Darwin's Armada

Author: Iain McCalman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847377181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
Darwin's Armadatells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace, four young amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere during the first half of the nineteenth century in search of adventure and scientific fame. It charts their thrilling voyages to the strange and beautiful lands of the southern hemisphere that reshaped the young mariners' scientific ideas and led them, on returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin. All three crucially influenced the publication and reception of his Origin of Speciesin 1859, one of the formative texts of the modern world. For the first time the Darwinian revolution of ideas is seen as a genuinely collective enterprise and one that had its birth in a series of gripping and human travel adventures. Many of the most urgent ecological and social issues of our times are seen to be prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery.

Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution

Author: Iain McCalman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393071294
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
"Sparkling…an extraordinary true-adventure story, complete with trials, tribulations and moments of exultation." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his staunchest supporters: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882—the day of Darwin's funeral—Darwin's Armada steps back and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers, who campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and advanced the scope of Darwin's work.

Darwin’s Racism, Sexism, and Idolization

Author: Rui Diogo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303149055X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Book Description

Darwin's Evolving Identity

Author: Alistair Sponsel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652325X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell. While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species. Drawing on his own ambitious research in Darwin’s manuscripts and at the Beagle’s remotest ports of call, Sponsel takes us from the ocean to the Origin and beyond. He provides a vivid new picture of Darwin’s career as a voyaging naturalist and metropolitan author, and in doing so makes a bold argument about how we should understand the history of scientific theories.

Darwin’S Racism

Author: Leon Zitzer
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1491791276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 856

Book Description
Throughout the 19th century in the British Empire, parallel developments in science and the law were squeezing Aborigines everywhere into nonexistence. Charles Darwin took part in this. Again and again, he expressed his approval of the extermination of the native lower races. The more interesting part of the story is that there were plenty of voices, albeit a minority and mostly forgotten now, who objected on humanitarian grounds (and sometimes scientific grounds as well). Europeans, they said, were becoming polished savages and dehumanizing the Other. Darwin was very aware of this criticism and cared not one whit. As he said in a letter to Charles Lyell, I care not much whether we are looked at as mere savages in a remotely distant future. But he well knew it was not a remote future. He had read several writers who accused Europeans of being the real savages. For a brief moment in his youth in his Diary, he himself dabbled in such criticism, even though he already believed in the inferiority of indigenous peoples. That belief grew firmer as he matured. Darwin did not dispute humanitarians so much as he ignored them. Its a sad story. But oh those humanitarians, how they inspire.

Darwin's Psychology

Author: Ben Bradley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198708211
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
This is the first book ever to examine the riches of what Darwin himself wrote about psychological matters. It unearths a Darwin new to science, whose first concern is the agency of organisms-from which he derives both his psychology, and his theory of evolution.

Public Relations, Cooperation, and Justice

Author: Charles Marsh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131737195X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Modern approaches to public relations cluster into three camps along a continuum: conflict-oriented egoism, e.g. forms of contingency theory that focus almost exclusively on the wellbeing of an entity; redressed egoism, e.g. subsidies to redress PR’s egoistic nature; and forms of self-interested cooperation, e.g. fully functioning society theory. Public Relations, Cooperation, and Justice draws upon interdisciplinary research from evolutionary biology, philosophy, and rhetoric to establish that relationships built on cooperation and justice are more productive than those built on conflict and egoistic competition. Just as important, this innovative book shuns normative, utopian appeals, offering instead only empirical, materialistic evidence for its conclusions. This is a powerful, multidisciplinary, and well-documented analysis, including specific strategies for the enactment of PR as a quest for cooperation and justice, which aligns the discipline of public relations with basic human nature. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of public relations and communication ethics.

Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination

Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393239519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Recounts the triumphs and mishaps of Columbus and other explorers, following the naturalists--both famous and obscure--whose investigations of the world's fauna and flora fueled the rise of science and technology that propelled Western Europe towards modernity.

A Swindler's Progress

Author: Kirsten McKenzie
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674052789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
In May 1835 in a Sydney courtroom, a slight, balding man named John Dow stood charged with forgery. The prisoner shocked the room by claiming he was Edward, Viscount Lascelles, eldest son of the powerful Earl of Harewood. The Crown alleged he was a confidence trickster and serial impostor. Was this really the heir to one of Britain's most spectacular fortunes? Part Regency mystery, part imperial history, A Swindler's Progress is an engrossing tale of adventure and deceit across two worlds—British aristocrats and Australian felons—bound together in an emerging age of opportunity and individualism, where personal worth was battling power based on birth alone. The first historian to unravel the mystery of John Dow and Edward Lascelles, Kirsten McKenzie illuminates the darker side of this age of liberty, when freedom could mean the freedom to lie both in the far-flung outposts of empire and within the established bastions of British power. The struggles of the Lascelles family for social and political power, and the tragedy of their disgraced heir, demonstrate that British elites were as fragile as their colonial counterparts. In ways both personal and profound, McKenzie recreates a world in which Britain and the empire were intertwined in the transformation of status and politics in the nineteenth century.

Delia Akelely and the Feisty Monkey

Author: Iain McCalman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780645076363
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
On an East-African hunting expedition in 1909, Delia Akeley, a forty-year-old American woman, captured a baby female monkey. Delia's loneliness in an isolating patriarchal world, and her long-frustrated desire to adopt a child, had motivated her to nurture the animal. She named the monkey JT Jr and decided to study her interactions with humans. The unique relationship between Delia and JT unlocked Delia's latent talents of research and observation, anticipating both Jane Goodall's chimpanzee writings and Margaret Mead's Samoan ethnographies. However, Delia's love for JT clashed with her husband Carl's obsession to create a temple of African wildlife dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Nursing Carl's broken body and realising their diverging interests pushed Delia into a breakdown in Uganda, which led to a savage divorce in Manhattan, and the heartbreaking caging of JT in a Washington zoo. Carl's death triggered a long battle between Delia and Carl's widow, who succeeded in obliterating most of Delia's achievements. In Delia Akeley and the Monkey, Iain McCalman uses official records and personal documents to build a story of passionate love and hate among women, men, animals and museums that predates our times but speaks to our present. It illuminates much about human-animal relations and the tyranny of gender inequality, through reinstating an obscured story of a dedicated amateur primatologist.