This introductory chapter notes the expansion of interest in the history of popular science and its role in shaping the relationship between science and society. It outlines the elements needed to understand how science is popularized, including the work of both scientists and media figures. The chapter then shows how historians now interpret the rise of evolutionism, noting that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was at first challenged by rival views of how evolution works with very different implications for the ascent of life, not all compatible with the image of the ‘tree of life’. The application of these ideas to human origins and to ideologies based on social evolution is noted for its potential impact on how the theory was perceived. All of these positions need to be taken into account to understand how the topic was displayed to the wider public.

New book series and magazines were founded in the 1870s and helped to publicize evolutionism. Many popular accounts focused on the ascent of life, still portraying it as a linear development toward humanity. They often used living rather than fossil species to characterize the main stages in the ascent, and stressed the parallel with the development of the embryo (the recapitulation theory). A few key fossils were discovered to boost the case for evolution, including the ancestry of the horse. Both Darwinians and the supporters of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy exploited the technique of the ‘evolutionary epic’ to make their case. But so did the promoters of rival explanations, including the Lamarckians and those who saw progress as the unfolding of a divine plan. Darwinism remained a source of controversy, and the opposition began to increase toward the end of the nineteenth century.

In the late twentieth century, television provided more immediate ways of representing the processes of evolution, while the press increasingly seized on debates arising from their human implications. Progress remained an important theme, although the image of a linear ascent to humanity was usually qualified by recognition of diversity. The air of unity promoted in the synthesis era evaporated as biologists explored new and disturbing implications of the selection mechanism, including sociobiology and the notion of the ‘selfish gene.’ Studies of primates were used to throw light on human behaviour. Along with new challenges to the plausibility of the Darwinian theory, the resulting controversies were played out in a blaze of publicity. Darwinism also had to be modified to take account of growing evidence for discontinuities in the ascent of life, including mass extinctions. Creationists presented these ‘Darwin wars’ as evidence that evolutionism was losing its credibility even within science.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Darwinian selection theory was linked to genetics, providing it with a secure foundation, although wider dissemination of this initiative was limited until the 1940s. Historians note that the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ was a rhetorical device to create an impression of unity, leaving the various disciplines involved still functioning independently. Radio now became an important means of disseminating science news, as in the 1959 celebrations of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The new version of Darwinism eroded the plausibility of eugenics and race theory, although these ideologies remained active in less visible forms. Popular accounts of evolutionism now stressed its open-endedness and played down the old assumption that humanity must be the inevitable outcome of progress. Julian Huxley tried to give the synthesis a moral dimension by linking it to his philosophy of humanism, but creationists saw the new initiative in science as a continuation of Darwinian materialism and renewed their attacks.

This chapter outlines the development of the theory of natural selection and the events surrounding the publication and reviewing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially in non-specialist publications. The different responses in Britain and the United States are noted. The role of supporters such as T. H. Huxley in reaching a popular audience is explored, although their reservations about the adequacy of the theory are also taken into account. Conservative efforts to present evolution as the unfolding of a divine plan provided a very different way of understanding the general idea of evolution. Many popular accounts failed to understand the difference between Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ model and older ideas of a linear ascent toward humanity, especially when dealing with the issue of human origins. In this area, popular interest in the gorilla as a potential ancestral form distracted attention from some aspects of Darwin’s model, as shown in more detail in Chapter 3. The early evolutionism of Herbert Spencer is introduced and his relationship to Darwinism explained.

In this chapter I take a detailed look at the evolutionary storytelling of Ernst Haeckel. He founded phylogenetics as the science dedicated to tracing the evolution of lineages. Although Haeckel’s phylogenetic scenarios were nourished from a broad buffet of evidence, the biogenetic law was his favorite shortcut to create lineages of hypothetical ancestors, most famously the tiny cup-shaped Gastraea. A recent consensus has emerged that stigmatizes Haeckel’s phylogenies as unDarwinian constructs that are conceptually stained by teleological thinking and the linearity of the scala naturae. Instead, I argue that his trees are fully Darwinian, and that the linearity present in his trees and thinking is the linearity of evolving lineages that track the arrow of time. Lineage thinking was novel when Haeckel started writing, and his was marred by imperfections. It was up to the following generations of evolutionists to resolve the conceptual tension between the linear and branching aspects of evolution, a struggle that is still ongoing in today’s literature.

The chain of being depicted creation as a linear hierachy of living forms from the simplest up to the human. In the eighteenth century it was 'temporalized' to give a model for the history of life on earth implying that humanity was the last and highest product of the creative process. This image of development was boosted by a comparison with the growth of the embryo to maturity. Early theories of evolution continued to present the process as an ascent towards humanity as its goal. Parallels were drawn with the goal-directed process of embryological development, implying that the embryo recapitulates the history of life on earth. Even when naturalists realized that evolution was best represented as a branching tree rather than a ladder, the tree was given a central trunk pointing toward humanity, all other developments being mere side-branches. The claim that humanity is the goal of creation survived in various non-Darwinian theories of evolution in the late nineteenth century.