18Mar 2023 by Post

Darwin and Agassiz: An Imaginary Picture

Adrian Desmond, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Charleston, correspondence, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Evolution, history, Intelligent Design, James Moore, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Lake Superior, primary sources, Races of Man, Racism, Royal Agricultural College, S. P. Woodward, Sacred Cause (series), slavery, United States
Given the close relationship Louis Agassiz shared with pro-slavery factions in the South, Desmond and Moore focus much on Darwin’s relationship with Agassiz. Source
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01Aug 2022 by Post

Darwin and the British Secularist Tradition

Adrian Desmond, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anglicanism, Baron d’Holbach, Charles Bradlaugh, Charles Darwin, Crisis of Doubt, Culture, Dover Beach, Edward Aveling, Erasmus Darwin, Faith & Science, In Memoriam, James Moore, John Henry Gordon, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, Origin of Species, Oxbridge, Robert Chambers, Secularism, The Oracle of Reason, The Rights of Man, Timothy Larsen, Tom Paine, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Victorian England
The arresting historical vignette of Darwin’s fraught meeting with Bradlaugh and Aveling at his country retreat would doubtless make for a good TV docudrama. Source
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12Jul 2021 by Post

The Casual Racism of Charles Darwin

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Abraham Lincoln, Adrian Desmond, Africa, Allison Hopper, anti-racism, Charles Darwin, Culture & Ethics, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Descent of Man, Edinburgh, Emma Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, Great Emancipator, Harriet Martineau, Human Origins, James Moore, N-word, Racism, slavery, slaves, Victorian England
It is certainly startling to see the N-word cropping up in Darwin’s letters, but this is not the only place. Source
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27Apr 2021 by Post

Some Additional Comments on Social Darwinism

Adrian Desmond, Alfred Russel Wallace, Applied Eugenics, Culture & Ethics, Current Anthropology, Darwin Industry, Darwinian evolution, Derek Freeman, Evolution, Herbert Spencer, James Moore, Jeffrey O’Connell, John C. Greene, Marvin Harris, Michael Ruse, natural selection, Origin of Species, Richard Weikart, Robert Richards, Social Darwinism
O’Connell and Ruse’s failure to engage deeply and fully with the historiography of this question makes it hard to take their effort seriously. Source
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03Jan 2020 by Post

Himmelfarb and Her Haters

10 Books That Screwed Up the World, Adrian Desmond, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Dickson White, Bea Kristol, Benjamin Wiker, Borneo, Bridgewater Treatises, Charles Darwin, Charles Gillispie, Charles Kingsley, City University of New York, Cornell University, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Darwinists, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Dyak headhunters, Edward T. Oakes, Encounter (journal), Ernst Mayr, Eugenics Record Office, Evolution, Francis Galton, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harry Bruinius, history, Jacques Barzun, James D. Watson, James Moore, Jeffrey Shallit, Jewish Women, John William Draper, Julian Huxley, Leo Strauss, Mein Kampf, P.Z. Myers, Panda's Thumb, Uaupés River Valley, Victorian England
Editor’s note: Historian and Darwin skeptic Gertrude Himmelfarb died on Monday, December 30, 2019. While mourning the passing of this great scholar, we are pleased to republish Professor Flannery’s 2009 essay, below. See also Flannery’s tribute, ‘Farewell to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Brutally Honest Historian of the “Darwinian Revolution.’” “If you have no enemies, it is a sign fortune has forgot you.” — Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732  Noted physician Thomas Fuller was an expert on “eruptive fevers,” and so it seems fitting to open this essay with his wry but telling observation on enemies in public life, for perhaps no contemporary historian has spawned more “eruptive fever” over an analysis of the reigning secular creation myth demigod, Charles Darwin, than has the present subject of this essay. If Fuller is any judge,…
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