of reverse monkey cartoon wherein monkeys are offended to be “related” to humans. This cartoon was also created around the time of the Scopes trial. 

Give Us All the Sail You've Got, And Heave the Ballast Overboard

        This is another cartoon created by the fundamentalist Earnest James Pace. The professor is depicted as stealing the faith of the students – by steering the boat of “popular education” towards the rock of “infidelity” as he orders the student to toss the Bible overboard.

When the above picture was shown in churches they accompanied it with the following statement: “It is not slander to say that popular education today has at is particular dogma the god-denying theory of evolution. There is no use for the Bible. It is thrown overboard and the boat is sailing straight to the rock of infidelity. Many young people come home from colleges and universities honeycombed with deadly doctrines that destroy the soul. And the home is responsible; the home must consider; the home cannot ignore the fact that God holds it accountable for these terrible conditions.”¹

¹Cohen, Charles Lloyd. Religion and the culture of print in modern America. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Print.

Leaking Badly and Headed for the Earth

                “Leaking Badly and Headed for the Earth” is a cartoon drawn by Earnest James Pace and fundamentalist. This image shows that Darwin’s Hypothesis of Evolution is a speculative hypothesis and is going to crash into the facts. Many fundamentalists believed that evolution was “science falsely called-so”. 

Upstart

Other cartoons took a look at the idea of evolution being a progressive sequence and that humans have reached the pinnacle of evolution. This suggests that Homo sapiens have reached an evolutionary end and a good one at that. These cartoons include the implied teleology while at the same time making fun of it. This often made of the primate cartoons very un-Darwinian. Some even went as far as to imply that only monkeys and apes evolved. This is depicted in the above cartoon titles “The Upstart” from the magazine Judge the summer of the Scopes trial, where a monkey sets off the evolve leaving all of the other animals behind. 

The Missing Link

                This picture shows William Jennings Bryan as the missing link between a professor and an ape. Bryan was a well known fundamentalist that was often mocked in cartoons. He has also been portrayed as an Inquisitor, Don Quixote, and a fool for attacking a scarecrow and for trying to pull a monkey out of a family tree. Pro-evolutionists used monkeys as a way to make fun of antievolutionists. The missing link was a popular way to poke fun at the anti-evolutionists because they would always ask well if we evolved from apes well then where is the creature that is in the middle.  Humans did not evolve from apes but instead we share a common ancestor that we both evolved from which is now long extinct.  

Anti-evolution Movement

The above image was initially widely distributed World War I poster portraying Germany as a gorilla-like brute making off with a woman meant to represent Belgium. This was a popular image during that time because it was reminiscent power and gorillas were associated with race and sexual voraciousness.  However, following World War I it helped to aid the antievolution fervor as many antievolutionists merged evolution with Social Darwinism. In the 1920’s the antievolutionists associated German science with evolution and natural selection with eugenic movement and German Doctrine “might makes right”. 

Evolution: A Journal of Nature

                The above cartoon is an example of the types of images that could be found in the journal Evolution: A Journal of Nature which was printed from 1927 to 1938.  This journal was created to give pro-evolutionists a platform in which they could use to help rebut anti-evolutionists by bridging the gap between the scientists and everyday people. This was done by presenting science itself in a popular language without being restricted by fundamentalists.

I would like to note here that this journal was looked two and a half years after the Scopes Trial (Famously known as the Monkey Trial). The author Ludwig Erwin Katterfield was not a scientist he was actually a political activists and defender of civil liberties. He did not create these images to debate the details of a scientific theory but instead was fighting against intolerance for the freedom of thought and the values of the Enlightenment. 

Man Is But a Worm

                This cartoon starts out with the “lower” life form an earthworm that as you travel along the spiral gradually changes into “higher” life forms until it ends up as Darwin. The earthworm is a play at Darwin because he wrote often about earthworms his books. While the path in this cartoon is a spiral it is essentially hinting at a linear progression showing the Great Chain of Being.  This is again example of how in many instances people deviated from the theory of natural selection and instead when towards a more teleological viewpoint even though this has been debunked by scientists. 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

                The Darwin fish and the Jesus fish are two similar icons representing vastly different ideals. The Jesus fish is a symbol of the followers of Jesus Christ, whereas the Darwin fish represents believers of natural selection. The Jesus fish is thought to be a secret symbol of the earliest followers of Jesus who were persecuted and forced to worship in secret. The above representation of the Jesus fish is not the only one in existence there are two other types: the “Jesus” Jesus fish, which has the word Jesus encapsulated within the fish and the IXOYE Jesus fish which has the green letters Iota, Chi, Theta, Upsilon and Sigma within the fish.  The simple images are everywhere particularly on the backs of Americans cars as a way to show which side of the argument (Creationism vs. Evolution) one agrees with. This is not to say that someone cannot believe in evolution as well as be religious. As mentioned in a previous post the tale of the Water Babies provides a great example of how the two worlds can intertwine. 

Darwin Ape Hybrid

                This cartoon shows an ape/Darwin hybrid sitting in the family tree. Cartoons like this and others portraying Darwin as some type of monkey or ape hybrid created a strong association between Darwin and evolution, so much so that that evolution became known as “Darwinism”. 

Evolution Cartoon

This cartoon is attempting to hint at the way many people view how evolution works. It shows that many people feel evolution is linear and progressive. The progressive nature is portrayed by the glum look upon the caveman’s face as he sees that he is not near the superior end of the path. This cartoon shows that the popular view of evolution does not coincide with the Darwinian view of evolution. In Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, he explicitly creates a branching diagram to argue for nonlinear, nonteleolgical evolution. 

Water Babies

This tale is about a young chimneysweep named Tom, who as he ages begins to act more like an ape than a man because he is ignorant of cleanliness, virtue and God. One day while working with his master Mr. Grimes, Tom meets a young girl named Ellie that causes him to be ashamed of his filth. This leads to Tom jumping into a nearby stream to clean himself, where exhausted, he falls into a deep peaceful sleep. Kingsley explains “the reason for his falling into such a delightful sleep is very simple; and yet hardly anyone has found it out. It was merely that the fairies took him”¹. As Tom entered the underwater world he underwent an extraordinary transformation into a salamander like creature thanks to the three fairies.

 By transforming Tom into a lowly salamander-like creature the fairies have given him a chance to change his ways and become the kind of person that can make a difference in the world. In order to do this he must learn the difference between wrong and right, as well as gain an understanding of the laws of nature that God put into the world. As his character progresses so does his form from resembling a salamander to gradually becoming more and more human-like. This progression Kingsley has Tom undergo is an evolutionary play on the “law of embryological recapitulation”. This law states how the embryological development of an organism follows a specific ordered sequence, starting with stages representing its most remote ancestor, and continuing through stages of its closer and highest relatives. In order to make this transformation and learn all he needs to learn, Tom is guided by three different fairies: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, who speaks for God’s purposes, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, who teaches Tom about the inflexible laws of nature that were built into the world in order to fill God’s purposes, and Mother Carey, who represents God.

Tomas Huxley, often referred to as Darwin’s Bulldog, appears in this story as Professor Ptthmllsprts (Put them all in spirits). who only believes in what he can see, hear, taste or touch. In the story Professor Ptthmllsprts, who only believes in what he can see, hear, taste or touch, accompanies Ellie on a netting expedition when she asks him about the existence of water babies (they do not know of Tom’s fate):

              

  Forgetting that he was a scientific man, and therefore ought to have known that he couldn’t know; and that he was a logician, and therefore ought to have known that he could not prove an universal negative…the professor answered quite sharply—
             
  “Because there ain’t.”¹

          

Just as he said that the Professory caught Tom in his net, evidence that water babies do exist, he allowed Tom to escape his net rather than admitting that his previous claims had been wrong. 

During his journey Tom comes across the Dosasyoulikes where he learns how evolution takes place. The Doasyoulikes left the Land of Hard Work and settled in the Land of Readymade where there was, for some time, an abundance of resources.  Over generations the Doasyoulikes became lazier and lazier so much so that they did not bother to learn about the volcanoes that would occasionally erupt nearby. Because they were unprepared when the volcano did erupt they were not able to cope with the resulting scarcity of resources and natural selection took its course turning them into hairy tree-dwelling apes. This showed Tom that understanding the laws of nature alone was not enough but that people must place themselves in the right circumstances so that the laws of nature will create the right results.

 Kingsley believed that by leaving so much up to circumstance and law that God not along encourages but rewards moral development, hard work and the study of nature. Tom learns this lesson when he encounters Mother Carey sitting on her throne:

And from the foot of the throne there swum away, out and into the sea, millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed. And they were Mother Carey’s children, whom she makes out of the sea-water all day long.

He expected, of course – like some grown people who ought to know better – to find her snipping, piecing, fitting, stitching, cobbling, basting, filing, planning, hammering, turning, polishing, mounding, measuring, chiseling, clipping, and so forth as men do when they go to work to make anything. 

But instead of that, she sat quite still with her chin upon her hand, looking down into the sea with two great grand blue eyes, as blue as the sea itself. Her hair was as white as the snow – for she was very old – in fact as old as anything which you are likely to come across, except the difference between right and wrong.

Tom said: 

“I hear you are very busy.” 

“I am never more busy than I am now,” she said without stirring a finger. 

“I hear, ma’am, that you were always making new beasts out of old.” 

“So people fancy. But I am not going to trouble myself to make things, my little dear. I sit here and make them make themselves.”¹ 

This final scene is reminiscent of the final lines of the Origin:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exhalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breather into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.²

¹ Kingsley, Charles, and Linley Sambourne. 1966. The water-babies. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

² Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, London: John Murray, 1859, p. 490, available through the Darwin Online Project at http://darwin-online.org.uk/