'All with stories to sell': Carleton S. Coon, Bentley Glass, Marston Bates, and the struggle by life scientists in the United States to construct a social mission after World War II

This analysis, focused on the work of anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, geneticist Bentley Glass, and naturalist Marston Bates, provides insight into the constructed nature of scientific ideas and the limits of science-based claims to authority. Keying into Cold War cultural anxieties, life scientists in the United States between 1945 and 1963 tried to compete with the "hard" sciences for prestige and funding by proposing solutions to perceived social ills based on the claim that they understood the evolutionary process and could apply their knowledge to guide human biological and cultural development. Positioning themselves as critical to the mitigation of political and environmental problems associated with rapid human population growth, biologists and anthropologists modified Progressive era ideologies to address changing attitudes toward race and class without altering the underlying premise that human culture, particularly "industrial civilization," was an anomalous evolutionary product that threatened the natural order, dictating scientific management and control.