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This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Edouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gath...

Review of: Mike Sutton, Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, Thinker Media [First Digital Edition], Kindle Edition 2014.

W dziewiętnastym wieku Karol Darwin ogłosił teorię ewolucji drogą doboru naturalnego. Jego celem było wykazanie, że przyroda ożywiona nie jest skutkiem boskiej interwencji, lecz rezultatem działania ślepych procesów naturalnych. Darwin twierdził, że doszedł do tej teorii wyłącznie na podstawie faktów i nie ma ona nic wspólnego z żadnymi przyjętymi z góry koncepcjami. Tak też większość ludzi postrzega dzisiaj darwinizm. Przeciwnicy argumentują, że darwinizm nie jest teorią naukową, ale że Darwin patrzył na przyrodę przez pryzmat światopoglądu ateistycznego czy materialistycznego i dopiero wówczas poszukiwał faktów potwierdzających jego teorię. Darwiniści odpowiadają, że pisma Darwina świadczą, iż nie tylko nie był on ateistą, ale zawsze wierzył w jakąś postać bóstwa. Jednakże uważna analiza pism Darwina, zwłaszcza jego pośmiertnie wydanych prywatnych dzienników i listów, wskazuje, że był on ateistą, a teorię doboru naturalnego sformułował w celu zastąpienia Stwórcy procesami naturalnymi.

Esta comunicação visa apresentar uma tradução comentada da correspondência entre Francisco de Arruda Furtado (1854-1887) e Charles Darwin (1809-1882) originalmente em francês e inglês. Também apresento aqui um transcrito traduzido parcial de cartas ainda não publicadas entre Darwin e Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) que mencionam Furtado. Academicamente essas cartas fornecem um recorte sobre o ofício do naturalista no século XIX, sobre a importância das ilhas oceânicas, neste caso os Açores, como laboratórios e estações de trabalho e sobre a vasta rede de contatos postal pela qual os naturalistas se comunicavam. Para além disso, as cartas mostram uma relação inspiradora entre um naturalista açoriano iniciante e seu ídolo quarenta e cinco anos mais velho e uma lenda viva da ciência.

Charles Robert Darwin is an English naturalist, geologist and biologist. He was one of the first to realize and clearly demonstrated that all living organisms evolved over time from common ancestors. The main driving force of evolution was called natural selection and uncertain variability. The existence of evolution was recognized by most scientists during the life of Charles Darwin, while his theory of natural selection, as the main explanation of evolution, became universally recognized only in the 30’s of the XX century. The ideas and discoveries of Charles Darwin, in a revised form, form the foundation of a modern synthetic theory of evolution and form the basis of biology, providing a logical explanation for biodiversity. Orthodox followers of Darwin’s teachings develop the direction of the evolutionary thought bearing his name Darwinism. Keywords: evolution, natural selection, uncertain variability, theory, biodiversity.

Charles Darwin spent his final years at Down House, a country residence only sixteen miles south of central London. Down House is maintained today as a museum in Drawin’s honor.

Humboldt embodies the wide-ranging curiosity and fascination with nature shared by eminent nature writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. In fact, he much influenced British and North American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, Clarence King, and John Muir, as Aaron (Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, Penguin, New York, 2006), Laura Dassow (Walls, Laura: The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009), and Andrea (Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Knopf, New York, 2015) have convincingly shown. Yet this essay argues that placing Humboldt in the tradition of Western and especially Anglo-American Nature Writing is ultimately problematic since it denies Humboldt’s connections to South and Central American intellectuals and scientists. Moreover, terming Humboldt a nature writer downplays his inherent concerns with human cultures and civilizations. The Nature Writing tradition originating in Europe and the United States delineated particular environments in romantic and nostalgic terms, denoting a position of privilege both in terms of its authors and settings described. In the Anthropocene, when the concept of “nature” as a whole has become increasingly tenuous, classifying Humboldt as a Nature Writer would be unjustifiable reductive.

An unpublished satirical work, writtenc.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMSBeaglevisited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy'sNarrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown work is intriguing not only for its glimpse of theBeaglevoyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate.

The drawing Untitled (Charles Darwin) (1983), by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, incorporates portraits of biologists, geneticists and genetical terms. What follows is a personal reflection on how the text and symbolism of Untitled affected the authors as plant breeders, causing them to pause and reflect on their own work and that of their field. They learned how art speaks to the spectator differently from direct conversation, allowing for subtler, but perhaps more effective, criticism and a unique opportunity for public peer review. By employing emotion and invoking empathy, art places scientists in the depths of the ethical, sociopolitical and historical contexts in which their work unfolds, urging them to see more fully. In the end, the authors expose their own biases.

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here th...

The Scottish botanist Robert Brown (Fig. 3.1) was a naturalist of the type that appeared frequently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a scientific traveller venturing to little-explored regions, just like, 30 years later, the Englishman Charles Darwin or the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt. At the age of 27, Brown sailed on board the research ship ‘Investigator’ on behalf of the renowned British botanist Sir Joseph Banks to New Holland, the present Australia, where until 1805, he collected 4,500 plant species, 1,700 of them hitherto unknown. Brown remained widely known beyond his field, not because of that collection but rather through an observation he made 20 years later.

John Davis outlines the lives and achievements of pioneers Mary Anning, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, placing them in the context of the time they lived in.

This article presents a review of Deely’s 2002 book, What Distinguishes Human Understanding? It considers Deely’s argument regarding the grounds for asserting the “uniqueness of man” as the “semiotic animal”. It then compares Deely with the arguments regarding continuity of species in the work of Charles Darwin, Charles Peirce and, more recently, Frans de Waal. The article argues that while Deely’s book draws us to key features of the human, the animal semeioticum might be distinctive without being in any single respect absolutely unique.

This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

For decades creationists have claimed that Charles Darwin sought the skulls of full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian people when only four were left alive. It is said that Darwin letters survive which reveal this startling and distasteful truth. Tracing these claims back to their origins, however, reveals a different, if not unfamiliar story.

The cover of Robert Ryan’s new book juxtaposes Charles Darwin’s eyes looking stage right with William Wordsworth’s eyes looking stage left. Darwin’s beetling brow, white eyebrows and dark eyes, tog...

For the last half-century, in a reversal of a long-standing critical position, Dickens has been regarded as engaged with the science of his day, particularly that associated with the laws of thermodynamics; with theories of the evolution of the universe and of life as promulgated in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the nebular hypothesis, and Darwin’s Origin of Species; and with geology and the representation of geological change. This chapter summarizes and assesses the criticism on Dickens’s relationship to science and on the role of science in his periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round, and in his fiction. It argues that the work of historians of Victorian science in recent decades now enables us to see Dickens as not just interested in science, but immersed in the textual and visual culture of display in Victorian popular science.

The site and time of origin of angiosperms are still debated. The co-occurrence of many of the early branching lineages of flowering plants in a region somewhere between Australia and the SW Pacific islands suggests a possible Gondwanan origin of angiosperms. The recent recognition of Zealandia, a 94% submerged continent in the east of Australia, could explain the discrepancy between molecular clocks and fossil records about the age of angiosperms, supporting the old Darwinian hypothesis of a “lost continent” to explain the “abominable mystery” regarding the origin and rapid radiation of flowering plants.

FANTASIA E CIENCIA NA AMAZONIA: O MUNDO PERDIDO , DE ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Resumo Em 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle publicou O mundo perdido, ingressando na ficcao cientifica, a partir das pesquisas cientificas realizadas pelos naturalistas, biologos e zoologos europeus que estiveram na Amazonia no seculo XIX. Nessa nova producao introduziu o Professor Challenger que se tornou personagem icone de uma serie de romances de ficcao cientificas que viriam a ser publicados a partir dessa obra. Maple White foi o nome dado a terra encontrada num plato na bacia Amazonica, onde habitavam seres pre-historicos e Arthur Conan Doyle recorreu como pressuposto para expor e discutir teorias cientificas vigentes naquele momento como, por exemplo, a origem das especies, de Charles Darwin. Desse modo, o objetivo desse trabalho e fazer um exame de O mundo Perdido a luz das descobertas cientificas daquele momento, assim como estudar as relacoes entre ciencia e ficcao, tendo a Amazonia com cenario desse romance. Palavras-chave: Arthur Conan Doyle; ficcao cientifica; Amazonia; literatura fantastica. FANTAZY AND SCIENCE IN THE AMAZON: THE LOST WORLD, BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Keywords In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle published The Lost World , joining in the science fiction, from the scientific research conducted by Europeans naturalists, biologists and zoologists who went to Amazon in the nineteenth century. In this new novel Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Professor Challenger who became icon character of a series of scientific fiction novels that will be published from this work. Maple White was the name given to the land found on a plateau in the Amazon basin, where lived prehistoric beings and Arthur Conan Doyle appealed for granted to expose and discuss current scientific theories at that time, for example, the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Thus, the aim of this study is to make an examination of The Lost World under the light of scientific findings that moment, and to study the relationship between science and fiction, been Amazon as scenary of this novel. Keywords: Arthur Conan Doyle; science fiction; Amazon; fantasy literature.