Seven years after the publication of The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin remained a controversial figure. Many critics opposed the theories in that volume and in On the Origin of Species on religious grounds, since, especially in Origin, the father of evolutionary theory did not restrict his discussions to lower organisms. The human species, Darwin dared to suggest, still shows "his lowly origin" and was not an exalted creation, as the church insisted.

In 1878, while the feuding raged, Darwin wrote to his vicar at Downe (a correspondence that he maintained from 1848 to 1884) complaining of some of the attacks upon his ideas. "I expected more vigor," Darwin wrote of one assailant, "& less verbiage." Darwin fully admitted the gaps in his theory and hoped that others would fill them. These gaps, however, were used by his insulted foes as evidence for dismissing the idea of evolution altogether, not as challenges for more research and debate. Despite the verbiage generated by both sides, the vigor of Darwin's evolutionary ideas has persisted and grown. Work by later biologists incorporated new insights, and their evidence eventually provided the reasoning and vigor sought by Darwin.

This "feud" between Darwin's supporters and his critics is included in Hal Hellman's Great Feuds in Science, which briefly considers ten of the best-known disputes in the history of science. The examples begin with Galileo in the 16th century and end with Margaret Mead in the 20th.

Hellman provides little new insight into the well-known controversies he has included. He does manage, however, to reveal a bit about the internal processes involved in "doing" science and how they are interconnected with the lives of the men and women who practice it. The book also explores how debate and controversy can change ideas. Each of the ten chapters provides a simplified background account of the eras in which each feud occurred, along with brief biographical sketches of the main players. This allows the reader to learn, for example, not only where Galileo fit into the historical matrix, but where his chief prosecutor, Pope Urban VIII, fit in as well.

The debates that took place in this and the last century are far more revealing than those of earlier times, primarily because recent records are more accessible and more complete. With an apparent increase in public awareness of - if not deep interest in - science, controversies in academic and research circles do generate some interest today. These spillovers into the public arena, however, provide a misleading view of the workings of science. Not all science is done in a climate of open hostility. Rather, there are more gradual shifts that are rarely recorded for public posterity. A good example of the press presenting an extreme example of a scientific "debate" involved E.D. Cope, O.C. Marsh, and their territorial battles over American fossils finds. As recorded in the pages of many eastern American newspapers during the latter half of the 19th century, these competitors each accused the other of destroying his fossil fields and stealing his staff members. "It seemed that their race," Hellman notes, "had more to do with spiting the other than with advancing the science of vertebrate paleontology."

The dispute between Donald Johanson and (primarily) Richard Leakey concerning human origins is another example of a very public scientific feud. The lure of being able to claim discovery of the earliest human ancestor seems to entice the most ambitious and, consequently, frequently the most contentious anthropologists.

Next to ego, perhaps no factor is more common historically in the debates Hellman has chosen to recount than religion. Galileo's battle with the church over the place of humans in the universe, and Darwin defender Thomas Huxley's debate with Bishop Wilberforce over creation and evolution, were both full of verbiage and vigor with long-lasting effects. One result in Galileo's case, Hellman writes, "was that the remains of one of the great scientists of all time were quietly hidden away in the basement of the church bell tower for almost a century."

Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the earth also held implications for both religion and science. Darwinian evolution, remember, required sufficient geological time to unfold. Kelvin's interpretation of the gradual cooling of the earth since its formation in relation to its possible age did not support the timescale required by evolutionists. And even though Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz bickered over the calculus, they still managed to inject religion into the argument by interpreting mathematical principals as either "divine creation" or a "law of nature."

John Wallis and Thomas Hobbes also fought over mathematics. Their argument was over the solution to the quadrature - mathematically squaring the circle. Wallis, like the majority of the feuding participants, wielded a sharp pen against his enemies, describing them as the "vomit[ing] poisonous filth against us."

Biology is at the core of many of the disputes in Hellman's book, probably because it is less abstract than mathematics and is so readily and directly linked to human concerns. Voltaire's assertion that John Needham's work on spontaneous generation was seriously in error resulted in a volatile exchange, to say the least: "According to you," Hellman quotes Needham, "morality is a very slight thing and ought to be subjected to physics. I say that physics ought to be subjected to morality." Geology has a minor role in Hellman's book; he covers Alfred Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift and, of course, Lord Kelvin's theories about the earth's internal temperatures.

Humanity and human behavior are the focus of the last two chapters. The public break between Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson occurred more recently than the other cases cited by Hellman, and thus the tale and its gossip have a richer and more immediate feel. This could be seen on Walter Cronkite's television show, Universe, on which Leakey and Johanson appeared to discuss creationism and human evolution. Instead, the joint appearance turned into a public debate on the level of "whose family tree is better: Richard or Donald's?" Leakey, according to Hellman, believes he fell into a trap. In any case, the electronic media helped make this one of the first mass market scientific feuds.

Not as publicly displayed is Derek Freeman's contention that Margaret Mead, the icon of cultural anthropology, exaggerated the results of her study of Samoan tribes. Whether the tribes played a practical joke on Mead or whether she just misinterpreted the culture, one anthropologist has thanked Freeman for one benefit of this dispute: "for rescuing all our careers from obscurity."

The underlying stimulus for the participants in these feuds, besides their dedication to their work, is ego. Yes, they wanted to search for truth, but Mead, Freeman, Johanson, Leakey, Cope, Marsh, Lord Kelvin, Huxley, Voltaire, Needham, Newton, Leibniz, Wallis, Hobbes, and Pope Urban VIII all had egos to match their standing in society. Knocking down a solid wall of established thinking requires an extraordinarily high level of self-confidence and perseverance, qualities that, in the eyes of defenders of the status quo, were being used to stick a knife in the back of previously accepted "reason."

The notes and bibliography are useful to those who wish to delve deeper into the battles, but all in all, Great Feuds in Science is a light, entertaining read offering a glimpse into the humanity and substance of science.

Scopes Trial Home Page - this case dragged a scientific theory into the courtroom long before DNA fingerprinting and forensics made science a frequent visitor before the bench. From the Minnesota State University Emuseum.

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