Book Description

'Carefully selected by James Strick, this comprehensive collection of primary source materials resurrects the forgotten man of evolutionary theory, Henry Charlton Bastian, and opens a new window on controversies which divided the ranks of evolutionary naturalists. The hostile reaction of Thomas Henry Huxley and his allies to Bastian's challenge - that they accept the theory of spontaneous generation and the materialism connected with it - shows just how far they were willing to go to sanitize evolutionary theory for public consumption while maintaining their own respectability. Strick's collection is a vivid reminder of the volatile politics of evolution and the importance of not losing sight of "the losers" in scientific controversy.' - Bernard Lightman 'Strick garners all the backbiting documents to show how crucial aspects of the Darwinian orthodoxy were made. The knock-down fight in the 1870s between Huxley and Tyndall, and the brilliant pathology professor Henry Bastian, was over the inclusion of spontaneous generation. Bastian's initial success in justifying it and picking up rival medical support reveals that Huxley's evolutionary view was not an inevitable outcome. The sparring in Strick's volumes proves that it took all of Huxley's and Tyndall's scientific, rhetorical and darker skills to establish their version of Darwinism.' - Adrian Desmond 'An invaluable resource for the understanding of the controversies on the origin of life on earth.' - Dr Iris Fry 'Everybody knows that life's creation was the last redoubt of natural theology in the nineteenth century and spontaneous generation the atheists' siege-weapon for destroying it. Strick's authoritative collection breaks new ground by showing how unbelievers themselves came to blows over the origin of life - even Darwin's followers. Their contest for the Victorian moral heights is a case study of the politics of science and a timely reminder that arguments among 'public scientists' are never simply about "the facts".' - Dr James Moore Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate collects the rare primary works on the origin of life by Henry Charlton Bastian (1837--1915), one of the brightest young rising Darwinian stars of the time. It contains all Bastian's key works on this subject, from his very first in 1871, The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms, through to one of his last, The Evolution of Life in 1907. The set also includes contemporary reviews and responses to Bastian's work which illustrate how emotive this theory was during the 1870s and why the likes of T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall went to extraordinarily great lengths to oppose Bastian. In the first two decades after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), a lively, often heated debate broke out about what the implications of Darwin's theory were for understanding the origin of life from non-living matter. Nowhere was the debate more acrimonious than among the Darwinians themselves. The response to Bastian's work was uniformly negative in Christian religious circles, and created a tremendous response, both negative and positive, from the Darwinians. One faction, including medical doctors and scientific journals, strongly supported Bastian's ideas, another, including Huxley, Tyndall and the powerful X Club, fiercely attacked Bastian, eventually declaring him vanquished by 1878. This set contains examples of both reactions, including Huxley's famous 'Biogenesis and Abiogenesis' address. This set is crucial to understanding the genesis of today's ideas about the origin of life. Much of the broad outlines of modern Darwinian ideas took shape in the debate over Bastian's work and have remained with us since. Featuring an introduction by James Strick, Assistant Professor of Biology and Society, Arizona State University, Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate will amply reward study by scientists, physicians, historians of science, and all in the modern scientific world, who wish to better understand public controversy in science. --contains important writings by nineteenth-century scientists on the spontaneous generation debate --important case study of a Victorian debate on evolution --crucial to understanding the development of the origin of life theory in the nineteenth century