by Kristin Johnson

Kristin Johnson is a professor in the Science, Technology, Health and Society Program at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Her recent books include The Species Maker (an historical novel set in the era of the Scopes Trial), Darwin’s Falling Sparrow: Victorian Evolutionists and the Meaning of Suffering, and Imagining Progress: Science, Faith, and Child Mortality in America. She is currently writing a book about why naturalists taught courses on eugenics. 

(Editor’s note: Having read The Species Maker, I can attest that it is a wonderfully thought-provoking novel. With the Scopes Trial as background, Johnson expertly weaves in a good deal of science while providing a very nuanced treatment of the cultural conflicts over evolution and its implications.)

As an historian of biology, I have taught a course entitled “Evolution and Society since Darwin” at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest for almost two decades. Like all my research and teaching, the course is designed to help students add history to their intellectual toolbox for navigating debates that concern science. 

Given history is about human beings, I begin each semester by reminding students that doing good history demands that we attend to both the tragedies and triumphs of the past, especially if we wish to understand the origins of challenges and debates in the present. I warn them that the “bad and the ugly” are at times very bad and very ugly via direct quotations from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man on the Irish, sex differences, and “lower races,”  that the triumphs are extraordinary via a graph of child mortality rates over the past two centuries, and – finally – that we must hold both the good and the bad in our heads at the same time via a graph of U.S. child mortality rates parsed into racialized groups.

Inevitably, despite my reminder, students who adore science (often but not always STEM students) are nervous we will just focus on the racism, sexism, and ableism evident in the history of evolutionary thinking, while those who are wary of the sciences (often but not always humanities students) are concerned we will be turning scientists – like Darwin, with whom the course begins – into heroes. And each group of students is wary of the other. 

My primary means of explaining how we can actually get intellectual work done amid such differences and learn something about the past (as opposed to just restating our own beliefs and values with respect to science) is to discuss the difference between normative and descriptive analysis and explain which kind of analysis we will be using and why. 

Normative analysis, I explain, is what philosophers, theologians, and (often) scientists do when looking at the past. When reading Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, for example, normative analysis involves determining whether Darwin’s account of human evolution is right or wrong, using criteria established by the philosopher, theologian, or scientist. Historians, by contrast, pursue descriptive analysis. And as historians (which I tell them they all must be by Week 3), we will be reading excerpts from The Descent of Man neither to condemn nor to praise, but rather to describe, explain, and understand Darwin’s claims about the origin of human beings in historical context. We will focus, I explain, on questions like the following: How and why did Darwin come to the conclusions he did? How did his cultural and social context influence his conclusions and vice versa? How were his ideas received and why? 

One example of how the historian’s demand that students be descriptive rather than normative operates in practice is that my students are not allowed to use the word pseudoscience when doing historical analysis. I explain that, while “but this is pseudoscience!” may be an appropriate normative gut response to certain texts, inevitably the word pseudoscience reflects present-day, normative concepts of what science is or should be. Such statements might help us clarify our own definition of what counts as science and why, but the term pseudoscience does not help us understand, for example, why so many biologists not only defined eugenics as a science but included courses titled “Eugenics” within biology curricula. 

Once they have this language of “normative versus descriptive” analysis, students are consistently (and impressively) able to navigate their own responses to the past and get to work doing good history. That said, at some point in every class I teach Two Questions – Two Challenges – are inevitably raised as students wrestle with the course’s methodological “ground rules.” At some point, a thoughtful student inevitably asks the First Question: How is it possible to avoid our normative beliefs from influencing our descriptive account of the past? My very unsatisfactory answer (after noting this is one of the most important questions they can ask!) is that sometimes it’s impossible, and – depending on the topic – even ethically undesirable. What matters, I explain, is that now you are aware of the very different goals of descriptive (as opposed to normative) questions and analysis. As a result, you are more likely to notice when normative values, beliefs, and assumptions are influencing your claims. 

The Second Question arises as the course proceeds and students are faced with actually applying historical methods to prior belief systems and knowledge claims. It has definitely been posed more often in recent years, as I continue to ask students who are committed to social justice activism amid a polarized political environment to analyze passages like the following descriptively and in historical context.

Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation. ~ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 

Not surprisingly, students have strong reactions to passages like this, in which Darwin both calls on supposed mental differences between the sexes and speaks casually of “lower races.” To help them navigate Darwin’s thinking, I pair this passage with the work of historian Evelleen Richards (via her classic article “Darwin and the Descent of Woman”). Richards places Darwin’s claims in historical context by systematically describing his campaign to break down the barrier between humans and non-human animals (sex differences existed in other primates, so why not humans?), his personal life (Darwin had few personal experiences that inspired him to question Victorian gender roles), and the pervasive sexist ideology of the Victorian era (one does not gain much historical insight, Richards argues, by labeling Darwin a sexist in a time period in which almost everyone held similar views). Then, using Richards’s work as a model, we try to carry out the same kind of analysis of Darwin’s conclusions regarding (as he writes) “the value of the differences between the so-called races of man.” 

As we proceed through The Descent of Man, the Second Question is inevitably asked: What is the point of reading all this? Isn’t explaining just a means of excusing Darwin for being sexist and racist? When we contextualize this book, are we actually justifying beliefs that were evil and wrong?

It’s an excellent question that arises from students’ deep commitment to changing the world and their awareness of the persistence of sexist and racist beliefs in the present. I respond by noting that I could, indeed, have assigned a piece that ridicules Darwin for being ignorant, sexist, racist etc. There are plenty of writings that call Darwin to task for not adhering to the author’s own (religious, scientific, or both) values from the Right and the Left. But then we would not be reading (or doing) historical research. And why does that matter? I remind them of the evidence Darwin confidently cited as evidence that men are by nature superior in intellect than women: 

If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, —comprising composition and performance, history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. ~ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Students are always quite bewildered by Darwin’s use of this list as evidence of a difference in intellectual power between men and women. They quickly highlight the obvious factor Darwin missed: an educational system which deprived women – and any human being who was not white and of a certain class – access to all the things that one needed to obtain ‘higher eminence’ in any field in Victorian Britain. I then ask: Okay, so how can we make sense of the fact that Darwin – who all students agree was a pretty brilliant man – was so blind to something we take as self-evident? Can we learn more from Darwin’s “mistake” beyond the obvious fact that he held different beliefs and values than a student at the University of Puget Sound in 2025? 

Students know by this point in the course that they have a lot more work to do than just concluding Darwin was ignorant, stupid, or morally bankrupt. As we leave The Descent of Man and proceed forward in time – from the U.S. eugenics movement and the evolutionary synthesis to debates over sociobiology and Intelligent Design – they know where to go for help: primary sources with the aid of careful historians of science.

What am I hoping my students learn from doing good history? First, here is what I do not think the lesson of descriptive, historical analysis is: “Darwin was a man of his time.” I’ve never understood such statements. After all, what else can anyone be but “of their own time”? Furthermore, assuming that the lesson of historical work is that “Darwin was a man of his time” ignores the fact that some of Darwin’s contemporaries made the same criticisms students make (especially with respect to the hierarchical thinking embedded in much – but not all – of The Descent of Man). John Stuart Mill pointed out, for example, that claims about natural sex differences were absurd unless someone had actually run the experiment of raising boys and girls exactly the same. The existence of criticisms of Darwin’s claims regarding both gendered and racialized differences demands that students add the following questions to their effort to make sense of Darwin’s confident claims: Why did Darwin – who was well aware of the tendency to remember facts and thoughts favourable to his theory and forget those that were unfavourable – set aside some criticisms? Who did Darwin believe he needed to pay attention to and why? Most importantly, whose knowledge counted in debates over the “scientific” status of different groups and why? 

Wrestling with these questions help us understand what critics of hierarchical thinking were up against (whether the critics or the hierarchical thinking were rooted in evolution, creationism, or complex combinations of both). Wrestling with these questions also culminates in a pretty compelling argument for diversity and inclusion in STEM, on the grounds that more socially representative scientific communities are better at noticing when good scientists are falling short of their extraordinary ideals. Description can elide into Normative indeed!

So, what do I hope students learn from my course? I have done my job if, by the end of “Evolution and Society since Darwin,” students adopt historical methods within their toolbox for navigating science in the present. And I don’t mean by becoming historians or reading history books for the rest of their lives. Rather, I mean that they have learned methods for (and embraced the value of doing) two things: First, the value and means of at least trying to “get in the mind” of another human being, and Second, the importance of noticing how one’s own values, beliefs, and assumptions are influencing how one sees the world.   

I believe learning how to do good, evidence-based history (as opposed to myth-based history that turns the scientists of the past into either heroes or villains for present-day purposes) improves science education because STEM students must practice interrogating when and how their own assumptions and values influence their response to claims and debates. I have done my job if a student starts asking: “What am I assuming that, 50 years from now, people will look back upon and declare unscientific or pseudoscience? What am I taking for granted? What am I ignoring? How do my context, experience, and hopes influence what I notice and believe?” And if they realize they can and should apply these questions not just to science, but to any controversy in which the stakes in understanding one’s own position and that of one’s opponents are high. 

This work matters to me in today’s polarized political environment because I believe history trains students how to construct better maps of both their own positions on science and positions with which they disagree. Ultimately, doing history is an exercise in dislodging our gut responses to stances (as rational/irrational, good/evil, logical/crazy, informed/ignorant, etc.) in the name of developing more complicated analyses than simplistic dichotomies allow. The demands (including descriptive analysis of historical context) upon which this complex analysis relies is not a demand that students be neutral with respect to knowledge claims or policies of either the past or the present. Rather, it is a methodological position driven by a belief that, like medical diagnosis, the claims of those interested in defending and improving science and scientific institutions must be as informed and as accurate as possible in order to be effective.