Darwin Centennial Celebration (1959) - Planning

Planning

Planning for the Darwin centennial began in the mid-1950s. In 1955 the Darwin Anniversary Committee, Inc., which included a number of Darwin's descendants as honorary officers, formed to coordinate anniversary events worldwide. Various other organizations, including the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Scientific Affiliation, various biological journals and scientific societies and institutions in many countries, also began planning independent activities and commemorative publications. After the evolutionary synthesis, whose founders sought to make genetics-based evolution by natural selection the central uniting principle of all biology, almost all of the most prominent evolutionists in the world—with the notable exception of Julian Huxley, the public face of evolution in England—were Americans. Early in the planning there was considerable tension between the American-based SSE and the heavily British Darwin Anniversary Committee (which included Huxley).

Through the organizational and promotional efforts of Sol Tax, most of the major figures in evolutionary biology ultimately settled on the University of Chicago as the main site for celebration activities. Tax brought together a wide array of interests to support the Chicago events and preempt any major British plans. Although his early efforts to secure the participation of important evolutionists had limited success, plans began coalescing after Tax arranged for Julian Huxley to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago for the fall 1959 semester. He enlisted prominent British naturalists to participate, including Huxley as the honorary chairman of the Darwin Anniversary Committee, Inc. and Darwin's grandson Sir Charles Darwin as a headline speaker, and even attempted to attract Winston Churchill and Elizabeth II to the events. Huxley had planned London-centered events that would have conflicted with others in the United States, but held his London events in 1958 instead. Tax got the support of Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley, during a time when the city was also trying to attract other high-profile events such as a World Fair and the Pan-American Games, and coordinated with other city institutions such as the Chicago Zoological Park and the Chicago Natural History Museum to generate as much support and enthusiasm from the city as possible.

Reuniting anthropology (including the study of human culture) with evolution and the rest of biology was one of Tax's main motivations for his organizing efforts. Into the 1950s, anthropology was notable absent from the new discipline of evolutionary biology, with few anthropology articles in the young journal Evolution and few anthropologists in the Society for the Study of Evolution, to the dismay of the leading evolutionists. However, since the late 1940s the University of Chicago had been pioneering evolutionary approaches to anthropology, and Tax made prominent anthropologists an integral part of the centennial celebration program.