Darwin's Ideas Research Articles

Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson and the Evolution of Happiness

This article explores the interconnected perspectives of Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson on happiness, offering a comprehensive analysis of their respective contributions to the understanding of this elusive concept. It contextualises Darwin’s and Dickinson’s views within the broader historiography of happiness, juxtaposing them with religious depictions, particularly the Christianisation of the idea. Unlike religious interpretations, Darwin’s discoveries challenged providential design, asserting chance as a governing principle in natural processes. To be more precise, his groundbreaking evolutionary theory, particularly outlined in On The Origin of Species, significantly alter traditional notions of happiness by emphasising the role of emotional and instinctive drives. Besides, this article underscores the impact of Darwin's ideas on Dickinson's scepticism toward religious interpretations of happiness, evident in the alignment of her poetic expressions with the challenges to faith during Darwin's transformative era. By means of examining several of Dickinson’s poems and letters in conjunction with Darwin’s autobiography, it establishes a dialogue between the two figures, revealing Dickinson's nuanced engagement with Darwinian concepts. The exploration extends then to Dickinson's approach to chance, as reflected in her poetic exploration of nature's workings. Likewise, it highlights Darwin's impact on Dickinson's worldview, suggesting that she valued chance as a gift, aligning with his view that chance is indispensable to the origin of new species. Overall, it offers a rich examination of the dynamic interplay between Dickinson's poetic vision and Darwin's scientific insights in shaping the evolving concept of happiness in the nineteenth-century.

Social Darwinism Revisited: How four critics altered the meaning of a near-obsolete term, greatly increased its usage, and thereby changed social science

Many social scientists still resist Darwinian insights. A possible reason for this is a fear of being associated with Social Darwinism. This article updates a 2002 search for appearances of Social Darwinism in articles and reviews on the JSTOR database. This database has since increased substantially in size, and it now includes far more publications in languages other than English. Use of the term Social Darwinism was rare before the 1940s. Talcott Parsons used it in 1932 to criticise the analytic use of the core Darwinian concepts in social science. Subsequently, and for the first time, Herbert Spencer and Willam Graham Sumner were described as Social Darwinists. This led to a major change of meaning of the term, where it was associated more, but not entirely, with free market individualism. With this reconstructed meaning, a 1944 bestselling book by Richard Hofstadter provoked an explosion of usage of the term in postwar years. The continuing use of the term is partly ideologically motivated and has served to deter consideration of Darwinian ideas in social science.

Narration of Evolutionary Theory and Educational Thought

Darwin's theory of evolution not only challenged the omnipotence of the Western Christian God but also eroded anthropocentrism, causing identity anxiety and crises of belonging among Christian believers in Britain. This influence extended to literature, where Victorian children's literature authors like Kingsley, Carroll, and Kipling engaged in a dialogue with evolutionary theory. They explored the fantasy nature of children's literature and the proximity of children to animals to address the anxieties and confusion arising from evolution. Embracing Darwin's ideas, these authors argued that anatomy, morphology, and even language could not distinguish humans from animals; only morality, emotions, imagination, and creativity facilitated human evolution. They warned against moral decline leading to evolutionary reversal and emphasized the need for education to focus on these qualities rather than rote memorization.

Disputing Darwin: On Piloerection and Mental Illness.

Most of Charles Darwin's ideas have withstood the test of time, but some of them turned out to be dead ends. This article focuses on one such dead end: Darwin's ideas about the connection between piloerection and mental illness. Piloerection is a medical umbrella term to refer to a number of phenomena in which our hair tends to stand on end. Darwin was one of the first scientists to study it systematically. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he discusses piloerection in the context of his analysis of the expressions involved in fear and anger, relying heavily on the evidence provided by one of his correspondents, the British psychiatrist James Crichton Browne. This essay reveals how Darwin's initial doubts about the similarity between piloerection in animals and psychiatric patients were eased when studying photographic portraits of female psychiatric patients sent to him by Crichton Browne. It considers arguments against Darwin's reading of these portraits and the apparent contrast between this reading and his own skepticism, in later years, about the value of documentary photography. The article concludes with some notes regarding the reception of Darwin's ideas about psychopathology.

The God of Chance and Purpose: Divine Involvement in a Secular Evolutionary World

The God of Chance and Purpose: Divine Involvement in a Secular Evolutionary World

Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell

Bell’s remarkable book examines racial politics at three “abolitionist colleges” that offered interracial education in the nineteenth century—Oberlin College, Berea College, and the short-lived New York Central College (1848–1860), which was the most radical of the group. These schools were among the institutions in the United States most committed to multiracial democracy. According to Bell, although the schools were run largely by white men, the Black students were the ones continually pushing the colleges to honor their commitment to universal human equality. These colleges emerged when racist violence and prejudice were spreading and hardening in both the North and South. Black students also faced challenges on these supposedly enlightened campuses. The most progressive white allies were not immune to fears of amalgamation—interracial mixing—which clearly showed limits in white egalitarian thinking. As in the abolitionist movement generally, white paternalism and its emphasis on racial uplift also worked against the universalist equality that Black men and women advanced. Even white college leaders’ particular understanding of equality, as about opportunity and individual liberty, “could make whites oblivious to the continued significance of race” at these colleges (89). Ultimately, as Bell puts it, whites in these college “communities were more comfortable reforming specific racial injustices than reimagining race itself” (10).This shortsightedness had profound effects on the schools’ trajectories following the Civil War. Bell documents in incredible detail how practices of interracial sociability and exchange broke down at Berea and Oberlin. College officials no longer enforced social equality on campus. Students could choose to associate closely with students of other races—or not. Prior historians explain this declension as part and parcel of the emergent Jim Crow regime. Bell offers a more satisfying explanation. The pre-existing limitations of white collegians and college leaders’ egalitarian thinking, coupled with the feeling that they had won the big struggle—abolishing slavery—produced indifference to their institutions’ historic missions. Many whites at abolitionist colleges came to accept contemporary Darwinian ideas of social evolutionism, namely that humans developed in stages and that Black people were simply at an earlier stage. This notion deviated dramatically from the ideal of equality that Black students championed.Degrees of Equality is a mode of social and cultural history based on impeccable archival research. Bell mined student writings, institutional sources, public accounts of the colleges, and records of extracurricular groups to great effect, all of it allowing Bell to ground his arguments in evocative descriptions of students’ lived experience. Better still, Bell situates his case studies not only in the histories of race and higher education in the nineteenth century but also in sociological debates about how to foster egalitarian communities. Bell explicitly addresses how his study speaks to “contact theory,” which examines how intergroup interactions can challenge prejudice and produce shared feeling. He lends support to sociological critiques of color-blindness, which often sustain prejudice and inequality, as Bell shows that it did in the postbellum years. Chapter 3 draws especially well from sociological theory. By reading the experiences of four Oberlin alumnae in light of Black feminist scholarship, Bell uncovers the many subtle ways in which the college and abolitionists continued to indulge prejudice, and why radical challenges to these practices were so necessary.Bell ends by suggesting that this history offers much to modern university administrators, as they try to create racially egalitarian spaces on campuses. Degrees of Equality shows how deep and careful historical research can speak to larger interdisciplinary conversations within the present moment. This book demands the attention of historians of American education, abolition, and race in the nineteenth century.

The evolutionary sociology of J.Turner: An introduction to the concept of Spencer selection

This paper describes the main ideas of J.Turner related to his concept of Spencer selection. In his concept, he made an attempt to formulate the basic principles of Spencer selection, and also provided an argument showing how H.Spencer's evolutionary approach, contrary to popular belief, can be relevant for sociology today. J.Turner believes that the main driving forces of human evolution strengthened (or introduced) certain cognitive, motivational and behavioural tendencies, and people used these tendencies purposefully to create a certain culture and social structure. H.Spencer's explanation does not directly ignore sociological explanations of the dynamics and evolution of social systems, unlike simple modern evolutionary explanations of institutionalisation in terms of evolving behavioural tendencies based on the concept of natural (Darwinian) selection. The latter are used in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology based on implicit assumptions about the automatic nature of the process of transforming neurological reactions and behavioural tendencies into social structures and institutions. The basis of Spencerian selection is formed by a certain set of needs of people (individual level) and social differentiation of institutional organisation (reproduction, regulation, production and distribution) as the population grows (societal level), as well as changes caused by war with their specific dynamics. Thus, Darwinian ideas about the natural selection of individual organisms can be counted as sufficient for understanding and explantion of the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena traditionally studied by sociologists. For this purpose, it is necessary to turn to a special type of selection of superorganisms, formulated by H.Spencer in his works at the dawn of the formation of sociology itself as a separate science. In addition, in itself, such a combination of sociological and biological models of social processes is promising for the development of individual multidisciplinary research programmes that can subsequently significantly strengthen and enrich the social sciences as a whole.

Two theories of action - Edelman's Neuronal group Selection and the Poetics of Paul Valéry

Motivated by two imperatives as they are framed in Code Biology – mechanism and actualization - we have turned to other attempts of modeling life at work. Here, we present two theories devoted to minds in action – one explains neuronal function, and the other dissects poetic crafting. Neuronal networks activation and poetic composition, respectively, are seen as the selection of specific connective patterns of either neurons or words, in action. Gerald Edelman, as a scientist, has generalized the Darwinian ideas of variation and selection to the cellular level in his “Sciences of Recognition”, a broader theoretical framework that includes the “Theory of Neuronal Group Selection” (TGNS) analyzed here. Paul Valéry, as a poet, has reconciled inspiration and technique in what he has called “works of the mind”, the creative processes mediated by sensing and making sense, in the “Poetic Theory” we present here he advances the mechanisms of artistic composition. We have identified the main ideas conveyed in these two theories, i.e., variation and selection, integration and differentiation, ambiguity and degeneracy, binding and blending, stasis and semiosis, by pairing and comparing textual fragments from the authors. We show that TGNS and the Theory of Poetic Action reconcile Sciences and Arts by recognizing that Natural Selection is a mechanism implied by formative acts in both scenarios and discuss to which extent Natural Convention - the main contribution of Code Biology – is integrated by the two thinkers.

Universalism and the Malaysian anglophone novel: Exploring inequality, migrancy, and class in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors

ABSTRACT Tash Aw’s 2019 novel We, the Survivors narrates the story of a convicted killer, Ah Hock, whose life serves as a lens to refract contemporary Malaysia’s postcolonial history and its ethnic and class politics, as well as its location within the circuitry of global capitalism. This article examines Aw’s representation of migrancy, class, and inequality in contemporary Malaysian society, reading the text as a critique of global capitalism through its tactical employment of a universalist idiom that appropriates Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition. The text also reflects on the ethics of novel-writing since Ah Hock’s oral testimony is ostensibly mediated by a more privileged character. Aw locates his novel in the pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism while asking critical questions of his own position within the transnational literary marketplace, thereby underscoring the urgent need to re-world the world created by global capitalism.

The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

The late ascent of Darwin's Descent: exploring human evolution and women's role for a new China, 1927–1965

AbstractDarwin's ideas held sway among Chinese intellectuals by the early twentieth century. Yet the usual emphasis was a Spencerism instead of Darwin's original ideas. As a result, translations of The Descent of Man in the early twentieth century quickly fell into oblivion. When the embryologist Zhu Xi (1900–62) eventually decided to give all evolutionary theories a comprehensive examination, he nevertheless found the idea of sexual evolution inadequate, as expressed in his volume Biological Evolution (1958). Only in the 1950s did serious efforts to translate Descent gather momentum, thanks to eugenicist and sociologist Pan Guangdan (1899–1967). Such efforts were not only responses to a renewed interest in Darwinism under the socialist regime, but also expressions that synthesized both scholars’ earlier paths in wrestling with schemes of human evolution and the roles of women in China's survival and renewal. Trained in different scientific and cultural milieus and holding almost oppositional views, the two scholars nevertheless converged in finding new meanings in Darwin's Descent.

“We Are Expected to Be Pretty and Well-Dressed Till We Drop”: Fashion and “Passing” in the Novels of Edith Wharton

Focusing on Edith Wharton’s New York trilogy of (1862–1937), the author interprets the function of fashionable dress as a means of constructing social identity. The paper looks at how the concept of “passing” develops through the language of dress and the poetics of behavior. The semiotics of dress reflects the wearer’s strategies of performative “passing”: efforts to become accepted in a certain social group, in this case, New York high society of the Gilded Age. The paper analyses two key conceptual discourses used in the works of Edith Wharton: Veblenian theory of the leisure class and the Darwinian idea of natural selection.

Science, Sensibility and Gender in Argentina, 1820–1852

This article analyzes how scientific thinking evolved in Argentina during the 1820s and 1830s. I will focus on liberals’ association of science with the emergence of a new male sensibility that feminized the role of men in society. This gendered scientific culture explains how liberals clashed in the 1830s with the policies of the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose hyper masculinist model based on the authority of the father was perceived not only as anti-civilization, but also as anti-science. This association of gender and science helps us to explain how the introduction of Darwinian ideas that seemed to support a more masculinist representation of evolution, now ruled by laws of survival and competition, was perceived as a contradiction of past ideas by the 1870s.

The Evolution of Evolutionism in China, 1870–1930

The earliest references to Darwin in China, which came by way of the network of Protestant missionaries, emerged in the early 1870s: the principle of general transformism and ideas about human origins were transmitted to the Chinese intellectual landscape. Only with the “evolutionary sensation” aroused by Yan Fu, in the mid-1890s, did Chinese readers begin to learn of Darwinian principles like the “struggle for existence” and “natural selection.” Translation of the Origin began much later, in 1902, and the initial effort was misleading. In his translation of the first five chapters of the Origin, published before 1906, Ma Junwu used linguistic strategies to modify Darwin’s texts so as to reflect Yan’s progressive transformism. But in his 1920 translation of the book in its entirety, Ma redid his earlier work. The complete Chinese Origin did not generate a sensation in the biological community. Even so, the deliberate selection, absorption, and appropriation of Darwinian ideas by the Chinese over the next several decades assimilated the new evolution into their own cultural setting. The case of “Darwin in China” details a specific Chinese context that deepens our understanding of how audiences for new scientific theories can be actively involved in the processes of appropriation and universalizing, while also disseminating, modifying, and assimilating Darwinian ideas in local context.

Origin of the Plague: Prospects of Ecological-Molecular-Genetic Synthesis

Plague, which is infamous for three devastating pandemics, remains to this day one of the most dangerous human diseases. Its pathogen, the microbe Yersinia pestis, is a priority agent in the arsenal of possible bacteriological weapons, which requires increased attention to the preventive development of systems of biological (bacteriological) security. Deep knowledge of the natural processes that caused the emergence of the causative agent of plague in nature might contribute to it. In the problem of the origin of Y. pestis, there are currently two alternative approaches, molecular-genetic (MG) and ecological. MG data led to the innovative idea of the saltational transformation of a clone of the ancestral psychrophilic saprozoobiont pseudotuberculosis microbe Y. pseudotuberculosis O:1b into a population of the plague pathogen Y. pestis by means of horizontal transfer of two plague-specific virulence plasmids pFra and pPst from the external environment or from other bacteria and inactivation/deletion of genes that lost their functions in a fundamentally new habitat, the vole (Microtinae) populations in Asia. The ecological scenario is based on the Darwinian idea of the adaptogenesis of the plague microbe with the rapid “quantum” formation of its properties in the marmot- flea (Marmota sibirica and Oropsylla silantiewi) parasitic system under the conditions of the Central Asia psychroarid climate at the turn of the Pleistocene and Holocene periods. Three important factors of quantum speciation of the plague microbe were identified: marmot heterothermy during hibernation, an oxidative burst of macrophages in the body of repeatedly awakening hibernating marmots, and stress-induced muta-genesis of the evolving microbe due to the oxidative burst of macrophages. This paper argues the principle of complementarity between the environmental and MG approaches. The prospect of solving the problem of quantum speciation of the causative agent of plague and the development of tools and methods for treating and preventing this disease is seen in the synthesis of the ecological and MG approaches.

‘An entangled bank’: Evolusionêre patrone in die Winterbach-tweeluik Klaaglied vir Koos en erf

The novels of the contemporary Afrikaans writer, Ingrid Winterbach, display a distinctive predisposition towards naturalhistory and Darwinian ideas. Her fictionalisation of a nineteenth-century worldview is underpinned by an imaginative (neo- Victorian) exploration of Darwinian concepts such as growth, metamorphosis, transformation and evolution. In his study on the Darwinian imagination in Victorian fiction, George Levine identifies a gestalt of ideas (both detectable in novels and in science) which can be regarded as central to the Darwin project. Darwin’s metaphor of an entangled bank (which depicts life as an overcrowded space where numerous species compete, diversify and reproduce in a struggle for survival) will be specifically assessed in this evocritical reading of Winterbach’s earlier publications, Klaaglied vir Koos (“Dirge for Koos”, 1984) and Erf (1986).

Freedom versus Accountability in the Academy

Freedom versus Accountability in the Academy Akeel Bilgrami (bio) the question of freedom of inquiry has been in the air, no doubt, ever since human inquiry began in any systematic way. But institutions of learning face the question in a rather more specific form since, on the one hand, they may claim to be uniquely privileged in possessing such freedom because inquiry itself is their most central function, yet on the other hand, they may be host to constraints on freedom that are necessitated by the institutional protocols that academies, as sites that combine both pedagogy and research, must adopt. Academic freedom has had a long and complex evolution, and that complexity owes to a wide variety of factors, some from changes of the culture within academic institutions and some from conditions in the mundiality of the world at large—whether political, economic, technological, or ideological—since such institutions are no longer (perhaps never were) sealed as cloisters. Though it might seem that the issues faced by Galileo in Europe were in essence no different from those faced by proponents of Darwin's ideas today in the American heartland, it would be obtuse to consider that essence as something unaffected by the tremendously large changes in the polity, the state, the law, the church, and the mentalities of ordinary people. That much is obvious given the vast distance of time and space between Renaissance Europe and contemporary America. But often the context of discussions of freedom of inquiry can change much more locally and within a very few years, and yet carry a vast conceptual [End Page 617] transformation in what the central issues are. I want to focus on one such local and very recent change in American universities, and consider what I believe is a really quite novel development in the entire question of academic freedom. It has been the subject of intense debate on campuses in the past couple of years, with cool heads increasingly gone missing on both sides. Before I address the dispute itself and come to one large conclusion about it at the end of this short essay, it may be worth first briefly expounding how the dispute has emerged against a background of political developments in the wider social and political context and their curricular and ideological effects on American universities. This story may be utterly familiar, but it bears retelling, if only to put into context the particular cast and character of the contemporary dispute I want to focus on. ________ the creative turmoil of the universities in the 1960s to a considerable extent emerged out of a broadly conceived Left politics among students, initially reacting to the draft and, therefore, highly critical of the government's misadventures in Southeast Asia, but then often going on to derive that criticism from a wider and more fundamental Left critique of capitalism and its effects both on American society and distant nations. Racial politics ran parallel to this mobilization on campuses and, as we know, produced one of the more remarkable pieces of legislation in American history. I say that it ran "parallel" to the Left politics on campuses initially triggered by the war in Vietnam, but I don't want to give the impression by that term that they were merely contingently or miscellaneously related. An ethos in which racial issues were raised in tandem with conspicuously Left-based mobilizations gave the politics of race a very specific complexion in that decade. Its focus was primarily on a struggle to acquire rights hitherto unpossessed by a group defined upon a racial identity, and that political focus did not get dispersed to a more broadly cultural racial politics as it did in the decades that followed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, and which [End Page 618] came to be described as "identity" politics. This is a point of some significance, and something like this initial restricted political focus dispersing to a broader cultural canvas is also perhaps true of the trajectory of feminist politics from those earlier decades of the 1960s and 1970s to the later decades of the past century. This is not the occasion to make clear or rigorous what is...

Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy's Evolving Literary Response

Although Tolstoy was deeply critical of Darwin in his notebooks, diaries, letters, and essays, his literary imagination was profoundly influenced by Darwinian theory. Tolstoy's major novels are Darwinian in form–modeling his ideals of gradual development, chance, and interconnectivity–while rejecting Darwin in their explicit discussions of his ideas. War and Peace is set in a pre‐Darwinian world where only the author, not the characters, has access to the new worldview opened up by ideas of evolution, natural selection and the struggle for existence. In this work, Darwinian ideas are manifest in the way Tolstoy conceived of the struggle of nations and individuals at the heart of the book and also in the “Second Epilogue,” where he references Darwin directly to help explain and justify his theory of history. Anna Karenina, by contrast, unfolds in the new Darwinian age, where both the characters, as well as the author, engage with Darwin's theories. His influence can be felt in the structuring worldview of the author, which emphasizes chance over teleology and interweaves multiple plotlines. However, the characters' own engagements with Darwin are designed to undermine his ideas, vindicating faith over the new scientific worldview. Anna embraces the “struggle for existence” as natural law and ends her life, while Levin turns away from Darwin and is saved from despair.

A EPISTEMOLOGIA DE BACHELARD E A CONSTRUÇÃO DO CONCEITO DE ADAPTAÇÃO DAS ESPÉCIES

A adaptação das espécies é uma das ideias centrais da síntese evolutiva, contudo, alguns obstáculos epistemológicos estão presentes na construção histórica desse conceito. A história da ciência emerge de interpretações dos contextos de desenvolvimento e produção da ciência, os obstáculos epistemológicos emergem dos mesmos contextos, dessa forma a epistemologia de Bachelard é adotada como referencial teórico principal. Ao utilizar a epistemologia histórica e crítica de Bachelard, são evidenciados os obstáculos epistemológicos presentes na construção do conceito de adaptação, ao longo do tempo, desde a visão fixista das espécies até à síntese moderna. Rupturas e descontinuísmos também foram evidenciados nessa retomada histórico-epistemológica. Concluímos que o conceito de adaptação passou por controvérsias. Em princípio mudanças foram atribuídas à obra do criador que visava o melhor arranjo possível para as espécies; em outro momento as ideias de mudança ganharam força, no entanto, a adaptação foi entendida como uma resposta ao ambiente; posteriormente, com a publicação das ideias de Darwin, a adaptação é compreendida como algo que existe nos indivíduos (os indivíduos apresentam diferentes tipos de adaptações), porém o ambiente seleciona as combinações mais favoráveis; a conciliação entre a teoria de Darwin e Mendel culminou na síntese evolutiva, aqui os mecanismos genéticos mais a seleção natural explicam a surgimento e a fixação de características adaptativas nas espécies.

Evolution and Economics in Robert Herrick's The Memoirs of an American Citizen

Abstract This article examines Robert Herrick's business novel, The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), and its engagement with competing views regarding the application of Darwinism in business practices and economic theory through the rise of its protagonist Edward Van Harrington and his corporation. The Memoirs of an American Citizen illustrates the influence of Darwinian individualism in fictional representations of business competition; however, Herrick's novel also contains a different interpretation of Darwin's ideas applied to the economic growth of Harrington's corporation that is presented as a result of economic evolution. Herrick's novel struggles to reconcile an evolutionary interpretation of social and business practices with individuals' capacity to exercise moral choices.