Origins of Evolution at Vanderbilt

Long before evolution was a household word, Vanderbilt students were engaging with its core ideas. Meet pioneering figures such as professors Alexander Winchell, James M. Safford, and Paul Jones, whose bold teaching and collecting helped lay the foundation for evolutionary thought on campus. Featured artifacts include an 1884 edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, early plaster casts, and fossils like those once displayed in Vanderbilt’s original natural history museum. Alexander Winchell served as perhaps the most renowned expert to join the faculty in 1875, when Vanderbilt opened, and was the shortest tenured faculty after being fired in 1878. Winchell believed in evolution – albeit with strong disagreements to Darwinism – and his views on human evolution would go against the beliefs of the fundamentalists running the university at the time. Winchell wrote a book about evolution in 1874, and thus, it wasn’t evolution perse that got him fired, but his ideas that black men evolved before white men. The exhibit features his writings on Sketches of Creation and the pamphlet that led to his dismissal Adamites and Pre-adamites. His geology co-chair, James Safford, was a well-known local geologist. He would stay on longer than any other faculty until his eventual retirement in 1900. He likely touched on evolutionary theory in some form during his lectures as he covered paleontology and ran the natural history museum, In the exhibit, you can find pages from his USGS field notebook, a portrait, and a description of the early museum. One of Safford’s students, Paul Jones, would go on to have the first course listed in the catalog referencing evolution – Philosophical Biology. Jones completed all of his education at Vanderbilt and eventually became an adjunct professor in Geology until his untimely death in 1899. Paul Jones’ dissertation cover is featured along with the course catalog page. While evolution was hidden deep in course content or actively avoided – it was certainly on folks’ minds. In 1899, the meeting of the Round Table was held to discuss evolution. See the invitation in the exhibit.