The Book That Changed America

I want to start reading books about how scientific discoveries affected the wider world. Initially I was looking for a book about the discovery of dinosaurs and its impacts, but haven't nailed down which one to get. If you have a recommendation that covers dinosaurs or anything else, let me know!

This book is about how Darwin's “On the Origin of Species” affected the lives of people in mid-1800's America, pre-civil war, post-John Brown's death. It follows the lives of various notable people and how the release of this book affected then and their surroundings.

This was before Science and Scientists existed as we understand them today. Western societies of the time asserted that “science was nothing less than the study of God's creation.” Darwin helped cleave science from religion & transcendentalism by dismantling the biblical idea of creation, helping push society toward a more materialist, agnostic, and rational science. One more capable of questioning religious dogma.

You can see even then the 3 categories of responses from people back then:
• Outright denial and demonization of such blasphemy
• Acceptance/intrigue and leaning toward agnosticism
• And my favorite retort: God of the Gaps. Accepting the theory and filling in the things it doesn't sufficiently cover (the origin of life itself, the complexities of the human eye, the evolution of consciousness, etc.) with “God did it” or that “natural selection is a mechanism employed by God”. We see this today too, and those gaps get smaller and smaller as science advances.

The book was also released in one of the most turbulent times of US History: 1860. John Brown had just been murdered by the state for fighting to end slavery, and the Civil War was incoming. Here comes a book that shatters the “race science”/“scientific racism”/polygeny (white supremacy masquerading as science) by (indirectly) saying all human beings are human beings and that other races aren't some ‘inferior species'. It was a powerful notion ~160 years ago. And the notion still hasn't won out against individual or societal racism completely. (Read “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, 2010 for more about this topic)

Darwin wasn't right about everything. He was a product of his time, holding racist, colonialist views like believing primitive peoples represented a missing link between primates and humans. His theory evolved with the help of other scientists. After the civil war, the theory was bastardized to assert that black people were inferior and white folk were better adapted to survive. This was justification to pass “anti-miscegenation” laws, outlawing interracial marriage.
I wish this book focused more on the society as a whole and less on the collection of mini-biographies of the individuals affected by Darwin. Other than that, it was pretty good.