Evolutionary Epic Research Articles

The Epic of Evolution and a Theology of Sacramental Ecology

The ‘Epic of Evolution’ is the scientific story that reveals that we live in an approximately 14-billion-year-old universe on a planet that is approximately 4.6 billion years old and that we are a part of the ongoing process of life that has existed on Earth for 3.5–4 billion years. This article focuses on the religious and ecological significance of the evolutionary epic in an effort to seamlessly connect the ecological value attributed as a part of an understanding of the evolutionary connectedness of life on earth with the Divine grace understood to be present in Christian sacramental worship. With a particular emphasis on the Eucharist, I argue that the sacramental perspective of grace being conveyed through material reality provides the potential for Christian sacramental tradition to make a significant contribution to protecting the threatened ecological communities of our planet. By incorporating William Temple’s concept of a ‘sacramental universe,’ I propose that the grace that is understood to be present in the substances of the bread and wine of the Eucharist points outward so that it can also be witnessed in all of God’s ongoing Creation. When the Eucharist is understood as taking place in a sacramental universe from which ecological grace flows; the incarnation can be recognized not as a one-time event but as an ongoing sacramental process through which God is revealed through the perpetual emergence of life. Consequently, as the primary form of sacramental worship in Christian tradition, the Eucharistic witness to the incarnation of God in Jesus and thanksgiving for life overcoming death provide Christians with a ritual orientation for recognizing the incarnational presence of God as an ever-present reality potentially witnessed in all that is. Therefore, the formal sacrament of the Eucharist is a part of a broader sacramental ecology of earthly life in which the presence of Divine grace can be witnessed in all aspects of the natural order. As a result, connecting Eucharistic grace with the value associated with an awareness of the ecological and genetic connectedness of all forms of life serves as a mutual enrichment of sacramental tradition and contemporary efforts to protect life on Earth.

The evolving spirit: morals and mutualism in Arabella Buckley's evolutionary epic.

Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality.Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840-1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist or more orthodox in their religion, found reconciliation. Unlike Wallace, Buckley emphasized the lawful evolution of morality and of the soul, drawing from the theological tradition of traducianism. Significantly, Buckley argued for a mutualistic and deeply theistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution, particularly the evolution of morals, without sacrificing the uniformity of natural law.Though Buckley's understanding of the evolutionary epic has been represented as emphasizing mutualism (Gates 1998) and spiritualist theology (Lightman 2007), here I demonstrate that her distinctive addition to the debate lies in her unifying theory of traducianism.In contrast to other authors, I argue that through Buckley we better understand Victorian spiritualism as more of a religion than an occult science. However, it was a conception of religion that, through her evolutionary traducianism, bridged science and spiritualism. This offers historians a more complex but satisfying image of the Victorian worldview after Darwin.

Theological presuppositions of the evolutionary epic: From Robert Chambers to E. O. Wilson

We can trace the “evolutionary epic” (named by E. O. Wilson, 1978) back to earlier writers, beginning with Robert Chambers (1844). Its basic elements are: fixation on seeing human history as rooted in biology; an aspiration toward telling the whole history of humankind (in its essential features); and insistence on the overall coherence of the projected narrative. The claim to coherence depends on assuming either that the universe possesses an “embedded rationality,” or that it is guided by divine purpose. This article proposes the term “idealism” to refer to these two assumptions taken together, for in practice they were closely linked. Nietzsche (1881) was perhaps the first thinker to point out the evolutionary epic's dependence on such an idealism, and he also pointed out that the assumptions of embedded rationality and of divine purpose are closely connected. Darwin's theory of descent with modification (1859) was sharply inconsistent with these assumptions: he was not an “idealist” in the sense indicated here, and not a proponent of the evolutionary epic. Proclaiming his “materialism,” Wilson (1978) failed to acknowledge that the epic depends on idealist assumptions; other adherents of the genre (M. Dowd, L. Rue) resurrect (knowingly or not) its theological roots.

AFTER FIFTY FULL YEARS, IT'S NICE NOT TO KNOW

AFTER FIFTY FULL YEARS, IT'S NICE NOT TO KNOW

The Recurrence of the Evolutionary Epic

In his 1978 On Human Nature, Edward Wilson defined the evolutionary epic as the scientific story of all life, a linear narrative beginning with the big bang and ending with the story of human history. Since that time several popular science writers have attempted to write that story of life producing such titles as The Universe Story (1992)and The Epic of Evolution (2006). Historians have also gotten into the act under the guise of “Big History,” which has resulted in a series of monographs and is taught at several universities and high schools throughout the world. While the evolutionary epic is often presented as a novel way of bringing the historical insights of modern science into a narrative form that transcends the humanities–natural science divide, the genre itself originates in the nineteenth century, just as new geological and cosmic timescales were being established and new sciences such as biology and anthropology were being formalized. Several German Naturphilosophen and Victorian naturalists imagined the history of life as one, as a “Cosmos,” and produced evolutionary epics that bare significant similarities with their more modern counterparts. By considering the various recurrences of the evolutionary epic, from its origins in early German Romanticism and Victorian naturalism to the degeneration narratives of the fin de siècle and on to the Wilsonian and Big History versions of the late twentieth century and beyond, this essay seeks to map out a shared intellectual genealogy while examining the genre’s conceptual commonalities. What is perhaps most compelling about the history of the genre is the striking persistence of non-Darwinian forms of evolution that are utilized to situate the emergence of humanity in these epic narratives of life.

A good Darwinian? Winwood Reade and the making of a late Victorian evolutionary epic

In 1871 the travel writer and anthropologist W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875) was inspired by his correspondence with Darwin to turn his narrow ethnological research on West African tribes into the broadest history imaginable, one that would show Darwin's great principle of natural selection at work throughout the evolutionary history of humanity, stretching back to the origins of the universe itself. But when Martyrdom of Man was published in 1872, Reade confessed that Darwin would not likely find him a very good Darwinian, as he was unable to show that natural selection was anything more than a secondary law that arranges all details. When it came to historicising humans within the sweeping history of all creation, Reade argued that the primary law was that of development, a less contentious theory of human evolution that was better suited to Reade's progressive and teleological history of life. By focussing on the extensive correspondence between Reade and Darwin, this paper reconstructs the attempt to make an explicitly Darwinian evolutionary epic in order to shed light on the moral and aesthetic demands that worked to give shape to Victorian efforts to historicise humans within a vastly expanding timeframe.

The Evolutionary Epic

The Evolutionary Epic Ian Hesketh (bio) Upon his return from Africa in 1871, the London-based explorer and anthropologist Winwood Reade decided that he would write a grand historical narrative that would illustrate how Charles Darwin’s great principle of natural selection had functioned throughout all of history. Though he referred to his project as a “universal history,” what he ended up producing [End Page 35] went well beyond what is typically meant by that term. His The Martyrdom of Man (1872) did describe the history of humanity within an overarching evolutionary framework, but it extended backwards in time to the origins of the solar system in the big bang of his day, the nebular fire mist, and forwards into the distant future to a point in time when Reade envisioned a perfected human species. What he ultimately produced was a Victorian evolutionary epic (Hesketh, “A Good Darwinian?” 44). It is true that there was no term for this form of literary production at the time, which helps explain why Reade relied on the less satisfying “universal history.” “Evolutionary epic” was not, therefore, an actor’s category. Several historians of Victorian science, however, have argued that there was a burgeoning and distinct genre of popular science literature at the time that we can call the evolutionary epic (Lightman; Amigoni and Elwick). Reade, for instance, ended up producing a historical narrative of the evolution of all life that had many precursors, including most notably Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, first published anonymously in 1844. James Secord’s magisterial study, Victorian Sensation (2000), of the reading and publishing of Vestiges makes the case that Chambers combined a romantic narrative with a developmental theory of life, beginning with an original seed event and ending with the evolution of the human mind, thereby making the book a literary sensation that sold incredibly well throughout the nineteenth century. Chambers’s combination of romantic narrative and scientific theory was so successful that it became the basis for the evolutionary epic genre. As described in Bernard Lightman’s Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007), Chambers’s “monad-to-human style cosmic evolutionary narrative” became a highly successful form that was appropriated by other popular science writers such as Grant Allen, David Page, Arabella Buckley, and Edward Clodd (221). Telling a grand story about the evolution of life became a way to inform a wide range of readers about nascent theories of evolution that were being proposed in more technical literature by the likes of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley, and, of course, Darwin. Far from using it as a mere conduit for these theories, however, authors of the evolutionary epic shaped the narrative framework to promote their own interpretations of what the story of evolution might mean for the present and, ultimately, the future. Making evolution more conducive to religious sensibilities was one particular way in which the authors of the evolutionary epic helped legitimate evolution in the minds of many Victorian readers. The evolutionary epic also came to be associated with a Whiggish interpretation of the present as the result of slow developmental processes originating deep in the past that had inevitably led to the rise and dominance of European civilization. The evolutionary epic gave this view the legitimacy of a scientific narrative that promised continued human intellectual, social, and political progress into the distant future. Reade, for instance, looked [End Page 36] forward to the invention of passenger air travel, the automobile, and the ready availability of laboratory-manufactured food (Reade 513). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, some versions of the evolutionary epic took a darker turn. By the 1880s, many began to worry that humanity’s success in transcending the laws of nature might lead to its inevitable downfall. In this regard, the evolutionary epic began to address notions of decline and regression. E. Ray Lankester, for instance, suggested that the long evolutionary history of humanity shares something with the life history of barnacles and ascidians, sea creatures that become less complex as food becomes more readily available in the later stages of their development. He believed that our own intellectual development had become arrested due...

Scientific Natural History: Telling the Epics of Nature

Scientific natural history, which addresses all biological aspects of individual species, one species at a time, then compares many together, is as important to science as any of the umbrella biological disciplines. With most species yet undiscovered and the vast majority of those known yet unstudied, most biological phenomena are probably also unknown and unimagined. Closing this gap calls for a renewed emphasis on the disciplines of the taxonomic -ologies, treating each species as an evolutionary epic, summoning information from all of the umbrella disciplines. We argue from the example of the once-obscure red fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, whose economic importance made it a model species for research on the superorganism, offering excellent opportunities for addressing many profound questions about superorganism organization, function, development, and ecology. Had scientific natural history been properly emphasized in recent research, theory testing in areas such as competition and kin-based selection would not have led to decades of distraction.

Victorian science and literature: Part 1, v.1: Negotiating boundaries; v.2: Victorian science as cultural authority; v.3: Science, religion and natural theology; v.4: The evolutionary epic

Victorian science and literature: Part 1, v.1: Negotiating boundaries; v.2: Victorian science as cultural authority; v.3: Science, religion and natural theology; v.4: The evolutionary epic

Time and Emergence in the Evolutionary Epic, Naturalistic Theology, and J.T. Fraser’s Hierarchical Theory of Time

Abstract This paper provides a general overview of emergence, and then examines the role emergence plays in different areas of science and theology, including big history or the evolutionary epic, religious and theistic naturalism. Critical remarks on the notions of time expressed in these discourses are also provided. The paper then assesses J.T. Fraser’s hierarchical theory of time in relation to emergence, and adduces the position Fraser would take with respect to emergence. Finally, the paper concludes with a playful coda from the standpoint of a man of letters, for whom letters have an elemental importance.

Implications of the Evolutionary Epic for the Study of Human History

Implications of the Evolutionary Epic for the Study of Human History

THE EVOLUTIONARY EPIC

Zygon®Volume 44, Issue 1 p. 3-8 Free Access THE EVOLUTIONARY EPIC Philip Hefner, Philip HefnerSearch for more papers by this author Philip Hefner, Philip HefnerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 February 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2009.00980.xCitations: 3AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume44, Issue1March 2009Pages 3-8 ReferencesRelatedInformation

From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain

From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Toward Green Narrative: Management and the Evolutionary Epic

We use a narrative perspective to explore the relevance of the sciences dealing with ecology for management theory and practice, presenting the issues of ecoscience from the perspective of green narrative, based on the “evolutionary epic.” Adopting an interpretive sensemaking perspective on narrative, we address the narratological basis of the evolutionary epic and examine the potential for the narrative to inform a new relationship between management and the natural environment. We suggest implications for management theory and practice by examining elements of the narrative.

Toward Green Narrative: Management and the Evolutionary Epic

Toward Green Narrative: Management and the Evolutionary Epic