Any academic who has published two or three books has learnt, by bittersweet experience, one crucial fact about the reviews. It really doesn't matter how good or bad a book you have written. What counts is where the reviewer is coming from. About forty years ago there was a huge row over human sociobiology, the application of Darwinian principles to human behavior. If you had anything good to say about it, if your reviewer was a feminist or a Marxist or a social scientist, you were doomed. Perhaps there were no good positively inclined books on the topic; but one wonders, one really does. More recently, try saying anything nice about religion if your reviewer is a New Atheist. Even God Almighty would get a stinker. Actually, if you think of what the New Atheists have to say about the Bible, God Almighty already does get a stinker.

I kept thinking of this as I read David Livingstone's Gifford Lectures, now published as Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Livingstone, as much a geographer as a historian, has long been interested in variations of beliefs in different academic and religious environments and now he has put things all together in a definitive study. He looks at the reception of Darwinian evolution in the years after the Origin (1859) in a number of places where Presbyterians predominated—Edinburgh, Belfast, Anglophone Canada, South Carolina and Princeton. You might think two things. First, since they were all Calvinists who took sola scriptura very seriously indeed, they would be united in their opposition to Darwinism. Second, since they were co-religionists they would be putting forth identical arguments to support their opposition. What mistakes you would be making!

We have long known that there were people, usually fueled by religious beliefs, who opposed Darwinism—the Anglicans Adam Sedgwick (Professor of Geology at the University of Cambridge) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, the Unitarian Swiss-American Louis Agassiz, the Presbyterians Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary and William Dawson, Principal of McGill in Montreal. But we have also known that there were others who were good churchmen who accepted evolution, Darwinism even—Anglicans Baden Powell at Oxford and the novelist Charles Kingsley, Catholic convert and future cardinal John Henry Newman, American Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, and others.

Some thirty years ago James Moore argued (in The Post-Darwinian Controversies [New York: Cambridge, 1981) that paradoxically it was often the more conservative Christians doctrinally who had least trouble with Darwinism, and Livingstone backs this up again and again. To take but one example, for much of the second half of the nineteenth-century Robert Rainy was the leader of the Free Church in Scotland. Appointed head of the Church's Divinity School in Edinburgh in 1874, he took evolution as the topic of his inaugural lecture. Bluntly, flatly, and repeatedly he said that hypotheses about physical origins have no bearing whatsoever on the fundamentals of Christian belief. Accept evolution, accept Darwinism, and get on with your life.

What is really path-breaking in Livingstone's study and connects with my little story above about book reviewers is the extent to which there were variations in acceptance of Darwinian thinking and likewise variations in the reasons for acceptance or rejection. It seems at times that being a Presbyterian was totally irrelevant! This is an exaggeration, but not by much. The late Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, used to say that all politics is local. Apparently all Darwinism is local too. In Edinburgh the Presbyterians were confident, good at science, and proud of their Enlightenment heritage. They were cutting-edge thinkers, and they knew it and wanted others to know it. The one thing they got a bit tense about was the thinking of anthropologist William Robertson Smith who turned evolution on the history of religion and suggested that the Eucharist might have origins in cannibalistic orgies where the victim is torn apart and gobbled down while still living. Perhaps expectedly, although this kind of thinking got up the noses of the good folk of Edinburgh, Sigmund Freud loved every word of it.

In Belfast, Presbyterians were tense feeling themselves a minority in an alien country. It did not help when Thomas Henry Huxley's chum John Tyndall gave a talk, in the early 1870s in Belfast, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, arguing in a loud and flamboyant way for materialism. Shutters were dropped and evolution condemned. It was oil on a raging fire when the Irish Catholics suggested that this kind of thing was only to be expected in a protestant culture. Hatred of materialism and equally of the followers of the Pope made for a heady brew of opposition.

Crossing the Atlantic we find likewise different reactions depending on place. What is really fascinating is that at Princeton in the secular college, thanks to the Scottish-born and -educated Presbyterian principal James McCosh, evolution was welcomed but at the seminary, thanks to the American Presbyterian principal Charles Hodge, it was not. As one who, although English-born, spent nearly forty years in Canada I found Livingstone's discussion of my adopted country particularly resonating and revealing. I should say that as in New York City reputedly the policemen are all Irish so in Anglophone Canada the professors and administrators of higher education were and still are all Scots, either of a chain of ancestors come to the New World or fresh off the boat. The very names of the institutions is a giveaway—Dalhousie, McGill, McMaster, Simon Fraser. I taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario and we had as presidents and deans and chairs a succession of McNaughtons and McKinnons and Stewarts and Bruces and Reids and so forth. They even wore kilts to work in the middle of winter on Robbie Burn's day, for all that as good Presbyterians they disliked intensely the vulgarity of his verse.

Scottish education meant lots of philosophy—I got my job back in 1965 because, as a new university built on the old Ontario College of Agriculture, the then dean decreed that, now we were a university, philosophy was compulsory for all of his aggies! In a university of less than ten thousand, we had a department of philosophy of twenty-five within three years. The University of Toronto still has seventy philosophers in its department. And that meant Scottish Common Sense philosophy—to misquote Sergeant Friday, “Just the facts ma'am, just the facts.” Science was data gathering and speculation was discouraged. I can still remember the tensions fifty years ago in my new university when just-opened colleges of physical and biological sciences brought to campus scientists who thought that way of doing science was boring and old-fashioned, which it was!

The most unsuccessful lecture I ever gave was talking about Thomas Kuhn to the people in Crop Science! What had paradigms to do with cabbages?! Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, particularly at rather conservative institutions like the Agricultural College (which until it became part of the new university was a branch of the University of Toronto), science eschewed the hypothetical and theoretical. Which meant that evolution when it came out was not so much rejected outright, but treated with great caution—it was just not the sort of science that Canadians did. Again though, while making points like these, Livingstone shows that Presbyterians were not uniform in their views. Whereas at Princeton it was the college that was pro-evolution and the seminary anti-evolution, in Toronto the Presbyterian seminary (affiliated with the University of Toronto) was quite comfortable with evolution! They viewed it from a theological perspective and found it acceptable whereas the scientists viewed it from a philosophical perspective and found it dangerous.

Of course, after a book like this, one is left wanting more. How is evolution treated in these various places today? Are there vestiges of the past, as we good evolutionists would expect. Right at the end, Livingstone does trail his coat a little, indicating that modern disputes show that people come at these sorts of things with (as I suggested at the beginning) minds made up. I am amused to find that literally on the last page I finally make it into Livingstone's book as one of the most rabid academics of modern times, like Colonel Blimp simply blowing my top at views with which I disagree! (Actually, relieved more than amused. Far worse than bad reviews are no reviews.)

Let me say that I am left wondering about his own institution, Queen's University in Belfast. Apart from Livingstone, its most distinguished historian of evolutionary theory is Peter Bowler, who has made a career out of writing books downplaying the significance of Charles Darwin (as in The Non-Darwinian Revolution [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins, 1992). Given that nineteenth-century Belfast was the place most opposed to Darwinism, are we to suppose that the old attitudes still hold sway in the twenty-first century? It might be worth doing a comparative study with liberal, enlightened, forward-looking Edinburgh to see if this is indeed true.