The Act or Process of Dying Out: The Importance of Darwinian Extinction in Argentine Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Novoa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Process Variation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Intellectual Elites

ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement.

Mind

On Purpose ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 166-194
Author(s):  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
William James ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Established Church

This chapter focuses on the writer Thomas Hardy who was raised a good Christian, a member of the established church. Then he read The Origin of Species and it all came crashing down. His poem “Hap,” written in 1866, tells it all, implying that God does not exist but that with his going, humans lose all meaning to life. The chapter also discusses crucial issues about how philosophers handled mind and meaning, about knowledge and morality. Not just the nonexistence of God— agnosticism or atheism pretty much became the norm in the profession—but the lack of meaning. The American pragmatists rode with things pretty well. Whether this was part of the general, late-nineteenth-century American vigor and rise to prominence and power, they found the challenge of Darwinism stimulating and thought provoking. For someone like William James, the struggle for existence and natural selection translated readily into a theory of knowledge—ideas fight it out just as organisms fight it out.

The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen MacDuffie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Evolutionary Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Scheme ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
Inheritance Of Acquired Characteristics ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scholars have long described Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books as a Darwinian narrative. Overlooked, however, is the way in which the text explicitly discusses Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, especially the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This essay contextualizes Mowgli's narrative within a fierce late-nineteenth-century debate about whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection or Lamarckian use inheritance was the main driver of evolutionary change. Kipling describes his protagonist's maturation to “Master of the Jungle” in thoroughly Lamarckian terms, as an evolutionary process propelled by experience, effort, and conscious adaptation. But some of the conceptual incoherence that troubled the Lamarckian evolutionary scheme when it was applied to human racial difference also troubles Kipling's account of Mowgli's genetic past and the evolutionary issue of his experiences.

Against the poetics of decadence: Latin America and the aesthetics of regeneration

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-143
Author(s):  
Michela Coletta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American Culture ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
Intellectual Elites

In the late nineteenth century, sociological studies often functioned as a channel between the psychological and criminological sciences and the traditional field of literature. I argue that Nordau’s work, which drew as much upon Italian criminology as it did upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s sociological theory of aesthetics, constituted a major path by which ideas of degeneration taken from the medical and criminological sciences came to be a fundamental tool of interpretation of modern Latin American culture. One of the main lines of argument in this chapter is that social theories on the degeneration of modern art were useful to vast sectors of the late-nineteenth-century intellectual elites to identify with the values of modern civilisation. By linking the development of literary modernismo to the wider engagement with questions about the features of modern civilisation, this discussion offers a new reading of modernismo as a movement that in its boom phase helped foster ideas of modernity as an essentially urban − and therefore transnational − phenomenon through notions of refinement, disease and degeneration. The second part of the chapter shows how Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel marked a turning point from decadent civilisation to the idea of Latin American culture by building on a moral conception of aesthetics.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

John Lloyd Williams (1854–1945): profile of a Snowdonian botanist

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Physiology ◽  
Marine Algae ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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