Edward Drinker Cope
Views

As a young man, Cope read Charles Darwin 's Voyage of a Naturalist, which had little effect on him. The only comment about Darwin's book recorded by Cope was that Darwin discussed "too much geology" from the account of his voyage. Due to his background in taxonomy and paleontology, Cope focused on evolution in terms of changing structure, rather than emphasizing geography and variation within populations as Darwin had. Over his lifetime, Cope's views on evolution shifted. His early views held that while Darwin's natural selection may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera. Cope's suggested mechanism for this action was a "steady progressive development of organization" through what Cope termed "a continual crowding backward of the successive steps of individual development". His beliefs later evolved to one with an increased emphasis on continual and utilitarian evolution with less involvement of a Creator. He became one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought, which holds that an individual can pass on traits acquired in its lifetime to offspring. Although the view has been shown incorrect, it was the prevalent theory among paleontologists in Cope's time. In 1887, Cope published his own "Origin of the Fittest: Essays in Evolution", detailing his views on the subject. He was a strong believer in the law of use and disuse—that an individual will slowly, over time, favor an anatomical part of its body so much that it will become stronger and larger as time progresses down the generations. The giraffe, for example, stretched its neck to reach taller trees and passed this acquired characteristic to its offspring in a developmental phase that is added to gestation in the womb.

Cope's Theology of Evolution (1887) argued that consciousness comes from the mind of the universe and governs evolution by directing animals to new goals. According to Sideris (2003), " argued that organisms respond to changes in their environments by an exercise of choice. Consciousness itself, he maintained, was the principal force in evolution. Cope credited God with having built into evolution a life force that propelled organisms toward even higher levels of consciousness."

Cope's views on human races and sex were influenced by his Lamarckian beliefs, which posited those of European ancestry as more highly evolved than nonwhite groups. In his essays on evolution, he assessed the physiognomies of three "sub-species of human" — termed the Negro, the Mongolian, and the Indo-European — in comparison to those of apes and human embryos, and drew the following conclusion:

The Indo-European race is then the highest by virtue of the acceleration of growth in the development of the muscles by which the body is maintained in the erect position (extensors of the leg), and in those important elements of beauty, a well-developed nose and beard. It is also superior in those points in which it is more embryonic than the other races, viz., the want of prominence of the jaws and cheek-bones, since these are associated with a greater predominance of the cerebral part of the skull, increased size of cerebral hemispheres, and greater intellectual power.

He believed that if, "a race was not white then it was inherently more ape-like". He was opposed to blacks because of their "degrading vices", believing that the "inferior Negro should go back to Africa" and that their "poor virtue" was inherent. Cope was against the modern view of women's rights, believing in the husband's role as protector; he was opposed to women's suffrage, as he felt they would be unduly influenced by their husbands, and that it would lead to the retrogression of the race as women took on more "masculine" attributes.
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