‘Short-Spanned Living Creatures’: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Aaron Green
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Simple Structure ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain.

Evolution by Blind Chance

1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-360
Author(s):  
Barrie Britton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
World Views ◽  
Literal Interpretation ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Universe

Ever since Charles Darwin first published his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, there has been considerable disagreement among Christians concerning both the truth of evolutionary theory and its possible reconciliation with the Bible. Some Christians have taken the so-called ‘fundamentalist creationist’ position believing in a literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis. Others have adopted so-called ‘theistic evolutionist’ views accepting to various different degrees Darwinian ideas about origins. One point however on which most Christians (and indeed non-Christians) are agreed, is that an evolutionary process based on blind chance must necessarily conflict with all possible theistic world views and stands irreconcilable with the biblical text. It is this assertion which in this essay I hope to refute, as based on misunderstanding of the meaning of blind chance, of the mechanism of evolution and of the involvement of God in the universe.

scholarly journals Triumph of the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin

2009 ◽  
pp. 54-56
Author(s):  
V.I. Burenin
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species

This year, February, 12th marks a 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. It has already been 150 year since he published his work on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Descent Of Man

Charles Robert Darwin, the English naturalist, published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the follow-up work The Descent of Man in 1871. In these works, he argued for his theory of evolution through natural selection, applying it to all organisms, living and dead, including our own species, Homo sapiens. Although controversial from the start, Darwin’s thinking was deeply embedded in the culture of his day, that of a middle-class Englishman. Evolution as such was an immediate success in scientific circles, but although the mechanism of selection had supporters in the scientific community (especially among those working with fast-breeding organisms), its real success was in the popular domain. Natural selection, and particularly the side mechanism of sexual selection, were known to all and popular themes in fiction and elsewhere.

Generation and the Origin of Species (1837–1937): A Historiographical Suggestion

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. S. Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Heritable Variation ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

Bernard Norton's friends in the history of science have had many reasons for commemorating, with admiration and affection, not only his research and teaching but no less his conversation and his company. One of his most estimable traits was his refusal to beat about the bush in raising the questions he thought worthwhile pursuing. I still remember discoursing at Pittsburgh on Darwin's route to his theory of natural selection, and being asked at the end by Bernard what were Darwin's views on heredity. I answered with the conventional waffle to the effect that the theory concerned the populational fate rather than the individual production and transmission of heritable variation, so that whatever views Darwin had on heredity had only a subsidiary place in his theorizing. Bernard was not fooled. ‘I would have thought’, he said, ‘that in order to understand anyone's theorising about evolution it would be necessary to look at his views on heredity’.

The Loss of Rational Design

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 235-257
Author(s):  
Friedel Weinert
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Rational Design ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
British Association ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Descent Of Man

Charles Darwin published hisOrigin of Specieson November 24, 1859. Whatever hurdle the theory of natural selection faced in its struggle for acceptance, its impact on human self-images was almost immediate. Well before Darwin had the chance of applying the principle of natural selection to human origins—in hisDescent of Man(1871)—his contemporaries quickly and rashly drew the inference to man's descent from the ape. Satirical magazines likePunchdelighted in depicting Darwin with his imposing head on an apish body. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (June 1860), Bishop Wilberforce asked T. H. Huxley triumphantly whether he traced his ancestry to the ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. A wave of evolutionary texts swept over Europe (L. Biichner, E. Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, J. B. Lamarck, C. Lyell, F. Rolle, E. Tyler and K. Vogt). Written in English, French and German, they all had a common focus: the place of humans in a Darwinian world, including religion and morality.

What Psychology Students Know and Believe about Charles Darwin

1997 ◽  
Vol 81 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1372-1374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Knapp ◽  
Charles Rasmussen ◽  
Mary Jo Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Multiple Choice ◽  
Psychology Students ◽  
Advanced Students ◽  
The Status ◽  
Belief Statements

204 introductory and 154 advanced students in psychology were asked about their knowledge of Charles Darwin and endorsement of belief statements about the status of evolutionary theory. Advanced students had higher scores than introductory students on three of six multiple-choice knowledge items and differed from them on all six statements of belief as assessed by χ2 Advanced students appear to know more about evolutionary theory but may be less inclined to endorse its relevancy to psychology.

Cooperation and Altruism

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sloan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Social Adaptation ◽  
Herbivore Damage ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Cryptic Coloration ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Shed Light

People have always been fascinated by cooperation and altruism in animals, in part to shed light on our own propensity or reluctance to help others. Darwin’s theory added a certain urgency to the subject because the principle of “nature red in tooth and claw” superficially seems to deny the possibility of altruism and cooperation altogether. Some evolutionary biologists have accepted and even reveled in this vision of nature, giving rise to statements such as “the economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end . . . scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a hypocrite bleed”. Others have gone so far in the opposite direction as to proclaim the entire earth a unit that cooperatively regulates its own atmosphere (Lovelock 1979). The truth is somewhere between these two extremes; cooperation and altruism can evolve but only if special conditions are met. As might be expected from the polarized views outlined above, achieving this middle ground has been a difficult process. Science is often portrayed as a heroic march to the truth, but in this case, it is more like the Three Stooges trying to move a piano. I don’t mean to underestimate the progress that been made—the piano has been moved—but we need to appreciate the twists, turns, and reversals in addition to the final location. To see why cooperation and altruism pose a problem for evolutionary theory, consider the evolution of a nonsocial adaptation, such as cryptic coloration. Imagine a population of moths that vary in the degree to which they match their background. Every generation, the most conspicuous moths are detected and eaten by predators while the most cryptic moths survive and reproduce. If offspring resemble their parents, then the average moth will become more cryptic with every generation. Anyone who has beheld a moth that looks exactly like a leaf, right down to the veins and simulated herbivore damage, cannot fail to be impressed by the power of natural selection to evolve breathtaking adaptations at the individual level. Now consider the same process for a social adaptation, such as members of a group warning each other about approaching predators.

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