1927. Neo-Darwinism, or evolution by natural selection with a heavy emphasis on hereditarianism was a staple feature, if not a common thread, in almost all early volumes of the To-day and To-morrow series, from the ‘ectogenetically optimistic’ series inauguration by J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1923), through to the “indeniably pessimistic” prophecy of doom through racial degeneration in F.C.S. Schiller’s Tantalus (1924 - See entries on these titles, as well as Icarus (1924) and The Mongol in our Midst (1924) on this website). The first advent of a strong environmentalist thrust in the series came with the release of the rather agnostic H.S. Jennings’ Prometheus, or Biology and the Advancement of Man (1925), also marking the first contribution by an American author. Oxford graduate, British neurologist and future Baron of Eynsham in Oxford County, Dr. Walter Russell Brain’s (1895 – 1966) Galatea, or the Future of Darwinism (1927) takes Jennings’ agnosticism to the next level, even using the dreaded term (in hardline eugenics’ circles at least) Neo-Lamarckism without apology or timidity.

Brain proclaims “Darwin is the Newton of Biology” (91), and he makes careful note of Darwin’s Lamarckian tendencies. His more hereditarian cousin, Francis Galton, is not mentioned, and he never uses the word ‘eugenics’ (although the term “dysgenic” appears once), nor does ‘euthenics’ make an explicit debut, but it may be said that Brain’s essay is preparing the way for a future series treatment of neo-Lamarckian euthenics, in a modern, secular recapitulation of a ‘Jean-Baptiste of Biology’ paving the philosophical pathway for the coming “Einstein of Biology” (91). See the promotional review and title-page in the accompanying picture.

Dr. Brain abruptly begins Galatea by confessing his Darwinian crisis of conscience: “It is hardly possible to accept the current Neo-Darwinian views on evolution without experiencing grave doubts concerning the rationality of the Universe” (7). Over the next four pages, he lays-out the bare-bones essentials of Neo-Darwinian (hereditarian) dogma in a literary row, without using August Weismann’s name, and then asks the rhetorical question “what conception of the forces at work in evolution does the theory imply?” (12).

-Michael Kohlman

• Brain, W.R. (1927). Galatea, or the future of Darwinism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner.

• Carlson, E.A. (1981). Genes, radiation, and society: the life and work of H.J. Muller. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Crookshank, F.G. (1925). The mongol in our midst. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner.

• Dikötter, F. (2011). Mao's great famine : the history of China's most devastating catastrophe, 1958-1962. New York: Walker & Co.

• Haldane, J.B.S. (1923). Daedalus, or science and the future. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner.

• Haldane, J.B.S. (1940). Lysenko and genetics. Science and Society, 4(4), 433-437.

• Huxley, J. (1949). Heredity east and west: Lysenko and world science. New York: Henry Schuman.

• Jennings, H.S. (1925). Prometheus, or biology and the advancement of man. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

• Kohlman, M. (2011). The first ‘rise and fall’ of Trofim Lysenko: The Marxist-Michurinist transformation of Soviet agriculture & genetics, 1927–1947. Alberta Science Education Journal, 41(2), 24-36.

• Pollock, E. (2006). Stalin and the Soviet science wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Roll‐Hansen, N. (2008). Wishful science: The persistence of T. D. Lysenko’s agrobiology in the politics of science. Osiris, 23(1), 166-188.

• Russell, B. (1924). Icarus, or the future of science. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company.

• Schiller, F.C.S. (1924). Tantalus, or the future of man. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner.

• Wu Ta-k'un. (1960). A 1960 Chinese Marxist critique of Neo-Malthusian theory. Population and Development Review, 5(4), 699-707.