Darwin's Plots Research Articles

Some Soybean [Glycine max. L. (Merill)] Varieties Determination of Cultivation Possibilities of as Main Crop

This research was carried out at Batman University West Raman experimental area with 3 replications in order to determine the yield and yield components of some soybean varieties as the main crop under Batman conditions in the 2018 production year. In the study, 7 different soybean varieties (Umut-2002, Nova, Bravo, Asya, Ataem, Atakişi, Blaze) were used as plant materials. In the study, plant height, number of branches, first pod height, number of pods per plant, yield per decare and oil content were investigated. As a result of the study, the plant height is 64.90-72.47 cm, the number of branches is 4.83-9.23 pieces/plant, the first pod height is 10.70-15.20 cm, the number of pods per plant is 31.27- 49.23 pieces, the seed yield was determined as 244.05-554.44 kg/da and the oil content was between 17.82-24.83%. In addition, it was determined that the results of the heat map clustering, PCA and DARwin plots and the grouping of the relationships between cultivars, traits and cultivar*traits were confirmed.

Incalculably Diffusive

Incalculably Diffusive

After Darwin's Plots

Beer’s short essay reflects on three essays which were originally delivered as papers during the 2009 autumn session of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies seminar.

Introduction: Darwin and Literary Studies

Roughly a decade ago, it could be said that Charles Darwin's thought was notably absent from the discipline of literary studies. Although Darwin had long been seen as an important influence on specific writers or movements--Conrad and Hardy in England, for example, or American naturalism--this influence seemed to amount to little more than a fatalist recognition of the cruel logic of a godless cosmos. A major thinker of the nineteenth century, Darwin appeared to have almost no place in the various discourses that informed twentieth-century literary analysis, from Russian formalism and New Criticism through cultural materialism and queer theory. It is true that a few important works had been written in the 1980s that explicitly brought the insights and methods of contemporary theory to bear on Darwin and his cultural and intellectual legacies: here Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots, Margot Norris's Beasts of the Modern Imagination, and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists still stand out as vibrant works of scholarship. Yet while these books are cited and praised even today, they never launched entire research programs in the manner of contemporaneous works such as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men, or Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. This relative absence of Darwin from literary discussion was understandable, if regrettable. After all, applications of Darwin's thought to the social, the political, and the cultural have a notorious track record, having justified both eugenicists' interventions into human reproductive rights and Social Darwinists' justifications of social and economic inequalities. Humanists could be excused for expecting that renewed efforts at Darwinian cultural analysis would only reach intellectually predictable or politically repugnant conclusions. But wariness of such reductive ideas or reactionary agendas seemed to have quietly given way to outright avoidance of Darwin and even biology itself. An epistemological skepticism or methodological rigor regarding specific lines of argument had calcified into an unchallenged assumption that any gesture toward the biological would inevitably revive the kind of false universalisms that literary studies had spent much of the 1980s and 90s unmasking. At the same time, outside of literary studies, just the opposite trend seemed to be happening: Darwin was assuming an ever-greater prominence in scholarly and other public discourses. During the 1990s several disciplines beyond the hard sciences, such as philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, were taking up Darwinian theory while journalists and popularizers pumped out one best seller after another claiming to explain all manner of phenomena in terms of evolution by natural selection. In the public sphere, the most visible of these disciplines was the field of evolutionary psychology. Building on the sociobiology worked out in the 1970s by E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, and others, evolutionary psychology explicitly sought, under the banner of Wilson's consilience, (1) to apply theoretical models from evolutionary biology to human behavior. And while its claims remain highly controversial, the discipline itself, as Dana Carluccio points out in her contribution to this issue, become astonishingly popular over the last twenty-five years, both as a research program and as a pop culture phenomenon (510). Carluccio observes: Its proliferating publishing venues, academic societies, and textbooks are echoed by journalism, novels, and movies that have trumpeted the field's hypotheses, making them as ubiquitous in US culture today as psychoanalytic notions, such as Freudian slips. Someone who has never heard of evolutionary psychology is nonetheless likely to believe that men find physical cues of female fertility (like youth) attractive because it helps them pass on their genes. (510-11) Of course, if evolutionary psychological reasoning has passed over into pop culture or common sense--or, maybe more precisely, into what John Guillory has called spontaneous philosophy (2) (Sokal 476)--it might be suspected that this transition has been effortless for the simple reason that the gap was so narrow to begin with. …

Towards a Cryptanalysis: Genealogies of ‘Lit‐Crypts’ from Poe to the ‘Posts’

Towards a Cryptanalysis: Genealogies of ‘Lit‐Crypts’ from Poe to the ‘Posts’

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Anne-Julia Zwierlein.UNMAPPED COUNTRIES: BIOLOGICAL VISIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE. London: Anthem Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Bernard Lightman (bio) Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Anne-Julia Zwierlein; pp. xi + 282. London: Anthem Press, 2005, £14.99, $27.50. This fine collection of sixteen essays originated in an international conference held at the Centre for British Studies at the University of Bamberg. The authors focus on the exchange between biology, literature, and culture in the nineteenth century; although some essays discuss German, Russian, or American figures, British novelists and scientists predominate. Anne-Julia Zwierlein has gathered together a strong international group of contributors composed of the right mix of well-known senior scholars, such as Janet Browne, Laura Otis, Sally Shuttleworth, and Kate Flint, and up-and-coming young Turks. Their expertise lies in a broad range of disciplines, including English, comparative literature, the history of science, the history of medicine, art history, and women's studies, and the result is a rich, interdisciplinary set of essays. The collection is divided into three parts. Part one, "Science and Literature," contains two essays that treat the role of the imagination in science as well as the issue of scientific authority. In "Evolution and Degeneration," part two, there are seven essays, dealing with such topics as the problematic immoral ideas in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871), Darwin and feminism, Darwin's influence on utopian and dystopian fiction, Peter Kropotkin's theories about human sociability, the influence of evolutionary anthropology on fictional treatments of the unconscious, Darwinism in the art of Alfred Kubin, and debates over the significance of color in Homer. The seven essays in part three, "Physiology and Pathology," investigate the relationship between medicine and literature, including the notion of contagion in Rudolf Virchow and George Eliot; sensation novels and medical conceptions of women; medical and literary representations of childhood fear; and the discourse about parasites, surgery, and the senses in both science and literature. Edited collections of essays based on conferences are prone to a number of problems. The contributions can be uneven in quality. This cannot, however, be said of this particular collection: each of the essays has a sparkle and charm of its own. Some [End Page 358] collections lack coherence. But by focusing on nineteenth-century British biology, this work avoids trying to cover all of the sciences or all national contexts. Yet another common problem with edited conference volumes is the lag between the original event and the publication—many of these volumes take too long to be published, and their relevance to current scholarship can be compromised as a result. But again, the editor and the contributors are to be congratulated, as these papers from a 2004 conference have been edited and published relatively quickly. The project can be criticized for one shortcoming: the volume contains a large number of essays and they are relatively short in length. There were times when I wished that the authors had had more time to delve more deeply into their topics. Scholarly work in the field of Victorian science and literature has come a long, long way in the last twenty years. Inspired by the work of Gillian Beer, especially her Darwin's Plots (1983), and George Levine, in particular his Darwin and the Novelists (1988), the field has moved from a simplistic examination of the impact of science on literary texts to complex studies of the two-way traffic between scientific and literary discourse. Both were part of one culture during the Victorian era, notwithstanding the debates between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold. But Zwierlein is critical of Beer and Levine for initiating the "focus on evolutionary theory which has dominated scholarly debates ever since" (1). She proposes to correct the overemphasis on evolutionary theory in past scholarship by giving equal weight in the collection to the Victorians' interest in networks of cells and nerves and to post-Romantic organicism. "The collection aims at demonstrating," she declares, "that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than the habitual reference to Darwin would have us believe" (7). Since parts two and three contain the same...

Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle Kenneth Thompson (bio) Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, by Lawrence Frank; pp. x + 249. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, £47.50, $90.00. This study of nineteenth-century detective fiction draws on Lawrence Frank's wide reading in the history of science. Applying methods of close reading to both scientific and literary texts, Frank argues that Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle "promoted a new, emerging worldview that was secular and naturalistic." Rejecting "nineteenth-century scriptural literalism, Natural Theology, and the vestiges of Enlightenment Deism," they "responded explicitly and implicitly to the scientific controversies of the day" (3). Like Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots (1983) and George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988), Frank pays close attention to the literary qualities of scientific writing as well as the place of scientific ideas in literature. His study is distinguished from their work, however, because he devotes at least as much attention to practitioners of what he calls "the historical disciplines" in astronomy, philology, and natural history as he does to Darwin. Frank posits shared ways of knowing that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Using such methods, investigators—whether in science or in literature—seek to reconstruct "contingent events" from the past using "fragmentary evidence" that has survived into the present (4, 44). [End Page 609] Frank also concentrates on a less-well-established literary genre than Beer and Levine. Rosemary Jann's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (1995) has argued for a close connection between science and detective fiction. But Jann sees Doyle as a popularizer of "a general ideal of scientific observation and reasoning" that made the scientist into a "hero" who provided "reassurance" (4, 6, and 46). Frank rejects such ideological readings. Writing of Ronald Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999), he questions the "hegemonic coherence" characteristic of Foucauldian studies and argues that they reduce human subjects to machines without "the complex mental life that Romantic literature offered as a model of human consciousness" (5). For Frank, "Detective fiction did not...simply reinforce a prevailing orthodoxy or ideology; nor did it reductively police consciousness." Its role was more positive and creative, introducing men and women of the nineteenth century to a new way of "imagining themselves in a universe radically altered by the historical disciplines" (25–26). This kind of recuperative strategy often overlaps with Frank's commitment to romantic textualism and is one reason why he often sees moments of transcendence—as well as conflict and accommodation—in literary and scientific writing. Although many of the figures Frank writes about are well known in the history of science, his careful and nuanced readings of texts by Pierre Laplace, John Pringle Nichol, John Tyndall, Robert Chambers, and Winwood Reade will introduce them to a wider scholarly audience. Further, by juxtaposing such writers with Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, we gain a new appreciation of the open-ended quality of natural inquiry in the period. Frank allows us to see that science in our sense—with its professionalization, disciplinary boundaries, and distinct methodologies—was only beginning to emerge at mid-century and scientific ideas circulated with much less disciplinary resistance. Unfortunately, Frank's exclusive commitment to close reading leads him to ignore the institutional side of these issues. Like James Secord in Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' (2000), Frank writes about popularizers of the Nebular Hypothesis such as Nichol and Chambers. Unlike Secord, however, Frank pays little attention to institutions and practices of reading in his account of these figures. While we have much to gain from seeing the widespread but often subterranean circulation of images and ideas in the period, we also need to remember that these writers often had differing social locations, career paths, and purposes. While Secord's analysis of the distinction between gentlemanly and commercial science in Victorian England demonstrates in great detail the impact of social position on scientific debate and...

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Helen Small and Trudi Tate.LITERATURE, SCIENCE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, 1830-1970: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF GILLIAN BEER. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003

Reviewed by: Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer Nicholas Dames (bio) Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, edited by Helen Small and Trudi Tate; pp. vii + 255. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £53.00, $74.00. No small part of the intellectual pleasure afforded by a Festschrift is to see what part of the honoree's scholarship is now considered central by those who know it well. While Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis offers no large surprises to those who have profited from Gillian Beer's work, it does mark a small but potentially significant change of emphasis in the uses to which that work is put. As one might expect, questions of the potential alignment and nonalignment of literary and scientific knowledge are foregrounded here, and Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) is never far away from the minds of the contributors, as several essays here reconsider aspects of Darwin's career. But if the enduring interest of Darwin's [End Page 698] Plots was its analysis of the narrative structures that linked formally self-conscious Victorian fiction with evolutionary science, elsewhere in Beer's work we can find a complex interest in the mechanics of description, as in her important 1987 essay "Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery." The Beer presented to us by Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis is less a theorist of narrative than of nonnarrative questions of epistemology and language, of the ways in which literature and science grapple in productively overlapping ways with the dilemma of how to describe the world without letting the tools of description determine in advance the appearance and scope of that described world. The volume's opening essay, Nigel Leask's "Darwin's 'Second Sun': Alexander von Humboldt and the Genesis of The Voyage of the Beagle," strikes this note immediately. For Leask, the descriptive texture of the Voyage, particularly notable in its transformation from rough diary to published journal, is a careful reaction against the exoticism and vivacity of Humboldt's tropics. While the account here of the genesis of the proper tonal range of mid- Victorian professional science will be familiar to most readers, the detail with which Leask demonstrates the many points of contact and divergence between the descriptive practices of Humboldt and Darwin is thoroughly rewarding. As the volume advances, however, questions of description are raised even more explicitly, particularly in relation to the recurrent problem of category versus particular instance. Harriet Ritvo's "Ordering Creation, or Maybe Not," and Helen Small's "Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk," each take interestingly nuanced approaches to the methodological dilemma that classification raised for Victorian scientists and novelists alike. Ritvo's essay restores critical attention to Victorian systematizers—still pervasively, and incorrectly, considered as dry redactors of Linnaean methods—by demonstrating the creativity, inventiveness, and polemical energy of nineteenth-century taxonomic theory. Her account of William MacLeay's little-known "quinary system" is a lucid, and appealingly unusual, case study in the ways in which post-Linnaean taxonomy had to find rather esoteric solutions to the problems presented by the enormous nineteenth-century influx of new organisms. Small's investigation of the impact of Henry Buckle's History of Civilisation in England (1857-61), an impact made all the more telling because of the frequency with which it was debunked and derided, makes fascinating claims for the importance of Buckle's deterministic, statistical method. For Small, Buckle's relatively unnuanced denigration of individual agency in favor of general contexts (nations, races, populations) helped many of his readers come to their own, more complex formulations of the relationship between the one and the many. When she turns to Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native (1878), Small makes the crucial move of studying the novel's discursive moments, particularly the descriptions of Egdon Heath, as reactions to the problem of particular instance versus determining context (or proximity versus grand overview) that Buckle so dramatically raised. As a way into the descriptive practices of Victorian fiction, still a rather unstudied realm, this seems promising and deserving of further investigation. Work like that of...

Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of His Attitude to Women by Shanta Dutta

442 Reviews and agonizing social problem does not justify an abandonment of the aesthetics of the critical text, and a commitment to historical readings necessitates fundamental historical accuracies. University of Leeds Denis Flannery Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of his Attitude to Women. By Shanta Dutta. Basingstoke : Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 2000. xi + 256 pp. ?42.50. ISBN 0-333-74486-1. There is a rather depressing photograph of Thomas Hardy, in the last year of his life, crossing the muddy, disturbed ground of a building site, as he goes to lay the foundation stone of the newly located Dorchester Grammar School. On a cold and windy July day in 1927 he is followed over the mud by a procession of dignitaries dressed variously in mayoral chains, hats, and church cassocks. George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were among the last of the eminent literary Victorians to survive well into the twentieth century, and as such they were bound to be lionized. In 1927 Hardy was an old man, accustomed by at least thirty years of public adulation to the tributes and duties of the literary lion?the society dinners, publicly subscribed letters of congratulation , pleas from aspiring writers, interviews, and teas at Max Gate. By devoting well over half her book to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century years of Hardy's life and work, and by taking a highly biographical approach to his writings throughout, Shanta Dutta's book unknowingly reveals more about the terrible aridity of the lionized life than about the well-worn subject of Hardy's 'attitude to women'. Like one of the many young writers who sought an audience with Hardy at Max Gate, Dutta's book is too concerned with Hardy as personality, or even as celebrity. This fascination with his lifeand with abundant biographical conjecture leads to blind spots in the critical writing. On heredity mjude, for example, Dutta states, '[Hardy] was surely not unaware of the role of heredity in determining character and action'?a fairlymajor understatement which oddly ignores the factthat Hardy's near-obsession with generational repetition has been long established by works such as Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots or very directly by his own statements on his early reading of Darwin and poems such as 'The Pedigree' and 'Heredity'. Part of the problem is that Dutta engages with works in a critical fieldwhich are focused entirely on Hardy?or, in other words, with monographs with 'Hardy' in the title?and this means that works such as Beer's, or Keith Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor, which contain important chapters on Hardy's works in their social and historical context, are ignored. There is close and well-researched attention to Hardy's revisions, especially to The Return of the Native, but too often the analysis peters out into biographical speculation : Hardy's 'mother-obsession', guilt over 'filial betrayal', depiction of his sister or past loves, forexample. The extent to which Dutta is fascinated by speculations about Hardy the man is evident in her frequent refusal to distinguish between author and narrator, and in her quotations from two novels 'about' Hardy, Howard Jacobson's Peeping Tom (1984) and Emma Tennant's Tess (1993). While the damning judgements of what is deemed Hardy's Victorian patriarchy in these novels may say something of the changing currents in popular response to Hardy, Dutta does not address this issue, but lets quotations from these novels stand in as critical responses in the last pages of her introductory chapter on 'the critics' debate', and on other occasions in her study. While she acknowledges that Jacobson and Tennant are 'extreme' in theirjudgement, their characters are responding to a late twentieth-century idea of Hardy, devoid of his cultural and historical context; their often simplistic reactions have no place in a critical work. There are times also when it becomes necessary for the critic herself to MLRy 98.2, 2003 443 raise her own consciousness about the social and historical context from which she herself is writing: in her discussion of the deaths of the children in Jude the Obscure, Dutta asserts that 'the tragedy of a child's...

GILLIAN BEER, Darwin's plots. Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction, London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley, ARK Paperbacks 1983, xi, 303 pp.

GILLIAN BEER, Darwin's plots. Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction, London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley, ARK Paperbacks 1983, xi, 303 pp.

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Gillian Beer. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge & Kégan Paul, 1983. x + 303 pp. (Reviewed by D. R. Oldroyd)

Gillian Beer. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge & Kégan Paul, 1983. x + 303 pp. (Reviewed by D. R. Oldroyd)

Essay Review: Darwin and George Eliot: Plotting and Organicism: Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning

Essay Review: Darwin and George Eliot: Plotting and Organicism: Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Gillian Beer

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDarwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Gillian BeerGreta JonesGreta Jones Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 76, Number 1Mar., 1985 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/353752 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1985 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review of Book: Darwin's Plots, Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Review of Book: Darwin's Plots, Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

SCIENCE AND THE NOVEL

Journal Article SCIENCE AND THE NOVEL Get access George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. By SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH. Cambridge University Press, 1984; £20. Darwin's Plots. By GILLIAN BEER. Routledge, 1983; £17.95. J. L. BRADLEY J. L. BRADLEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4, October 1984, Pages 356–360, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XXXIV.4.356 Published: 01 October 1984