Old men and young earth

I was feeling pretty depressed after reading the story in Sunday’s NY Times magazine about a growing number of “credentialed scientists” who are advocates for creationism and young earth theory. I could almost feel the darkness descending. What’s next, I asked, auto de fe?

Then I read the paragraph below in Paul Hawkens’ Blessed Unrest. A year after the publication of On the Origin of Species and four years before Gregor Mendel first explained the probabilities that govern inheritance, learned men like Horace Greeley (the editor of the NY Tribune) and Louis Agassiz (the “discoverer” of the ice ages) didn’t even believe that plants necessarily grew from seeds. Yipes! So maybe this too will pass. Here’s the paragraph.

In 1860, Thoreau delivered his most important lecture from a scientific viewpoint, “The Succession of Forest Trees,” which introduced for the first time the idea that over time a community of plants and animals is gradually transformed in response to changes in the environment. Thoreau had just read Darwin’s Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle and was taken by Darwin’s description of species distribution and succession on the different islands of the archipelago. Horace Greeley vigorously contested Thoreau’s assertion that trees arise naturally from seeds that are dispersed by animals, water and wind. Greeley and others believed that wild plants under certain conditions were spontaneously generated. Their “progressivism” as it was labeled, was a variation of creationist dicta, positing a series of advanced creations on earth, culminating with man as the ultimate one, all linked by “an abstract unity to the mind of God.” At the time, this topic was an issue of vital concern to botanists and laymen alike with roots in theological principle. For progressives such as Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard zoologist, spontaneous creation was fundamental to science, just as science was fundamental to religion.