Darwin Centennial Celebration (1959) - Chicago Events

Chicago Events

The program for the Darwin Centennial Celebration centered on a series of panel discussions that featured well-known scholars from a wide range of fields, from astronomers and biochemists to geneticists and systematists to psychologists and physiologists to anthropologists. There were five panels, arranged to go from the origin of life to the evolution of life to man's physical, mental and then sociocultural evolution. The center panels that focused on biological evolution included a number of the "architects" of the evolutionary synthesis and other important figures in the young discipline of evolutionary biology. The evolutionary biologists had attempted to make biological evolution more prominent in the program, feeling that the origin of life research of biochemists and astronomers was too speculative while social science evolutionary research was in its infancy (with much of the anthropology community still opposed to evolutionism). As it was they tried to set the tone for the other panels, presenting the core of evolution as natural selection acting on random genetic variation; most of the prominent critics of that view of biological evolution were not invited (with the exception of C. H. Waddington, who criticized the synthesis for failing to account for embryology). Despite the eminence of the panelists and the hopes of Sol Tax, the panels mostly—with the exception of the origin of life panel—presented ideas already published and broke little new ground, in part because they were intended for a popular audience; according to historian V. Betty Smocovitis "the discussions and even some of the contributed papers were surprisingly flat".

In addition to the panels, there was an extensive book exhibit with a wide range of evolutionary literature, as well as an exhibit in the University of Chicago Library on Darwin's published works. Two evolution-related films were screened: The Ladder of Life and Evolutionary Aspects of Social Communication in Animals. Tax also scheduled a dramatic performance. The initial plan was to stage a production of the hit 1955 play about the Scopes Trial, Inherit the Wind (to be directed by Studs Terkel); Tax's next idea was to produce an Oklahoma!-style musical with the theme of progress. Ultimately, Tax and the Darwin Anniversary Committee commissioned business administration professor Robert Ashenhurt and investment broker Robert Pollack to produce a musical reenactment of Darwin's life. The result, Time Will Tell, was performed every night of the Darwin Centennial Celebration to great success.

The high point of the celebration was the Convocation ceremony that took place on Thanksgiving Day, which brought elements of sacred ritual to an otherwise mostly secular celebration. After a procession to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Bach organ music and a prayer, Julian Huxley—a proponent of religious humanism—delivered a lecture entitled "The Evolutionary Vision". In it, he described religion as an "organ of evolving man" that was no longer necessary in traditional forms; the audience, by and large, reacted strongly and negatively to this "secular sermon". Following Huxley's lecture, awards were presented to Sir Charles Darwin, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Alfred Kroeber, Hermann Joseph Muller, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright, and Julian Huxley.