Yan Fu's Unfaithful Translation of Thomas Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics'

This paper analyses Yan Fu’s translation of the title and the key terms in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and shows that his unfaithfulness was mainly due to his personal intention to inspire the Chinese people to fight against foreign enemies and the feudal system in late nineteenth-century China. In his famous The Heavenly Theory of Evolution, the translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu added the traditional Chinese value of ‘heaven’ by translating ‘evolution’ as ‘heavenly evolution’ in order to make Darwin’s theory more acceptable and easier to understand by target readers. When he translated terms such as ‘competition’ and ‘natural selection’, Yan Fu borrowed the slogan of the Westernizing reform to explain the relationship linking evolution, competition and selection. Yan Fu wanted to arouse people’s attention to the theory of evolution and hoped they would use evolutionary thought as a theoretical weapon to save themselves and the country from a national crisis. His unfaithful translation appealed to the scholars to make them spread the theory through their social influence.

Life on the Earth

Change in life forms over the long span of the Earth’s history, and the theory of evolution are discussed in chapter 7. Along with the tenets of geologic time (chapters 3 and 4) and plate tectonics (chapters 5 and 6), evolution encompasses another foundational idea in geology. This chapter examines the history of evolutionary thought and theory, starting with Charles Darwin and his work on natural selection. The historic “Bone Wars” that occurred with the discovery of the dinosaur fossils is an example of how fossils are used and sometimes misused to unravel the evolution of a significant branch in the Earth’s history of life. So too, the story of horses and their ancestors is portrayed in the Cenozoic era, as early equine ancestor species responded in their body size and tooth and foot structure to changes in climate and the opening of grasslands. The number and variety of life forms waxes and wanes over geologic time, through evolution and sometimes extinction events, only to re-emerge over eons, eras, periods, and epochs, leading to pulses of biodiversity in the fossil record. The theory of evolution was forged after the work by Darwin and others by later developments in molecular biology and DNA research which support modern evolutionary theory.

Epistasis and Evolution

The concept of epistasis was introduced into evolutionary theory more than a hundred years ago. Its history is marked by controversies regarding its importance for the evolutionary process, as exemplified by the debate between Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright in the wake of the modern synthesis. In this case the disagreement was about the shape of the adaptive landscape, which is determined by epistasis. Wright believed that epistasis causes the adaptive landscape to be rugged with many local peaks, whereas Fisher viewed evolution as a smooth, steady progression toward a unique optimum. Even today, the different meanings attributed to epistasis continue to spawn confusion. Nevertheless, a consensus is emerging, according to which the term should be used to designate interactions between genetic effects on phenotypes in the broadest sense. Stated differently, in the presence of epistasis the phenotypic effects of a gene depend on its genetic context. In evolutionary theory the phenotype of primary interest is organismal fitness, but principally the concept applies to any genotype-phenotype map. Reflecting the Fisherian view, throughout the 20th century epistasis was often considered to be a residual perturbation on the main effects of individual genes. Following the advent of sequencing techniques providing insights into the molecular basis of genotype-phenotype maps, over the past two decades it has become clear, however, that epistasis is the rule rather than an exception. This has motivated a large number of empirical studies exploring the patterns and evolutionary consequences of epistasis across a wide range of scales of organismal and genomic complexity. Correspondingly, mathematical and computational tools have been developed for the analysis of experimental data, and models have been constructed to elucidate the mechanistic and statistical origins of genetic interactions. Despite a certain inherent vagueness, the concept takes center stage in modern evolutionary thought as a framework for organizing the accumulating understanding of the relationship among genotype, phenotype, and organism.

The Role of Non-Adaptive Design Doctrine in Evolutionary Thought

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was, to a certain extent, influenced and shaped by external factors, including the milieu of ideas in the early-nineteenth century, regarding how the natural world should be understood. Therefore, these ideas and their influences have received considerable attention. The role of non-adaptive design ideas, however, has not been fully explored. In particular, Darwin’s requirement and rejection of the religious doctrines of adaptive and non-adaptive design, respectively, are important and often unappreciated. Here, I analyze these ideas and how they influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution. I find they played an important role in both his theory development and justification, revealing a core theological belief in Darwin’s theory; namely, that the creator would not create non-adaptive designs. This paper explores this belief and its context.

Deconstruction, dissipation and death, and the ‘casting-away of the law’?

In this brief tribute, I pursue the long-promised imaginary conversation with Peter Fitzpatrick and engage two themes: the nature of an abyss and the conversion of Karl Marx from a revolutionary thinker to a best exemplar of evolutionary thought. If these themes make some sense, a good way of being with Peter is a further exploration amidst us all.

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Modernist epic is more interesting and diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction, it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century—a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as “the eclipse of Darwinism”—evolution’s significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling the national story, the new epic contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a fresh basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.

The Wicklow Essays

This chapter focuses on the essays Synge wrote and revised over a decade (1898–1908) during his travels in Wicklow. Beginning with a discussion of Synge’s engagement with natural history, and his simultaneous engagement with positivistic science and works on spiritualism and mysticism, the chapter firstly argues that Synge’s religious sense was pantheistic and worked to reconcile his belief in evolutionary science with a sense of the numinous. Drawing on ecocritical scholarship, the chapter reads Synge’s essays alongside his contemporary reading of evolutionary theorists such as Henry Drummond, T. H. Huxley, and Darwin, and writers who applied evolutionary thought to anthropology and sociology, such as James Frazer and Herbert Spencer. By showing that Synge worked to ‘re-enchant’ nature, emphasizing close connection with the physical world as the principal source of spiritual experience, and by placing this alongside the occult knowledge explored in the previous chapter, Chapter 2 shows that Synge’s view of nature is essentially mystical. Synge’s contribution to little magazines is used to trace the development of his work, showing how the illustrations chosen for his article ‘The Last Fortress of the Celt’ work to compound Synge’s presentation of the Irish peasant as a member of the global primitive. Finally, this is shown to have a socialistic dimension through Synge’s writings about forms of labour, in which the vagrant figure, through the rejection of the unequal exchange of time and capital, is freed into a sort of religious state which Synge then associates with the opposition between ‘vigorous’ and Decadent art.