Darwinism came early to Australia. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species appeared on sale in Sydney only four months after its publication in Britain. Within a year, worried presidents of the local scientific societies were joining forces with church leaders to warn of the social and intellectual dangers of “the development hypothesis,” and various Australian scientists were privately expressing fears about the adverse effects of Darwinism on traditional thinking. Yet within three years of the arrival of Darwin's book, an Australian scholar had pioneered, in the application of Darwinism to political economy, an achievement that elicited approval from no less a person than Herbert Spencer; and within fifteen years Darwin himself was praising an Australian botanist for his contributions to organic evolution. By the last decades of the century, Darwinism had become entrenched in the major teaching institutions of the country, and many churchmen were comfortably accommodating the new science of life to Christian theology.

Assessing the impact of major ideas on any given society is both challenging and frustrating. The very term society slips through the fingers as soon as one attempts to grasp it. Who received new ideas: all the citizens or a select few? In a continent the size of Australia, which for most of the nineteenth century comprised little more than a handful of sparsely populated colonies clinging to the coastal fringe, the difficulties are compounded. Each of the colonies possesses a distinctive history.

No region in the world has won greater notoriety for its hostility to Darwinism than the American South. Despite the absence of any systematic study of evolution in the region, historians have insisted that southerners were uniquely resistant to evolutionary ideas. Rarely looking beyond the dismissals of Alexander Winchell from Vanderbilt University in the 1870s and James Woodrow from Columbia Theological Seminary in the 1880s – or beyond the Scopes trial in the 1920s – they have concluded in the words of Monroe Lee Billington that “Darwinism as an intellectual movement … bypassed southerners.” W. J. Cash, in his immensely influential The Mind of the South, contended that “the overwhelming body of Southern schools either so frowned on [Darwinism] for itself or lived in such terror of popular opinion that possible heretics could not get into their faculties at all or were intimidated into keeping silent by the odds against them.” Darwin's few southern converts either “took the way of discretion” by moving to northern universities or so qualified their discussions of evolution as to render the theory “almost sterile.”

Historians of religion and of science have generally concurred with the judgment of southern historians. Uncompromising antievolutionism, says the American church historian George M. Marsden, “seems more characteristic of the United States than of other countries and more characteristic of the South than of the rest of the nation.” Because the region was more religiously conservative and less well educated than the North, such differences were only to be expected.

American blacks, it would seem, had good reason to be suspicious of Charles Darwin and his theories of human origins. According to one scholar, Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis was by 1900 “the chief scientific authority for racists” in the United States. “His emphasis upon physical differences between races and his theory of natural selection – in fact the whole idea that racial characteristics result from evolution – became cornerstones of scientific racism.” Darwin's influence was “pervasive” according to this interpretation, although popularizers of racist ideas seldom quoted him directly.

If Darwinism was indeed the chief prop of racism in late-nineteenth-century America, one would expect a strong protest against Darwinian evolution by blacks, especially from the educated elite among African Americans. Yet, in fact, there was no strong, sustained black reaction either for or against Darwin and his theories. The story of black responses to Darwinism is complex and marked by unexpected turns. Darwin looms larger in white writings about “the future of the Negro” than in the speeches and writings of important black Americans.

The two most influential black secular leaders of the years between Emancipation and the 1920s, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, did not find Darwin's ideas particularly threatening. Though neither man publicly endorsed Darwin, each employed a vague concept of evolution in his theory of progress.

In 1854, five years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Douglass had given a lengthy address devoted to “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered.”

During the 1870s and 1880s, American Jews discussed Darwin and scientific theories of evolution in the context of debates within the Jewish community on the future of American Judaism. Kaufmann Kohler, a prominent American Reform rabbi, appealed to Darwin and evolutionary theory as support for radical Reform Judaism, which emphasized the idea of progressive revelation. The legitimacy of radical Reform, however, was subject to much debate. More moderate Reform rabbis as well as traditionalist Jewish leaders criticized Kohler's support for evolution and the links he made between evolution and radical Reform. Moreover, traditionalists who accepted evolution also attacked Kohler and his fellow radicals, claiming that evolutionary theory actually gave more support to traditional Judaism!

Intracommunity rivalry was certainly not alone in shaping the responses of Jews to evolution. The American Jewish community faced many challenges from without that threatened the integrity and survival of Judaism. Religious leaders pointed to assimilation as the community's most urgent problem, whether it resulted from conversions to Christianity, the appeal of the Ethical Culture Society (founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, son of a prominent Reform rabbi), or the antagonism to religion generated by the growth of agnostic and materialistic thought.

In 1859 the English naturalist Charles Darwin, a resident of Down outside of London, published his controversial views on the origin of species. In a landmark book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, he argued against the conventional notion that God had supernaturally created the original types of plants and animals and in favor of the idea that they had evolved naturally over long periods of time primarily, though not exclusively, by means of random variation and natural selection. News of his heretical views spread rapidly, and before long even the citizens of such remote outposts of British civilization as Dunedin, New Zealand, halfway around the globe from Down and home of the southernmost university in the world, were debating the merits of Darwinism.

The essays in this volume focus specifically on the ways in which geography, gender, race, and religion influenced responses to Darwin. Chronologically, they span the period from the publication of the Origin to the 1930s, when Darwin's theory of natural selection finally captured the allegiance of the scientific community. Geographically, they concentrate on the English-speaking world, especially Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Although historians of science have been examining Darwin's influence for decades and have produced a number of notable studies, our knowledge of how various groups and regions responded to Darwinism remains spotty. For example, despite the availability of such works as Thomas F. Glick's Comparative Reception of Darwinism (1974) and the section “Towards the Comparative Reception of Darwinism” in David Kohn's Darwinian Heritage (1985) – neither of which covers Australia, New Zealand, or Canada – we still know relatively little about the role of locale in affecting responses to Darwin.

Darwinian evolutionary theory intensified debate about the origin and dimensions of sexual difference in species, not only in scientific and medical literature but also within wider intellectual circles whose members quickly entered a multidimensioned public debate about “the woman question.” Charles Darwin himself contributed directly to the discussion by his introduction of the mechanism of sexual selection in Origin of Species (1859) and through his widely read Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), where he most fully elaborated his ideas about women's nature. Other scientists, social scientists, and popularizers – mostly men – appropriated the evolutionary model into their discussions about women's nature in the last half of the nineteenth century and presumed that their personal observations represented biological determinations. The prescriptive sexual categories provided by scientists and physicians working within the evolutionary framework became dominant in a culture increasingly preoccupied with scientific explanations. Educated women in the nineteenth century were on the periphery of conversations about Darwinian theories for lack of institutional and professional forums, but they were hardly disinterested in evolutionary arguments, particularly as such concepts related to individual women and to women's collective circumstances. A few women, however, took up Darwinism directly, drawing on their own experience to extend or challenge theories and sometimes to position their advocacy of women's rights. They took up these arguments because the emphasis on evolutionary change and the mechanisms of sexual selection provided an opportunity to rethink “the woman question” in their own terms.

The sustained labor of historians during the past six decades has provided us with a relatively clear understanding of the response of American Protestant intellectuals to Darwinism. We know, for example, that at the time that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, most Protestant thinkers in the United States assumed that interpretations of the history of life were inextricably bound up with beliefs that lay at the very heart of Christian theology. We now also know, however, that prior to the middle of the 1870s, virtually all spokespersons in the American Protestant community, recalling the fate of earlier transmutation hypotheses and aware that many reputable scientists were fiercely hostile to Darwin's work, concluded that the Darwinian hypothesis was a false system of metaphysics masquerading as science. Accordingly, insofar as they addressed themselves to that hypothesis at all, they tended to focus on its scientific deficiencies and its metaphysical affinities with the heretical works of Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. Only after 1875, when it had become abundantly clear that the scientific community had endorsed the theory of organic evolution, did American Protestant thinkers feel compelled to engage in a sustained assessment of its theological implications. During the next quarter of a century most of them concluded that judicious modifications of traditional formulations of Christian doctrine would enable them to accept the transmutation hypothesis. Not all Protestant opinion leaders, however, endorsed that view.

Historians attempting to assess the responses of naturalists in British North America to Charles Darwin's theory of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection soon encounter two significant problems. First, the country's leading Victorian scientists, Sir John William Dawson (1820–99) and Sir William Edmond Logan (1798–1875), were both geologists. As such, they were positioned to address the theory's weaknesses more than its strengths, in the fossil record that appeared to preserve not a single example of one species evolving into another.

Yet their responses differed considerably, as neither Dawson nor Logan reacted primarily out of scientific considerations. Dawson, the principal of McGill College, Montreal (from 1855), longtime president of the Natural History Society of Montreal, and founding president of the Royal Society of Canada (1883), became known internationally for his unremitting resistance to Darwin. In 1860, if not earlier (and, Darwin suspected, before having read The Origin), he determined to defend the traditional place of natural theology in the cosmology of Design. Dawson's long-awaited scientific biography, Susan Sheets Pyenson's John William Dawson: Faith, Hope, and Science (1996), recently confirmed earlier claims that it was “a calling to natural theology that Dawson heard as a calling to science.” Yet while Pyenson also documented the detrimental effects of this decision upon Dawson's subsequent scientific reputation, historians have yet to evaluate definitively not only the impact, but even the nature and extent, of his sustained critique.