Author : Curtis N. Johnson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 15,2 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 019936141X
"Discusses the chance and randomness as motifs in the writing of Charles Darwin" --publisher
Author : Curtis N. Johnson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 45,13 MB
Release : 2019-10-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 0190882948
Charles Darwin's "Historical Sketch" has appeared as a preface to nearly every authorized edition of Darwin's Origin of Species since the second English edition was published in 1860. The "Historical Sketch" provides a brief history of opinion about the species question as a prelude to Darwin's own independent contribution to the subject, but its provenance is somewhat obscure. While some previous thinkers anticipated portions of Darwin's theory long before he did, none of them saw the complete picture as clearly as Darwin. As such, he was able to claim originality and priority for the idea that has transformed our understanding of nature. His "Historical Sketch" was written as an attempt to address these issues. Some things are known about its production, such as when it first appeared and what changes were made to it between its first appearance in 1860 and its final form in 1866. Other questions remain unanswered. How did it evolve in Darwin's mind? Why did he write it at all? What did he think he was accomplishing by prefacing it to Origin of Species? Curtis Johnson approaches these questions, offering some clarity on the originality of Darwin's work. Darwin's "Historical Sketch" is the first comprehensive study of Darwin's "Preface" to Origin of Species. Johnson conveys the pressure Darwin felt from friends and other correspondents to showcase the originality of his theory, and he tackles questions of originality by carefully examining the 35 authors Darwin referenced in this monumental text.
Author :
Publisher : Academic Press
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 41,96 MB
Release : 2018-07-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 0128155507
Darwin's Pangenesis and Its Rediscovery Part A highlights the findings of Darwin's Pangenesis, an expanded cell theory and unified theory of heredity and variation that strengthened his theory of evolution and explained many phenomena of life. Now, new advances and the discovery of circulating cell-free DNA, mobile RNAs, prions and extracellular vesicles are providing new breakthroughs, thus increasing evidence on the inheritance of acquired characters, graft hybridization, and many other phenomena that Pangenesis suggests. Sections of note in this volume include the rationale, criticisms, influence and recent molecular evidence of Darwin's Pangenesis, as well as its relation to the inheritance of acquired characters, which is often included under the blanket term "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance." - Presents a comprehensive approach to Darwin's Pangenesis, which is so little understood that few have recognized its far-reaching importance, but seems today surprisingly modern - Links Darwin's hypothetical gemmules with circulating cell-free DNA, mobile RNAs, prions and extracellular vesicles, shedding new light on an old theory - Includes section on Darwin's Pangenesis in relation to the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters, a central debate in the history of genetics
Author : Michael Tondre
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 15,65 MB
Release : 2018-08-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813941466
The Physics of Possibility traces the sensational birth of mathematical physics in Victorian literature, science, and statistics. As scientists took up new breakthroughs in quantification, they showed how all sorts of phenomena—the condition of stars, atoms, molecules, and nerves—could be represented as a set of probabilities through time. Michael Tondre demonstrates how these techniques transformed the British novel. Fictions of development by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others joined the vogue for alternative possibilities. Their novels not only reflected received pieties of maturation but plotted a wider number of deviations from the norms of reproductive adulthood. By accentuating overlooked elements of form, Tondre reveals the novel’s changing identification with possible worlds through the decades when physics became a science of all things. In contrast to the observation that statistics served to invent normal populations, Tondre brings influential modes of historical thinking to the foreground. His readings reveal an acute fascination with alternative temporalities throughout the period, as novelists depicted the categories of object, action, and setting in new probabilistic forms. Privileging fiction’s agency in reimagining historical realities, never simply sanctioning them, Tondre revises our understanding of the novel and its ties to the ascendant Victorian sciences.
Author : Samuel Grove
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 49,8 MB
Release : 2021-07-12
Category : History
ISBN : 1793632502
Darwin's discovery of evolution is as celebrated as Galileo's laws of motion or Newton's discovery of gravity. But this was only half the story. Not content to prove that evolution had happened, Darwin sought to convey its full humbling implications. Thus he formulated the theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular belief, this theory ran exactly counter to scientific reason and was consequently rejected by the scientific community of the time. This wasn’t the only reason Darwin’s critics recoiled. His theory robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design. The fate of his ideas, for the time being at least, would be left to the heretics he inspired in other domains. Darwin's radical thought anticipated Nietzsche's Godless philosophy, Marx's class-based economics and Freud's psychological theories of the unconscious. It would take a further 80 years for Darwinism to become accepted as mainstream science, but it came at the expense of its counter-scientific core. For the remainder of the twentieth century a popularized Darwinism would become the touchstone for backlash movements in philosophy, economics and psychology—disciplines he once so radicalized. This is the story of how the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became the most reactionary idea of the twentieth.
Author : Phil Dowe
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 12,17 MB
Release : 2005-03-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780802826961
The history of the interaction between science and religion is fraught with tension, although, as philosopher Phil Dowe demonstrates, many thoughtful and religious people have also found harmony between these two crucial fields. This fascinating book insightfully surveys the relationship of science, reason, and religion, giving special attention to the most contentious topics -- cosmology, evolution, and miracles. Providing a superb introduction to the philosophy of science, Dowe's Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking contends that there are four basic ways to relate science and religion. Two of them, naturalism and religious science, present these endeavors as antagonistic. By contrast, an independence view understands them as wholly unrelated. Finally, an interaction account sees religion and science as complementary -- perhaps even dependent on one another. Dowe finds this last perspective the most historically and philosophically compelling. He argues his case by exploring the history of science, highlighting the life and work of three scientific giants: Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking.
Author : Etienne Gilson
Publisher : Ignatius Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 33,92 MB
Release : 2009-09-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1681491958
Foreword by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn Darwin’s theory of evolution remains controversial, even though most scientists, philosophers, and even theologians accept it, in some form, as an explanation for the variety of organisms. The controversy erupts when the theory is used to try to explain everything, including every aspect of human life, and to deny the role of a Creator or a purpose to life. The overreaching of many scientists into matters beyond the self-imposed limits of scientific method is perhaps explained in part by the loss of two important ideas in modern thinking—final causality or purpose, and formal causality. Scientists understandably bracket the idea out of their scientific thinking because they seek explanations on the level of material and efficient causes only. Yet many of them wrongly conclude from their selective study of the world that final and formal causes do not exist at all and that they have no place in the rational study of life. Likewise, many erroneously assume that philosophy cannot draw upon scientific findings, in light of final and formal causality, to better understand the world and man. The great philosopher and historian of philosophy, Étienne Gilson, sets out to show that final causality or purposiveness and formal causality are principles for those who think hard and carefully about the world, including the world of biology. Gilson insists that a completely rational understanding of organisms and biological systems requires the philosophical notion of teleology, the idea that certain kinds of things exist and have ends or purposes the fulfillment of which are linked to their natures—in other words, formal and final causes. His approach relies on philosophical reflection on the facts of science, not upon theology or an appeal to religious authorities such as the Church or the Bible. “The object of the present essay is not to make of final causality a scientific notion, which it is not, but to show that it is a philosophical inevitability and, consequently, a constant of biophilosophy, or philosophy of life. It is not, then, a question of theology. If there is teleology in nature, the theologian has the right to rely on this fact in order to draw from it the consequences which, in his eyes, proceed from it concerning the existence of God. But the existence of teleology in the universe is the object of a properly philosophical reflection, which has no other goal than to confirm or invalidate the reality of it. The present work will be concerned with nothing else: reason interpreting sensible experience—does it or does it not conclude to the existence of teleology in nature?” —Étienne Gilson
Author : Michael A. Flannery
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 43,83 MB
Release : 2023-12-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1438495730
This book examines the ideas and influences of a nearly forgotten Swedish-American philosopher, John Elof Boodin (1869–1950). A friend and student of William James and protégé of Josiah Royce at Harvard, Boodin combined Jamesian pragmatism and Roycean idealism in developing original scholarship (nearly sixty articles and eight books) from 1900 to 1947, in addition to a volume of posthumous papers published in 1957. Although he is seldom remembered today, the enduring importance of pragmatism and the rising influence of process theology today suggests that his close reading of early to mid-twentieth-century science and vast grasp of philosophical issues warrants a renewed interest in his work that can be a valuable antidote to the sterile and constricting effects of reductionism and dogmatic materialism prevalent today in both those fields.
Author : J. David Archibald
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 47,88 MB
Release : 2018-12-15
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN : 1538111640
Charles Darwin: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works provides an important new compendium presenting a detailed chronology of all aspects Darwin’s life. The extensive encyclopedia section includes many hundreds of entries of various kinds related to Darwin – people, places, institutions, concepts, and his publications. The bibliography provides a comprehensive listing of the vast majority of Darwin’s works published during and after his lifetime. It also provides a more selective list of publications concerning his life and work. Includes a nearly year by year chronology detailing Charles Darwin’s life, family, and work. The A to Z section includes many entries on concepts and people important in Charles Darwin’s life and his work, emphasizing during his lifetime but extending somewhat backwards and forwards from there. The bibliography includes all of Charles Darwin's articles and books published in his lifetime in English and other languages, as well as a selective list of works about him and his work. The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.
Author : Michael A. Flannery
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 19,18 MB
Release : 2018-08-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0817319859
An astute study of Alfred Russel Wallace’s path to natural theology. A spiritualist, libertarian socialist, women’s rights advocate, and critic of Victorian social convention, Alfred Russel Wallace was in every sense a rebel who challenged the emergent scientific certainties of Victorian England by arguing for a natural world imbued with purpose and spiritual significance. Nature’s Prophet:Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology is a critical reassessment of Wallace’s path to natural theology and counters the dismissive narrative that Wallace’s theistic and sociopolitical positions are not to be taken seriously in the history and philosophy of science. Author Michael A. Flannery provides a cogent and lucid account of a crucial—and often underappreciated—element of Wallace’s evolutionary worldview. As co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, Wallace willingly took a backseat to the well-bred, better known scientist. Whereas Darwin held fast to his first published scientific explanations for the development of life on earth, Wallace continued to modify his thinking, refining his argument toward a more controversial metaphysical view which placed him within the highly charged intersection of biology and religion. Despite considerable research into the naturalist’s life and work, Wallace’s own evolution from natural selection to natural theology has been largely unexplored; yet, as Flannery persuasively shows, it is readily demonstrated in his writings from 1843 until his death in 1913. Nature’s Prophet provides a detailed investigation of Wallace’s ideas, showing how, although he independently discovered the mechanism of natural selection, he at the same time came to hold a very different view of evolution from Darwin. Ultimately, Flannery shows, Wallace’s reconsideration of the argument for design yields a more nuanced version of creative and purposeful theistic evolution and represents one of the most innovative contributions of its kind in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, profoundly influencing a later generation of scientists and intellectuals.
