Publication Of Origin Research Articles

Wallace's annotated copy of Darwin's Origin of Species

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in London. The first printing was sold out to the book trade almost immediately, necessitating a second printing the following month, on December 28.' Darwin had been corresponding since May 1857 with the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, then traveling in the Malay Archipelago collecting birds and insects. A year later, in June-July 1858, had come the famous "joint papers," precipitated by Darwin's receipt from Wallace of his paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type," read before the Linnean Society of London on July 1, along with contributions by Darwin.2 This in turn hastened the publication of Darwin's Origin, as he noted in the introduction:

Humboldt and an Aesthetic Tradition in Geography

HE year 1859 is particularly significant in the history of attitudes toward the environment. Alexander von Humboldt died. Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species. Frederick E. Church exhibited his painting, Heart of the Andes, first in New York and then in London. In his lifetime Humboldt, through his explorations and scientific writings, stood in fame next to Napoleon. Humboldt had been a universal genius. Ralph Waldo Emerson described Humboldt as one of the wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar. . .who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind-a universal man .. .1 Humboldt was indeed a universal man-perhaps even the culmination of the Renaissance man envisioned by Pico della Mirandola in 1486: a man put amidst the world so that from there [he could] better perceive all that is in the world.2 During a lifetime of ninety years Humboldt did precisely what Pico della Mirandola specified. At a time when the scientific world was beginning to move from the unified spirit of the Renaissance to specialization in the various disciplines that exist today and to value scientific work in terms of its practical applications, Humboldt, guided by his curiosity, tried to grasp the world as a whole-to involve the entire cosmos in his thinking. The idea of unity in the diversity of nature was a central theme of Humboldt's writings, as was the unity of art and science. Although his work was widely read before 1859, especially in the Americas, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species quickly overshadowed Humboldt's rich labors. Darwin's idea of evolution and his vision of nature as a battleground supplanted the relatively static, peaceable, and noble kingdom of nature that Humboldt had

Curriculum Theory: Give Me a “For Instance”

Often, in our attempts to make sense out of social and intellectual movements, we use guideposts to set off the route our subject has taken. The publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is frequently taken as the starting point for a massive intellectual upheaval that went far beyond the realm of scientific inquiry alone. There is, of course, nothing in the curriculum field comparable to Darwin's revolutionary theory. Nevertheless, we do have a few modest guideposts which help us mark our way in the development of curriculum as a field of study. One is the publication in 1918 of Franklin Bobbitt's The Curriculum, which set off curriculum as a field of professional specialization in its own right and not simply, as had been considered earlier, an offshoot of general educational considerations. While the publication of Bobbitt's book cannot be said to have actually initiated the movement toward a distinctive field of study called curriculum, it is reflective of that movement as it developed in the early part of this century, at least insofar as it embodied the particular assumptions and predispositions that were to dominate the thinking of those who were identified with the curriculum field for at least half a century and extending to the present. The publication of The Curriculum may be taken as the starting point of the era of so-called scientific curriculum making with all that implied for how the curriculum was to be conceived, how the development of the curriculum was to take place, and what constituted the criteria of success by which the curriculum was to be judged. A second milestone in the development of the field was the publication, in 1927, of the Twenty-Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for

Test of selection and neutrality in natural populations.

MORE than a century after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the question of the relative contribution of selected and nonselected (“neutral”) genetic variation to evolution is still unresolved1,2.

IDEAS ABOUT LIVING UNITS, 1864-1909: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF GENETICS.

IDEAS ABOUT LIVING UNITS, 1864-1909: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF GENETICS L. C. DUNN* The concept of the gene as a self-replicating unit ofheredity has been one ofthe most influential ideas oftwentieth-century biology. It was derived from Mendel's experimental proofofthe segregation ofalternative forms of a gene (now known as alleles) into different gametes in the formation of the germ cells of a hybrid. Although the principle was demonstrated in Mendel's paper of1866, it did not begin to influence biological theories until after its rediscovery, confirmation, and extension in the first years ofthe twentieth century. That period, say from 1900-1906, can now be seen as the chief break in the continuity of ideas about the transmission system ofheredity. What had happened prior to that time— except, of course, for the original publication of Mendel's pea experiments —had little genetic connection with the later course of development ofthese ideas. There was no such sharp break in studies ofevolution or ofdevelopment; in fact, many students ofthe latter field would say that it has not yet been affected in a major way by what happened in 1900. Views about the mechanisms ofevolution began to change more gradually in the 1920's and 1930's. It is, ofcourse, not surprising that the effects ofthe break should be felt first in the territory, so to speak, in which it occurred—that ofthe transmission mechanism ofheredity. It is interesting to reflect, from the vantage point of 1965, that that "territory" was not recognized as such until after the break occurred. Heredity, with the definiteness given to it by modern genetics, now seems to be a well-marked field, but in the nineteenth century this was not so. Then efforts to develop general theories of heredity werejudged primarily by their applicability to problems ofvaria- * Columbia University, Nevis Biological Station, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. This will form a chapter in a forthcoming book, Genetics, 1864-10,30.: The Development ofSome of the Main Ideas, to be published by McGraw-Hill Book Co. 335 tion, evolution, and development, and we see signs today, after nearly one hundred years, ofa return ofthat attitude. Then it was due to the absence ofprecise questions about the transmission mechanism—what I referred to above as non-recognition ofthe territory. Now genetics threatens to disappear as a separate field because the solution ofsome ofits basic problems has led to its absorption into the general fabric of biological knowledge. The gene, whatever its fate as an "ultimate" unit in the structure and functioning ofliving material, has become a basic part of the description of that organization. The nature of the radical change that occurred around 1900 can be studied by examining some ofthe questions ofchiefinterest to biologists in the immediately preceding period. Three main groups of questions can be distinguished: those concerning the nature ofspecies differences and the effects ofhybridization on domesticatedplants; those having todo with morphology, development, and cytology, chiefly in animals; and those specifically concerned with theories ofheredity. The last took the form of ideas about living units as elements ofhereditary transmission and control of the development of form and function. Needless to say, all were directed toward general questions raised as the result ofthe intense interest in the mechanism of evolution evoked by the publication of Origin of Species in 1859. I shall deal first with the last set ofquestions and shall consider the history ofideas concerning living units in the nineteenth century and the state ofsuch theories today. Many ofthe documents describing the development oftheories ofheredity and ofliving units in the nineteenth century have been brought together, with commentary, by Alfred Barthelmess in his valuable book Vererbungswissenschaft [?]. The source of'ideas about living units could, ofcourse, be traced to much earlier times; Jean Rostand has made an attempt ofthis sort in his Esquisse d'une histoire de l'atomisme en Biologie [2]. But the particles imagined by Buffon, Diderot, and others in the period before experimental study began were purely speculative and did not lead to the discovery ofthe true atomisme which Mendel proved. The "elementary particles" ofMaupertuis (1751), however, were invoked to account for the segregation of a dominant gene for polydactyly...

Marxism and Charles Darwin

Previous articleNext article No AccessMarxism and Charles DarwinGerald RunkleGerald Runkle Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 23, Number 1Feb., 1961 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2127074 Views: 32Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England

NINETEENTH-century free thought (the Victorians generally called it Rationalism) made its grand assault on Christian orthodoxy1 during the twenty years or so following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in I859. It was then that advanced theological liberalism, twice rebuked in the Court of Arches, was twice vindicated by the Privy Council, that Oxford and Cambridge were opened to nonsubscribers to the Thirty-nine Articles, that scholarly clergymen like Leslie Stephen, J. R. Green, and J. E. Thorold Rogers felt it a duty of conscience to resign their orders, and that such stalwart soldiers of truth as T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, G. J. Holyoake, and Charles Bradlaugh were marching from victory to victory. This was undoubtedly the climax of the story, but there is no need to rehearse it in detail. It is more worth-while to analyze the forces that lay behind it, and this will focus our attention on the two or three decades immediately preceding T859. The factors usually cited in explanation of the decline of nineteenthcentury orthodoxy are the rise of the concept of evolution as a scientific hypothesis in geology and biology, and of the higher criticism in Biblical scholarship. The prevailing impression seems to be (a) that, because Lyell and Darwin had shown that neither the origin of the earth nor the origin of man as described in Genesis can be reconciled with the findings of science, therefore thinking people became atheists or agnostics; and (b) that, because a number of German scholars had shown that neither the Old nor the New Testament can be taken at face value, therefore honest men had no recourse but to abandon Christianity altogether. Not only is this implausible on the face of it. It has also obscured the fact that the Victorian religious crisis was produced by a fundamental conflict between certain cherished orthodox dogmas (of which the infallibility of the

The Bearing of Science on the Thought of Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough died at the age of forty-two just two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The main body of his slender volume of work was done by 1859, and it is barely probable that he knew Darwin's epoch-making study or had even heard of it. But Darwin, one must remember, climaxed a period of continuing scientific research on the results of which speculation had abundantly fed. Clough's adult years coincided with the last twenty years or so of this period. Such circumstances as the appearance of Lyell's Principles of Geology or the impact on English religious thinking of Strauss and German higher criticism, on the one hand, and the emergence of the Oxford Movement with its appeal to the principle of authority, on the other, could not but evoke from sensitive and thoughtful minds some significant response. In the period that produced Tennyson's In Memoriam, Clough's response was equally or more significant. Though their inward struggles were not unlike, the resolution for Clough differs sufficiently from Tennyson's to repay careful study of his thought. I fancy that of the two Clough's mind and the upshot of his speculation are the more congenial to the twentieth century.