In say 1900 for instance if I went to Harvard or even a random small university in Iowa or Indiana would the evolution especially Darwinian evolution be taught?
Well, “evolution” in the sense that living things change over time had been fairly well proven by the geologic evidence at that point. But the late-19th/early-20th century was a period known as the eclipse of Darwinism where acceptance of natural selection actually started to decline somewhat. There were a few other alternative explanations for evolution which came about at that time, but none ever really became dominant.
So to answer your question, assuming you were in biology or a related field, you probably would at least be taught the basics of natural selection simply because that remained the closest thing to a mainstream theory. Depending on where your professor’s own ideas fell, one of these alternatives might have been taught as the “correct” theory, with discussion of natural selection only for background.
Perhaps another important point is that since biology at the time didn’t completely revolve around evolutionary theory like it does now, if you went to a religious school they could still teach you a religious-based version of creation or one of the religious explainations for evolution, but otherwise teach you mainstream scientific biology. These days, any school with a reputable biology department has to teach natural selection.
Distinguish evolution from natural selection. The latter was Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great idea, while the actual fact of evolution was fairly commonplace by Darwin’s time. His grandfather Erasmus was an early advocate. Darwin didn’t have any idea of the mechanism, though, just that natural variation (which obviously existed) would lead to evolution when some variants were more successful at reproducing themselves than others.
Cite?
Commonplace in what sense? Sure the idea of evolution in the general sense that life forms change their form over time (and generally, that they progress from less complex to more complex, better adapted forms - something that modern evolutionists strenuously deny) was out there before Darwin and Wallace published. It was advocated by a handful of authors, such as Erasmus Darwin, Lamark, and Robert Chambers. That is a very long way from saying that it was generally accepted, however, either by scientists or by the educated public. It was a well known view, but was not generally accepted, and, in general, the more people actually knew about biology, geology etc., the less likely they were to accept evolution. The evolutionary ideas in Robert Chambers’ book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) made quite a splash with the general public, but just about all serious scientists (including Charles Darwin, who had already formulated, but not published, his theories at the time) thought it was rubbish. (Chambers was a professional author, not any sort of scientist, and the science in his book was riddled with errors and nonsense.) Lamark’s evolutionary theory had had some following amongst serious scientists for a while, but in the period before Darwin and Wallace published Lamark had few serious followers left.
Yes, but it is notable that this had little influence even on Charles Darwin, who did not embrace evolution until analysis of the evidence he had collected on the Beagle voyage pushed in that direction. During the voyage, as his diaries show, Charles remained a conventional creationist.
I think you referring to Erasmus here, but the views you attribute to him sound uncommonly like his grandson’s theory of natural selection. Unless you have a clear cite for this, I think you are projecting Charles’ idea (i.e., the version of evolution accepted now) back onto Erasmus. It cost Charles quite a bit of work and intellectual effort to come up with natural selection theory, and he found the vital clue in the work of Malthus, not of his grandfather (although he was quite familiar with Erasmus’ works).
To address the OP, by 1900 Charles Darwin's ideas were extremely well known, and quite widely, even if not yet universally, accepted by biologists. As **GreasyJack** says, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were some quite serious doubts (founded on real scientific problems, not religion) as to whether natural selection could be the primary mechanism of evolution, but few doubted that modern species had arisen through some sort of evolutionary process.
Furthermore, the creationist movement, and its accompanying Biblical literalism, did not really get going until the 1920s and 30s. By 1900, there was little left of the original religious opposition that Darwin's ideas had stirred up (which had not been mainly motivated by Biblical literalism anyway, but by an attachment to the intelligent design argument), and most educated Christians broadly accepted the reality of evolution (which is not, after all, inconsistent with the notion that God created the original life forms that have evolved into the present ones, or, indeed, with the idea that God somehow guides the evolutionary process).
For all these reasons, I think we can be confident that evolutionary theory of a broadly Darwinian sort (but probably with some reservations expressed about the natural selection mechanism) was being taught in American universities at this time. It might have been common to stress the *compatibility* of evolution with religion, but there certainly would not have been anything like modern creationism being taught.
I might add that although I have little direct knowledge of biology curricula in that period, I do know a good bit about what was being taught in the related field of psychology. Evolutionary ideas seem to have been generally accepted amongst American academic psychologists of the relevant era, which strongly suggests that they would also have been accepted by their biologist colleagues.Here’s a biology textbook from 1889, from the Harvard library.
Do a search and you’ll find, in the History of Biology chapter, a discussion of the place of Darwin and the idea of “evolution by natural selection.” The author, discussing Darwin and Wallace, notes that:
Of course, this doesn’t tell us exactly what was being taught in the classrooms, but the textbooks themselves were certainly dealing with the issue.
There are other biology textbooks from the period available for viewing on Google Books.