Against the backdrop of the Cold War, several midcentury biologists worked to radically revise the basic idea of evolution, broadening it far beyond its traditional scope. Drawing heavily on the work of French paleontologist and idiosyncratic Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, biologists including Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and G.G. Simpson redefined evolution as a universal process encompassing all change over time, from the cosmic level to the cultural. This redefinition served to support an urgent conclusion: that humanity had replaced natural biological and geological processes to become the primary agent of evolutionary change. In this paper, I will explore how this understanding of evolution—explicitly adopted by a number of organizers and participants—informed the Wenner Gren Foundation’s 1955 conference, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. The ongoing interplay between the life and social sciences in the wake of that conference can be observed in the 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration at the University of Chicago, an event ostensibly intended to delimit and define the discipline of evolutionary biology one hundred years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, but which included a number of the anthropologists from the Man’s Role conference, including Sol Tax, the Darwin Centennial’s organizer. Contextualized in larger contemporary discourses, these conferences can be used to trace the migration of ideas from evolutionary theory and outré Catholic theology into social scientific, ecological, and evironmental thought.
