The idea of “settled science” isn’t new. In the 1930s many scientists and philosophers, not just in Germany but throughout Western Europe and North America, thought people from the northwest corner of the Eurasian landmass, and their New World descendants, had evolved to a greater pinnacle of humanity than had people of other ethnicities.

In the late 1920s the Field Museum, a Chicago institution, commissioned Malvina Hoffman, a student of the illustrious Auguste Rodin, to create more than 100 bronze and stone works representing the world’s various “racial types.” That exhibit, billed as “The Races of Mankind,” opened in 1933 (coinciding with the Chicago World’s Fair) and continued on display, in various configurations, into the 1960s.

Now Hoffman’s work is on display at Field again, through the end of the year—but today universities deride the idea behind it as “scientific racism,” even as they exalt the thinker, Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary theories underlie the concept. Hoffman herself may have deliberately undercut it: “These people are individuals,” she later said of her Races of Mankind sculptures, not simply the composite types the museum had wanted her to present.

Hoffman depicted a farmer harvesting fruit in India, a wife cautiously watching her husband hunt in Africa, a Pacific islander climbing a palm tree, an Italian-American bodybuilder from New York, and many more. She traveled the globe to discover most of her subjects, but used photographs for some.

Present-day cultural critic Edward Rothstein believes Hoffman’s sculptures of actual people—not just types—“may have marked the weakening of a museum orthodoxy” about a supposed racial hierarchy. The same year the original Hoffman exhibit opened in Chicago, though, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, espousing an idea deeply rooted in social Darwinism: the Nazi theory of the master race.

“Great mischief can come from these theories,” says the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman, noting that the Nazis took the idea of racial superiority/inferiority “to a terrible, radical extreme.” Most anthropologists today still cling to an evolutionary explanation of human origins. In natural history museums, including Field, Darwinism is still “settled science.”

Chapman, though, believes it’s only a matter of time before such origin accounts crumble: “The progress we’ve made in understanding DNA suggests increasingly that the evolutionary process defined by Darwin does not adequately describe human beings.”

Today’s visitors to Field are asked to “rethink” the museum’s earlier exhibit on race. Chapman hopes someday the museum will stage another “rethinking” exhibition. “We should have a Field Museum exhibit in a few years that says that not only were we wrong about race, we were wrong about evolution and what it means to be human.”

Darwin doubter

Chapman’s Discovery Institute regularly shows how new scientific discoveries and understandings are undercutting Darwinism. In September, though, Discovery gained a potent ally: Tom Wolfe’s just-published book, The Kingdom of Speech (Little, Brown).

Wolfe with his usual humor and verbal gusto portrays Darwin as a British gentleman who panicked when a writer of lesser social status wrote an article postulating survival of the fittest as the key engine of evolutionary change. Darwin conspired with others of his class to get the credit and produced a “creation myth” as likely to be true as those that once described the world as sitting on a tower of turtles.

That Wolfe declares himself to be an atheist makes his ridicule of evolution particularly important, given media tendencies to dismiss Bible-based critiques. The Kingdom of Speech is short and tails off in its second half, but Wolfe is probably right to say, “if you write more than 150 pages about anything that says ‘evolution’ you’re in for it. Nobody’s going to stick with you.” —Marvin Olasky