Download or read book Imagining the Darwinian Revolution written by Ian Hesketh and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s singular contribution to natural science. And yet, since at least the 1980s, science historians have moved away from traditional “great man” narratives to focus on the collective role that previously neglected figures have played in formative debates of evolutionary theory. Darwin, they argue, was not the driving force behind the popularization of evolution in the nineteenth century. This volume moves the conversation forward by bringing Darwin back into the frame, recognizing that while he was not the only important evolutionist, his name and image came to signify evolution itself, both in the popular imagination as well as in the work and writings of other evolutionists. Together, contributors explore how the history of evolution has been interpreted, deployed, and exploited to fashion the science behind our changing understandings of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.
Download or read book The Darwinian Revolution written by Michael Ruse and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-10-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue p. ix Acknowledgments p. xv 1 Background to the Problem p. 3 2 British Society and the Scientific Community p. 16 3 Beliefs: Geological, Philosophical, and Religious p. 36 4 The Mystery of Mysteries p. 75 5 Ancestors and Archetypes p. 94 6 On the Eve of the Origin p. 132 7 Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species p. 160 8 After the Origin: Science p. 202 9 After the Origin: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics p. 234 10 Overview and Analysis p. 268 Notes p. 275 Bibliography p. 285 Index p. 312.
Download or read book Darwin Deleted written by Peter J. Bowler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideas and terminology of Darwinism are so pervasive these days that it seems impossible to avoid them, let alone imagine a world without them. But in this remarkable rethinking of scientific history, Peter J. Bowler does just that. He asks: What if Charles Darwin had not returned from the voyage of the Beagle and thus did not write On the Origin of Species? Would someone else, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, have published the selection theory and initiated a similar transformation? Or would the absence of Darwin’s book have led to a different sequence of events, in which biology developed along a track that did not precipitate a great debate about the impact of evolutionism? Would there have been anything equivalent to social Darwinism, and if so would the alternatives have been less pernicious and misappropriated? In Darwin Deleted, Bowler argues that no one else, not even Wallace, was in a position to duplicate Darwin’s complete theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolutionary biology would almost certainly have emerged, but through alternative theories, which were frequently promoted by scientists, religious thinkers, and moralists who feared the implications of natural selection. Because non-Darwinian elements of evolutionism flourished for a time in the real world, it is possible to plausibly imagine how they might have developed, particularly if the theory of natural selection had not emerged until decades after the acceptance of the basic idea of evolution. Bowler’s unique approach enables him to clearly explain the non-Darwinian tradition—and in doing so, he reveals how the reception of Darwinism was historically contingent. By taking Darwin out of the equation, Bowler is able to fully elucidate the ideas of other scientists, such as Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley, whose work has often been misunderstood because of their distinctive responses to Darwin. Darwin Deleted boldly offers a new vision of scientific history. It is one where the sequence of discovery and development would have been very different and would have led to an alternative understanding of the relationship between evolution, heredity, and the environment—and, most significantly, a less contentious relationship between science and religion. Far from mere speculation, this fascinating and compelling book forces us to reexamine the preconceptions that underlie many of the current controversies about the impact of evolutionism. It shows how contingent circumstances surrounding the publication of On the Origin of Species polarized attitudes in ways that still shape the conversation today.
Download or read book The Darwinian Revolution written by Michael Ruse and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1979, The Darwinian Revolution was the first comprehensive and readable synthesis of the history of evolutionary thought. Though the years since have seen an enormous flowering of research on Darwin and other nineteenth-century scientists concerned with evolution, as well as the larger social and cultural responses to their work, The Darwinian Revolution remains remarkably current and stimulating. For this edition Michael Ruse has written a new afterword that takes into account the research published since his book's first appearance. "It is difficult to believe that yet another book on Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution could add anything new or contain any surprises. Ruse's book is an exception on all counts. Darwin scholars and the general reader alike can learn from it."--David L. Hull, Nature "No other account of the Darwinian Revolution provides so detailed and sympathetic an account of the framework within which the scientific debates took place."--Peter J. Bowler, Canadian Journal of History "A useful and highly readable synthesis. . .skillfully organized and written with verve, imagination, and welcome touches of humor."--John C. Greene, Science
Download or read book Darwinian Impacts written by David Roger Oldroyd and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only scattered references to early anthropology of Australian Aborigines.
Download or read book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution written by Gertrude Himmelfarb and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book This View of Life written by David Sloan Wilson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly—to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.” In a series of engaging and insightful examples—from the breeding of hens to the timing of cataract surgeries to the organization of an automobile plant—Wilson shows how an evolutionary worldview provides a practical tool kit for understanding not only genetic evolution but also the fast-paced changes that are having an impact on our world and ourselves. What emerges is an incredibly empowering argument: If we can become wise managers of evolutionary processes, we can solve the problems of our age at all scales—from the efficacy of our groups to our well-being as individuals to our stewardship of the planet Earth.
Download or read book Evolution in Victorian Britain written by Caden C. Testa and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the readers with a broad but detailed consideration of a wide array of transmutationist thinkers who published before Darwin. Highlighting some of those whom Darwin later acknowledged as well as number he chose not to, readers are shown that the notion that none of these earlier thinkers offered a well-developed or workable theory of evolution is untenable once we read their own words. Further, we will quickly see that transmutation, or the ‘developmental hypothesis’ as it was also sometimes called, had a wide audience across the period under consideration. Scholars such as Adrian Desmond have already drawn attention to the political radicals in the London and Edinburgh medical schools who embraced the transmutationist ideas of the French anatomists Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire and the naturalist and zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and the historians John van Wyhe and Roger Cooter have highlighted the materialist naturalism of phrenologists whose work was so amenable to developmentalist thinking. Paul Elliott has drawn our attention to the “Derbyshire Darwinians,” who championed the transmutationist and egalitarian Enlightenment ideas of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather — as well as the extent to which the Derby Philosophical Society was a breeding ground for this kind of thinking. It was here, for instance, that the young radical journalist Herbert Spencer spent many hours in his formative years. Thus, while Darwin was quietly working away at his big species book, transmutation was being discussed and debated, written about, and advocated across the nation. The book he eventually published in 1859, On the Origin of Species, was thus a contribution to an already very lively, controversial, contested, and ongoing debate. However, Darwin had not intended to published Origin as we know it; it is in fact only what he called a brief abstract of the detailed multi-volume work he had initially had in mind. It was upon receipt of a short essay from the naturalist and collector Alfred Russel Wallace that Darwin was pressed to publish. In this short paper Wallace had quite independently arrived at a theory of species development that was remarkably similar to that which Darwin had been working on for some twenty years.
Download or read book The Huxleys written by Alison Bashford and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-16 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a long-overdue biography of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T.H. Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Both T.H. and Julian suffered from depression, thinking and writing about the condition and genetic inheritance in highly curious ways. And between them, they communicated to the world the great modern story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Because the grandson modeled himself so self-consciously on the grandfather, celebrated historian Alison Bashford writes seamlessly about these omnivorous intellects together, almost as if they were one very long-lived man whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the Space Age, and from colonial wars to world wars to the cold war. The myriad questions that the Huxleys grappled with make them the perfect dynasty-companions for time travel over the age of evolution: What is the nature of time and how old is the Earth itself? What is the connection between human history and natural history? How are humans animals and how are we not? What is the deep past and the distant future of humankind? Can and should we actively seek to improve future generations? What might the planet look like 10,000 years hence? This momentous biography traces the problems and wonders of the modern world that the Huxleys themselves raised, postured, and pondered over lives that spanned the age of evolution"--
Download or read book Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences written by Bernard Lightman and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Darwinism as Religion written by Michael Ruse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Darwinism as Religion' argues that the theory of evolution given by Charles Darwin in the 19th-century has always functioned as much as a secular form of religion as anything purely scientific. Through the words of novelists and poets, Michael Ruse argues that Darwin took us from the secure world of Christian faith into a darker, less friendly world of chance and lack of meaning.
Download or read book Reckoning with History written by K.J. Kesselring and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together essays on uses of history as both a practical activity and an approach to thinking about the present, this collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history in pasts both distant and near. Reckoning with History begins by examining uses of the past in early modern Britain, a period in which print, religious reformation, and political conflict transformed historical culture. Later essays offer insights into personal, popular, professional, and sometimes deeply political uses of the past in other times and places, helping to contextualize our own moments in historical writing and to link the early and post-modern periods. Throughout, contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past. Covering subjects such as early archival practices, memories of historic plagues, and the type of commemorations needed to revitalize liberal democracies, Reckoning with History contextualizes the uses of the past today.
Download or read book Monkey to Man written by Gowan Dawson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine the iconic depiction of evolution, the "march of progress," and its role in shaping our understanding of how humans evolved We are all familiar with the "march of progress," the representation of evolution that depicts a series of apelike creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching the upright human form. Its emphasis on linear progress has had a decisive impact on public understanding of evolution, yet the image contradicts modern scientific conceptions of evolution as complex and branching. This book is the first to examine the origins and history of this ubiquitous and hugely consequential illustration. In a story spanning more than a century, from Victorian Britain to America in the Space Age, Gowan Dawson traces the interconnected histories of the two most important versions of the image: the frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) and "The Road to Homo Sapiens," a fold-out illustration in the best-selling book Early Man (1965). Dawson explores how the recurring appearances of this image pointed to shifting scientific and public perspectives on human evolution, as well as indicated novel artistic approaches and advancements in technology.
Download or read book Retrieving Darwin s Revolutionary Idea written by Samuel Grove and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwin's discovery of evolution is as celebrated as Galileo's laws of motion or Newton's discovery of gravity. But this was only half the story. Not content to prove that evolution had happened, Darwin sought to convey its full humbling implications. Thus he formulated the theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular belief, this theory ran exactly counter to scientific reason and was consequently rejected by the scientific community of the time. This wasn’t the only reason Darwin’s critics recoiled. His theory robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design. The fate of his ideas, for the time being at least, would be left to the heretics he inspired in other domains. Darwin's radical thought anticipated Nietzsche's Godless philosophy, Marx's class-based economics and Freud's psychological theories of the unconscious. It would take a further 80 years for Darwinism to become accepted as mainstream science, but it came at the expense of its counter-scientific core. For the remainder of the twentieth century a popularized Darwinism would become the touchstone for backlash movements in philosophy, economics and psychology—disciplines he once so radicalized. This is the story of how the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became the most reactionary idea of the twentieth.
Download or read book The True Adventures of Charley Darwin written by Carolyn Meyer and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just in time for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Meyer tells the story of his restless childhood, unrequited teenage love, and a passion for studying nature that was so great, Darwin would sacrifice everything to pursue it.
Download or read book Imagining God written by Garrett Green and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garrett Green examines the point at which divine revelation and human experience meet, where the priority of grace is acknowledged while allowing its dynamics to be described in analytical and comparative terms as a religious phenomenon.
Download or read book Darwin Deleted written by Peter J. Bowler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of science text imagining how evolutionary theory and biology would have been understood if Darwin had never published his "Origin of Species" and other works.--publisher summary.
