The fury against evolution

Why the Fury Over Evolution?
As we can see from the above discussion, the pieces of the evolution puzzle had been falling into place for a century with little or no opposition. And the basic elements of natural selection are obvious and common-sense observations that had all been noted before. So why the fury over evolution? There are a number of reasons:
Evolution seems cruel
Evolution appears purposeless
Evolution conflicts with religious beliefs
Evolution has disturbing sexual and social implications
Cruelty
It's one thing to speak of "Nature red in tooth and claw", or to note that most organisms are fated only to be lunch for somebody else. It's another to assert that nature was intrinsically organized that way. If the world was originally created harmonious but was corrupted somehow, cruelty and predation are explainable. On the other hand, if death, predation and parasitism are built into the biological world, indeed are the main mechanisms by which evolution proceeds, the philosophical and theological implications are troubling.
There's an interesting paradox here. Many theologians who believed in predestination had no trouble with believing that a loving God could create people that he knew were destined to be condemned. These same theologians often had a tremendous problem believing that a loving God would allow a caterpillar to hatch knowing that it was fated to be eaten by a bird.
It's also interesting that many atheist debaters bring up predation and parasitism as arguments against the concept of a loving God. It seems to be a general pattern that extremists on both sides of a debate take one another's arguments at face value without subjecting them to analysis. It doesn't seem to have occurred to either side that perhaps predation in nature has nothing to do with right and wrong or good and evil.
Lack of Purpose
One reason that Lamarck ran into so little opposition was that his concept of evolution meshed so perfectly with the Argument from Design. God could instil organisms with an instinct to behave a certain way, and the better they fulfilled the will of God, the more perfect their biological adaptation became. With Lamarck, you almost had to believe in the Argument from Design.
In Darwin's model, Man is not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution, and there is no guarantee that the world would have evolved humans. Once again humans are dethroned from the centre of the Universe.
Underlying these objections is a serious threat to the Argument from Design itself. If highly-ordered systems can arise from the impersonal interaction of natural forces, then order may not demonstrate intelligent design. Most of the modern assaults on the Argument from Design have built around that very theme. If there is design, it must lie at some deeper level than the systems themselves.
Conflicts with Religious Beliefs
The two issues above both had religious cores, but in addition, evolution threatened not just religious ideas in general, but specific Christian doctrines in particular. For one thing, life was one phenomenon that seemed certain to require some component of supernatural action, and that belief took a serious blow. If humans evolved from more primitive organisms and if death and predation have always been part of the natural order, then there was no literal Garden of Eden, no literal Adam and Eve, and no Fall in the traditional sense. But if Christ came to redeem fallen mankind after the sin of Adam and Eve, and none of those were literal events, then what exactly was Christ's role?
Also, it's one thing to say that "the Sun stood still" for Joshua, really meant the Sun only appeared to stand still, or that a "day" in Genesis 1 really refers to an indefinitely long period of geologic time. It's another entirely to say that there was no literal Adam and Eve or Garden of Eden. Furthermore, the genealogies that begin with Adam and Eve must be at least partly mythological. Accepting evolution means that one must interpret a fairly large piece of Genesis as allegorical if not mythological. That in turn, means a pretty radical revision in how one interprets the rest of the Bible; why should the rest of it be different?
Already, scholars were doing just that. Archeological discoveries in the Middle East, newly discovered historical documents, and advances in techniques for interpreting ancient texts had already convinced many historians and scholars that sections of the Bible had been copied from other sources, pieced together by multiple authors, or post-dated (written after their purported date). Conservatives were already feeling highly threatened by these developments. Liberals had no difficulty accommodating Darwin, but to conservatives Darwin was the last straw.
Disturbing Sexual and Social Implications
This was the Victorian era, and you simply cannot discuss evolution without reproduction. Victorians had some difficulty accepting that there were plants that got pollinated by tricking insects into trying to mate with them, for example.
Victorians have been accused of being prudish about sex. Frankly I don't see it. Their art shows a lot of unclad human forms; their fashions are figure-flattering (even exaggerating - this was the era of bustles and corsets) and discreetly revealing. Cultures that are really sexually hung-up keep women hidden and conceal them in shapeless clothing (the Middle East being the archetypical example). The Victorian era managed to generate enough sexual art and literature to keep an anti-pornography crusader named Anthony Comstock permanently employed.
So what were the Victorians? They were staggeringly, stupefyingly sentimental. Everything about them; their prose, their art, their fashion, is dripping with honey and covered with sugar. It must have been a rough time for diabetics. It would be hard for such a sentimental society to take the utilitarian view of sex or predation that evolution requires. One of the toughest sentimental hurdles to escape in biology is anthropomorphism, projecting human traits onto other species. A housefly can sense its environment, but it's extremely doubtful that it has any more self-awareness than a computer-driven robotic machine. So is the death of a fly any more a moral issue than the junking of an obsolete computer? Much of the problem people had with the alleged cruelty of evolution was simply getting over anthropomorphism.
The sentimentality of the Victorians also explains their seeming indifference to social ills. They weren't indifferent - their concern made Charles Dickens pretty prosperous - but they had an unshakable optimism that things would inevitably get better, that the social ills were transient. And to be fair to them, things were getting better, very dramatically so. Someone born in 1800 would live to see a world with enormous improvements in standards of living, life expectancy, and public health. If the Victorians were all that indifferent to social ills, how did these improvements happen?

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay