Re: Mid-19th Century Religion
That fits with what I've found on the subject also.
Here's a bit of trivia, though. The idea of men being descended from apes was kicking around decades before Origin of the Species, let alone Descent of Man. Darwin's work was more about how it happened, than the fact that it happened.
http://books.google.com/books?id=AesIk8M0kNYC&pg=PT212
That strangely anachronistic-sounding passage is from the British Encyclopedia, 1809!
The name most associated with pre-Darwin origin of species was Lamarck, now not much more than a humorous footnote in discussions of evolution, for proposing the idea that giraffes developed long necks by stretching upward, then passing that acquired trait to their offspring. At the time, though, Lamarck was the best thing going, and he was closer to being right than anything else being proposed.
But as Terre said, there just didn't seem to be a general science vs. religion outcry about any of it, the way there would be in the 1870s and beyond. In fact, overall, there seemed to be more of a sense that science worked hand-in-hand with religion to reveal what god had designed.
Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net
Originally posted by amity
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Here's a bit of trivia, though. The idea of men being descended from apes was kicking around decades before Origin of the Species, let alone Descent of Man. Darwin's work was more about how it happened, than the fact that it happened.
Several writers, who have pleased themselves with describing what they call a regular gradation or chain of beings, represented man only as a superior kind of monkey; and place the unfortunate African as the connecting link between the superior races of mankind and the orang-ou-tang; they deny, in short, that he is generically distinguished from monkeys. Such an opinion might reasonably be expected from the slave-merchant who traffics in human blood, and from a West Indian Negro driver, who uses his fellow-creature worse than brutes; but we should not think of finding it defended by the natural historian, and we shall not hesitate to assert, that it is as false philosophically, as the moral and political consequences, to which it would lead, are shocking and detestable.
That strangely anachronistic-sounding passage is from the British Encyclopedia, 1809!
The name most associated with pre-Darwin origin of species was Lamarck, now not much more than a humorous footnote in discussions of evolution, for proposing the idea that giraffes developed long necks by stretching upward, then passing that acquired trait to their offspring. At the time, though, Lamarck was the best thing going, and he was closer to being right than anything else being proposed.
But as Terre said, there just didn't seem to be a general science vs. religion outcry about any of it, the way there would be in the 1870s and beyond. In fact, overall, there seemed to be more of a sense that science worked hand-in-hand with religion to reveal what god had designed.
Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net
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