This chapter examines Mead’s encounter with evolution in the 1880s, demonstrating that evolutionary ideas could have a devastating effect if they were interpreted as threatening life’s meaning. I argue that Mead could not fully embrace the evolutionary perspective that characterized his mature philosophy until the work of Josiah Royce and Hermann Lotze showed him that evolution and science were compatible with significance and purpose. Mead’s own trajectory suggests that Dewey and Kitcher are right: we should not assume “that correction of belief about the occupants of the cosmos can automatically be articulated into a satisfying vision of what is valuable in one’s life.” In the first section of the chapter, I demonstrate that debates in biology were a part of Mead’s undergraduate education at Oberlin College from 1879 to 18 83. I then outline how modern scientific ideas were involved in Mead’s struggle with agnosticism during the mid-1880s, including a minor obsession with criticizing the argument from design. Finally, in the last section of the chapter, I argue that Mead’s course on the philosophy of nature with Royce at Harvard and his reading of Lotze’s book Microcosmus in Germany allowed him to reconcile the notion of evolution with his idealist and spiritual tendencies. I conclude by briefly examining Mead’s mature account of religion and values.