Stance in Popularisation - Interaction or Manipulation? Darwin's theory of evolution and related matters as presented in George William Hunter's A Civic Biology Presented in Problems (1914)

Darwin’s theory of evolution developed over several years and in various works, but most closely associated with the six editions of his On the Origin of the Species (1859-1872) attracted considerable controversy at the time of its circulation. Indeed, it continues to do so among members of the so-called creationism movement. At the heart of this debate is not just a purportedly irresolvable difference in world views between religion and science (see Ferngren 2002, Christiansen 2009) in particular the question of how and whether science and religion should be taught in schools, but also of how theories are presented to the non-scientific community and how the process of popularization contributes to reshaping the ideas of the original work (something inherent in the interactive nature of much popularization – see Christiansen forthcoming), sometimes exaggerating or obscuring certain aspects of theories and drawing different conclusions from those of the original author. Hunter’s A Civic Biology is interesting in this respect partly because it was at the centre of the famous and highly politicised Scopes (“Monkey”) Trial (1925), in which a high school teacher was prosecuted by the State of Tennessee for teaching evolution in a state-funded school. Although, in large degree, a mere pretext for a cause célèbre by which evolutionists sought to overturn the law question, the work from which Scopes taught presents an interesting example of text-books at the time and the way in which they dealt with Darwin’s complex theory. It is ironic that even among the scientific community at the time evolution still constituted an article of faith in that many of its central assumptions were not to be established empirically until advances in the new field of statistics (Fisher 1925), among other things, linking Darwin’s work to Mendel’s, finally provided the hard evidence necessary to lend it scientific credibility. This paper will investigate the language of Hunter’s discourse concentrating on speaker stance (Jaffe 2009) including the interpersonal function in particular the way in which Jakobson’s (1960) “conative,” “phatic,” and “emotive” functions are introduced into the presentation of Darwin’s theory. Comparison will be made with those works of Darwin’s dealing with evolution, in particular On the Origin of the Species. The aim will be to show how and where he injects his own stance into Darwin’s theories thereby illustrating not only the interactive aspect of popularisation but also its retrogressive aspect, namely the way that ideas may be distorted and misrepresented.