Dan Flores

Looking back on this nature faker controversy, labeled so by Roosevelt, from today's vantage, what seems apparent is that its practitioners were trying to take on the big implications of Darwinism in the world around them.

Theirs was a response, and it strongly appealed to the reading public, to the bleak nature-read-in-tooth-and-claw conclusions that Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Lord Tennyson drew from evolution.

Instead of finding humans condemned because we'd turned out to be mere animals, nature writers like Seton looked for examples among birds and mammals of traits humans admired.

Compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and ability to reason and to transfer cultural learning across generations.

and most of all, self-awareness and individuality.

In one of Seton's stories in Scribner's in 1900, a captured female coyote named Tito sits chained in a ranch yard observing the techniques stockmen are using to wipe out the coyote kind.

When she escapes and has litters of her own, she passes on her knowledge about how to avoid traps and poison, which, in Seton's telling, was why coyotes were surviving when so many other creatures were not.

In his famous wolf story, Lobo, King of Karumpaw, Seton wrote about a canny New Mexico wolf with one fatal flaw, his fidelity to his mate.

As he put the matter, in Wild Animals I Have Known, Satan's theme was, we and the beasts are kin.

Given the perspective of contemporary 21st century bird and mammal research, with its emphasis on self-awareness, tool use, theory of mind, perceptions of fairness, cultural transmission, grief over the loss of mates, and individuality, all those things these writers seem to be working with, all that seemed to be lacking in the best writings of the Seton-London-Muir genre were double-blind, replicable experiments.

But at the time, the well-respected Burroughs, furious at what he saw as chicanery, went on the attack.

Non-human animals, Burroughs thundered, were purely creatures of instinct, nothing more.

That drew Roosevelt into the fray.

Simply enough, the nature fakers were misleading their readers, he told the public.

In a private communication to the editor of Collier's magazine, Roosevelt went further.

He echoed the lines in Darwin's The Descent of Man when he wrote the editor, I believe that the higher mammals and birds have reasoning powers which differ in degree rather than kind from those of humans.

But, he continued, he meant different in degree from the lower reasoning powers of, for instance, the lower savages.

In other words, if we can take this astonishing comment literally, Roosevelt believed the resonances and parallels between animals and humanity did not really apply to modern first world humans, only to tribal indigenous peoples who were lower in their evolutionary progress.

Obviously, Roosevelt had not absorbed the lessons of Colombian anthropologist Franz Boas, who was already arguing against Western ethnocentrism by positing that all humans were equally evolved, but with cultures that followed very different trajectories.

Jack London, at least, would eventually get a measure of revenge, telling Collier's readers that the truth was that President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.