History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene

by Edited by James Richard Moore

• ISBN13: 9780521524780
• ISBN10: 0521524784
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of thirteen essays by prominent scholars explores the history of evolutionary thought in all of its cultural richness over the past two hundred years. Evolutionary ideas have undergone fundamental changes and are now found to have diverse sources and universal scope. They are no longer beholden to biologists' understanding of their own past, and do not focus exclusively on Charles Darwin. This volume aims to address the problem of the human significance of evolution. The contributors draw on contemporary sources as diverse as medicine, literature and natural history tableaux, as well as the resources of publishing history, feminine scholarship, and the histories of politics, sociology, and philosophy. The essays offer new perspectives on familiar figures such as Erasmus, Charles Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, Huxley, and Haeckel, but also on many lesser known participants in the evolutionary debates.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Contributors	xi
Introductory conversation	1	(38)
Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of evolution?	39	(32)
Roy Porter
Nature's powers: A reading of Lamarck's distinction between creation and production	71	(28)
Ludmilla Jordanova
Lamarckism and democracy: Corporations, corruption and comparative anatomy in the 1830s	99	(32)
Adrian Desmond
The nebular hypothesis and the science of progress	131	(34)
Simon Schaffer
Behind the veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges	165	(30)
James A. Secord
Of love and death: Why Darwin `gave up Christianity'	195	(36)
James R. Moore
Encounters with Adam, or at least the hyaenas: Nineteenth-century visual representations of the deep past	231	(22)
Martin Rudwick
Huxley and woman's place in science: The `woman question' and the control of Victorian anthropology	253	(32)
Evelleen Richards
Ideology, evolution and late-Victorian agnostic popularizers	285	(26)
Bernard Lightman
Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus and the secularization of nature	311	(18)
Paul Weindling
Holding your head up high: Degeneration and orthogenesis in theories of human evolution	329	(26)
Peter J. Bowler
Evolution, ideology and world view: Darwinian religion in the twentieth century	355	(20)
John R. Durant
Persons, organisms and . . . primary qualities	375	(28)
Robert M. Young
Afterword	403	(12)
Index	415