Examining Charles Darwin’s (Mis)representation within science and history curricula

ABSTRACT

Teaching and learning are grounded on age-appropriate, credible curricular resources, which can be formal (i.e. textbooks) and informal (i.e. trade-books). As Charles Darwin’s ideas galvanized biology and racism, this study examined his historical representation within trade-books (e.g. biography, narrative non-fiction, expository, etc.), textbooks (student editions, teacher editions, etc.), and curricular supplements (teacher-facing assessments and lessons; student-facing tests and tasks) published in United States. Through content analysis, I contrasted historians’ understandings of Darwin with history-based trade-books’ (n = 111) and biology-oriented texts’ (n = 132) depictions of Darwin. Misrepresentations abounded. History-based books concealed Darwin’s colonialist past and disregarded—or repeated without qualification and context—the racist ideas within his writing. Biology-based texts largely omitted problematic aspects of Darwin’s past. These 20^th- and 21^st-century history trade-books and science texts mirrored the patterns of 19^th-century American social studies textbooks’ Lost Cause logic and 20th-century science American textbooks’ anti-evolution casuistry. Reviewed texts obscured the racist ideas within Darwin’s words, actions, and inactions, through both omission and commission. Concerns are raised about who determines how historical and scientific content are included, detailed, and omitted within curricular resources published in different countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Charles Darwin
• curriculum
• racism
• history
• biology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2023.2211654.

Notes

1. Stephen Jay Gould has been called as ‘the greatest champion of evolution since Darwin’ (Beals et al., 2003, p. iv).

2. Textbooks and accompanying supplements are common, age-appropriate, formal curricular resources in all disciplines; trade-books—biography, narrative non-fiction, expository, and historical fiction targeting children and young adults—are informal, complementary curricular resources common in social studies, history, and English (Eaton, 2006; Schwebel, 2011).

3. The descriptor white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy demarcates the intersectionality most precisely (Strunk, 2021).

4. Not the.

5. Darwin’s evolutionary ideas are as foundational to 21^st-century biology as Newtonian mechanics to physics or germ theory to epidemiology.

6. Gaines M. Foster’s (1987) Ghosts of the Confederacy, Jon Grinspan’s (2021) The Age of Acrimony, Eric Foner’s (1988) Reconstruction and (2019) The Second Founding, and Fahs and Waugh’s (2004) Memory of the Civil War in American Culture explore the topic differently.

7. American creationism, an umbrella term that Benjamin L. Huskinson (2020) defined in American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market, includes all American Christians and denominations ‘for whom being created as separate and special from the rest of the creation is an important part of their identity’. Competing, incongruent anti-evolutionary explanations include natural theology, natural philosophy, flood geology (containing old- and young-earth paradigms), scientific creationism (or creation science, which contains both old- and young-earth paradigms), and theistic evolution (or Intelligent Design). Hanson’s (1986) Science and Creation, Ardea Skybreak’s (1987) The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, and Lurquin and Stone’s (2007) Evolution and Religious Creation Myths—with chapters by historians, biologists, chemists, geneticists, geologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, physicists, zoologists, and National Association of Biology Teachers’ executive director—debunk anti-evolution casuistry from novel angles. Scholars tracing the history of anti-evolutionary adaptations—such as, Huskinson (2020), Edward Caudill’s (2013) Intelligently Designed, Forrest and Gross’s (2004) Creationism’s Trojan Horse, and Mano Singham’s (2009) God vs. Darwin and (2000) Quest for Truth—recognize subscribers’ political unity in spite of ecclesiastical differences.

8. Occlusion is common within textbooks (e.g. Loewen, 2007; Roberts, 2015) and trade-books (e.g. Connolly, 2013; J. Bickford, 2018a; Sakowicz, 2016).

9. Gilmer W. Blackburn’s (1985) Education in the Third Reich examined Nazi cultivation of history and biology curriculum, for instance.

10. Assimilationist-racism holds that people of colour rise by emulating White standards (Kendi, 2016, 2019). Charles De Paolo (2010) described Darwin’s milieu within The Ethnography of Charles Darwin: A Study of his Writings on Aboriginal Peoples: ‘[O]nly the fittest human beings were expected to survive and to dominate the natural and socio-cultural history of the species … [Settler colonialism and chattel slavery], though reprehensible in their effects on native people, were nonetheless consonant with the natural laws governing competition, selection, and extinction. In the realm of human activity, native or uncivilized man, when confronted by strong invaders … [were] destined either to be assimilated or … extinguished by the newcomers (De Paolo, 2010, p. 3)’. In contrast, segregationist-racism claims immutable racial differences require separation. Racist people and policies, whether segregationist or assimilationist, oppose antiracism. Antiracism resists the social construction of race and its horrid implications (Kendi, 2016, 2019).

11. Andreas Wagner (2015) argued that arrival of the fittest, not survival, is more precise (Wagner, 2015).

12. Numerous schools in various Northern states adopted Moore’s popular book as demonstration of (White) reconciliation during what historians term The Redemption (e.g. Foner, 1988, 2019; Grinspan, 2021).

13. Euphemism is imprecise but apt as few scientific and historical elements appeared within Riley’s ‘scientific history’, though words like science, facts, false, and fake have clear—and in the above cases, unmet—definitions.

14. Many scientists, at the time, remained uncomfortable with Darwinian induction—favouring Baconian deduction—and lack of independent corroboration (Stott, 2012).

15. Adam Shapiro’s (2013) Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolutionary Movement in American Schools places the trial for context of textbook publishing patterns, Tennessee public school reform, and reactionary sociopolitical tensions. See Adam Laats’s (2010) Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars for theological patterns in American education and politics.

16. The Scopes Trial typified, but did not singularly shape, the racialized context. For instance, a 1922 American Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling relied on racial pseudoscience distinguishing European Americans’ whiteness (‘the Caucasian race’) from the white-skin of Takao Ozawa, an Issei or first-generation Japanese immigrant to America (Shalley-Jenson, 2021).

17. Relatedly, SCOTUS (1947) Everson v. Board of Education reinforced the establishment clause, SCOTUS (1968) Epperson vs. Arkansas deemed state-based evolutionary bans to be unconstitutional, US Court of Appeals (1975) rejected balancing evolution and creation instruction, SCOTUS (1987) Edwards v. Aguillard determined creation science to be unconstitutional, and a federal appeals court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) rejected Intelligent Design instruction.

18. An initial random sample of social studies textbooks’ (n = 20) narratives and indices revealed Darwin’s absence.

19. Advantage/TASA Open Standard, Lexile, Grade Level Expectations, and Developmental Reading Assessment are proprietary software reliant upon distinct algorithms to determine readability and text-complexity. They differently measure and weigh word and sentence length, number of words, and syllable density, among other elements.

20. This inquiry was not a fact-check of Darwin’s history in curriculum. There is, for example, no discussion in this paper about how and why most books did not feature Darwin’s delay, or the period between 1840—when he first organized evolutionary ideas—and 1859, when he published On the Origin of Species. This period in Darwin’s timeline, while important, is not essential to understanding his scientific and historical import. Scholars describe historical (mis)representations, such as omission and commission, as the absence of an essential idea or inclusion of an incorrect idea (e.g. Connolly, 2013; Eaton, 2006; J. Bickford, 2018a; Schmidt, 2013; Schwebel, 2011). For instance, Sandra Markle’s (2009) Animals Charles Darwin Saw—like many other history-based trade-books—disregarded how a formerly enslaved African man trained Darwin in taxidermy, an important skill for a naturalist. This detail does add nuance and vibrancy to Darwin’s relationships with non-Europeans, though the detail is also not essential and arguably not expected within a curricular text. While weighing the import of the historical content within the literary context, Markle’s emphasis—or maybe space limitations—perhaps prevented its inclusion. The absence of this content was not assessed as omission, a historical misrepresentation. To illustrate an error of commission that similarly did not warrant distinction as a historical misrepresentation, Markle noted ‘Before Darwin, people did not believe that animals changed over time’ (2009, p. 9), which biologists recognize as incorrect (Stott, 2012). Again, the inquiry’s focus was not only to identify and record all ahistorical, unscientific claims.

21. Darwin’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, carved the original Am I Not a Man And a Brother? anti-slavery medallion.

22. Captain FitzRoy’s infantilizing moniker endures as Boat Memory’s original Yahgan or Ona name is unknown.