Humanizing Evolution

Abstract

In this paper I explore the various attempts to integrate anthropology—and anthropologists—within the wider synthesis of evolution in the interval of time between 1927 and 1962 by tracking intersecting individuals and groupings at critical junctures such as conferences, commemorative events, and collaborative publications. I focus on the discipline as a unit of historical analysis and on a series of rhetorical arguments used to discipline and bound areas of study that grounded the secular philosophy of evolutionary humanism. I trace the beginnings of an originary narrative and offer a kind of prehistory of what was first referred to as “human evolution” and then “biological anthropology,” an area of study that brought humans into the discipline of evolutionary biology. I examine the key roles played by “architects” of the evolutionary synthesis—such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, G. G. Simpson, and Ernst Mayr—and their relations with the anthropologists Sherwood Washburn, Ashley Montagu, and Sol Tax at pivotal meetings such as the Cold Spring Harbor meeting of 1950, the Darwin centennial at the University of Chicago in 1959, and a number of Wenner-Gren symposia culminating with the Burg Wartenstein symposium (no. 19) that saw the emergence of the new “molecular anthropology.”

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