This podcast interview is the tenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
History is written by the victors, as the saying goes, and the history of science is no different. A classic history of biology narrates the contributions of Charles Darwin and Gregory Mendel—their paradigm-shifting, discipline-making theories of evolution and genetics, respectively. And while both have certainly revolutionized modern science, the history of science is incomplete without the theories that ultimately did not withstand the scientific test of time.
Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory—the idea that species emerge not through the gradual evolution that Darwin posits, but through a rapid period of genetic mutation—was disparaged, disputed, and disproved by scientists. Still, it ignited the public imagination (especially in the U.S.) in the early twentieth century, producing novel visions of futurity, masculinity, imperialism, social revolution, and science. It is this history that Jim Endersby narrates in his new book, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1933 (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
I had the great pleasure of talking with Jim Endersby in February 2026. Our Botanical Imaginations series was a great excuse for me to ask him about the botanical roots of public enthusiasm for mutation theory. He didn’t disappoint, pointing to the myriad ways that plants shape(d) a resounding faith in biology in the U.S., giving life to novel ways of looking at the world that persist to this day. However, our conversation also extends far beyond plants to encompass the politics of expertise. The participatory science of the twentieth century, Endersby shows, might help us navigate the science skepticism and antagonism of our present.
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Interview Highlights
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rebecca Laurent: You are the author of several fantastic books, most recently The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). For those who haven’t read the book, can you tell us a little bit about it?
Jim Endersby: The book is part of a wider set of projects, which are about, I suppose, the adventures of science outside the lab. It’s what happens to science when it escapes from its gatekeepers—the scientists, but also from the professional historians of science; the people who decide what is and isn’t science.
And it’s about how science gets into everyday life, into people’s ideas and conversations.
The particular episode that I look at here is in the early part of the twentieth century and the huge amount of popular interest in something called the mutation theory. I discovered quite by accident that there was this popular interest because the orthodox histories of science will tell you that the mutation theory fizzled out really fast. It turns out that isn’t quite true, and understanding why that isn’t quite true, and why people latched onto the theory, is what the book tries to deal with.
What people think a scientific theory means is actually what it means to those people at that time. If we want to try and understand how most people think about science, or with science, then we need to actually understand what they’re making of it, how they’re appropriating it, how they’re interpreting it, how they’re trying to make sense of it for themselves.
RL: How do you see “biotopia” shaping botanical imaginations specifically, both in the twentieth century and today?
JE: I think there’s a kind of push and pull. Biotopia comes out of ways of thinking about plants, and then it becomes an idea that shapes the uses to which we imagine we can put plants.
Because of genetics and mutation theory, one of the places that becomes very exciting in the early twentieth century is the botanic garden. Lots of botanic gardens are doing experiments on plants inspired by both DeVries and Mendel. These experiments make it possible to think about plants as raw material that can be reshaped by human ideas, desire, and imagination. Luther Burbank becomes a celebrity because he claims to be the very first person to have actually made a new species, a claim which is quite widely accepted at the time.
These kinds of things make botany a sexy subject.
Plants seem much more plastic. It is much easier to reshape them than animals. The hope is that once we understand what causes mutations in plants, we’ll then be able to trigger them artificially, and then we’ll be able to solve problems like famine. (All the things that biotechnology companies are still promising today are already being promised before World War I by the proponents of the mutation theory.) And then, once we understand how the plants work, we’ll be able to apply that knowledge to animals and eventually to humans as well.
So, plants are seen as opening all kinds of doors. The promise of abundance has different resonances for different audiences, but I think that’s one of the most exciting things: the idea of remaking nature, making new plants, and solving the world’s problems.
RL: The potential to redesign nature was especially appealing to white men and boys in the U.S., as you write. You also draw an interesting historical parallel between the desire to control nature and the desire to bring Puerto Rico and the Philippines under US control. Can you talk a little bit more about this relationship between science, ecology, and imperialism? To what extent is the American motive for redesigning nature the product of hegemonic masculinity, white supremacy, and American exceptionalism?
JE: Obviously science—commercial science, the application of science, writing about science—is dominated by men on both sides of the Atlantic. Things have improved, but not as much as one would like.
And yet, some of the most interesting people in the book are women writing about biology and its possibilities. I write about Wharton and Gilman, but also some of the pioneer science fiction writers in pulp magazines, who often presented a more critical view of science and its possibilities than their male contemporaries did.
I literally spent years trying to find African American writers who were interested in mutation theory. I never succeeded. So, it certainly does seem to have appealed to that imperial mentality.
If we don’t actually listen properly to what other people are saying and try to understand why they’re saying it, where they’re coming from, that really seems like the death of democracy, scientific inquiry, and the humanities to me.
I think some of the American optimism in the early twentieth century is about a new phase of American imperialism, a sense of taking over the role that the European powers held in the nineteenth century.
One of the images that comes up in the book again and again is the idea of a garden as metaphor for civilization. Just as creationism is organized resistance to natural selection in America, gardening played the same role in Britain. Thomas Henry Huxley demonstrates this in his famous essay “Evolution and Ethics.” All of his metaphors for gardening—deciding what is to live and what is to die—are imperial. The natives are exterminated, a colony is introduced in its place, and this is progress. He’s absolutely unapologetic about it.
An awful lot of what is done in America’s name, in the name of liberty, in the twentieth century looks suspiciously like British imperialism. And I think that notion of gardening, of managing nature to suit human needs, is one of the metaphors that links the sciences and the imperial project. This is the idea that nature is deficient, and it needs to be improved upon in some way or another.
There are particular appeals to masculinity that come out of Luther Burbank’s work. People form Luther Burbank clubs that are aimed at young boys who are going to take up a traditional kind of American masculinity. This is a scientific updating of the steady, yeoman farmer idealized by the Founding Fathers. They will add to their overalls and straw hat a copy of Burbank’s book.
One of the things I find quite fascinating about Burbank is that he talks about Mother Nature being a messy, untidy, and inefficient old lady who needs a bit of care and shaping. The claim that men know better than Mother Nature is one that comes up again and again, and it very easily transfers onto the notion that there are other kinds of people in the world who are less evolved, less scientific, who need the same kind of civilizing, gardening influence.
RL: One of the most interesting parts of your book for me was the tension between the democratic, participatory view of science that we see in the twentieth century versus the way we often think about science today as an elite sphere. Perhaps some of the pushback we see to science today is really about the division between the elite who “know what they’re talking about” and the people who don’t “deserve respect” for their beliefs?
JE: I’m very aware of my own contradictions around this.
Looking for expertise and trusting experts is quite an important thing to do. The question is, how do we decide who the experts are? One of the things that we need to be thinking about with AI is the sources for information.
At the same time, I find it relatively easy to get taken seriously. I am tall, male, white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle class, middle-aged, highly educated. I’m just a walking list of privileges. Of course people listen to me.
Expertise is precious and important, and yet thinking about how we actually share it and how we recognize the different kinds of expertise that people might have is more complicated.
To put it in an obvious frame, the woman who’s having the baby has an expertise that the male doctor who is helping deliver it does not have. Just recognizing these different kinds of expertise and valuing them differently than we do at the moment is maybe a small step towards rebalancing those issues.
I do find interesting the level of skepticism about science in certain sections of the community, like anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories about COVID.
Understanding how science gets into people’s heads and lives, and how they interpret it, the uses they make of it—that’s really what my book is about. If we were willing to at least entertain the possibility that there might be good reasons why people arrive at what seem like slightly nutty beliefs, then, at least, we can begin to have a conversation.
Unless we individually accept our responsibility to listen, then nobody has freedom of speech. If we don’t actually listen properly to what other people are saying and try to understand why they’re saying it, where they’re coming from—that really seems like the death of democracy, scientific inquiry, and the humanities to me.
Featured image: “Why Is a Neighbor’s Newspaper Always More Attractive Than Your Own?” Life, December 31, 1908. Illustration courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
Jim Endersby is professor of the history of science at the University of Sussex. He has written several award-winning books, including A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology and Orchid: A Cultural History. His most recent was The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900–1935 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He is married with two grown-up children and lives in Sussex. Contact.
Rebecca Laurent is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the current managing editor of Edge Effects. She studies the culture and politics of plants. Rebecca’s previous research has focused on oil-state entanglement and the repression of environmental activism. Her last contribution to Edge Effects (with Emily Burke) was “The Colonial Roots of Catholic Plants” (April, 2026). Contact.
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