Dimensions of Darwinism. Themes and counterthemes in twentieth-century evolutionary theory

This article explores the critical history and reception of Charles Churchill, the mid-eighteenth century satirist, looking in particular at his skepticism towards all authority as a questioning of traditional ideas of `enlightenment', and at the reasons for the meteoric but short-lived nature of his poetic success.     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty

Despite the professed harmony of science and religion in early to middle nineteenth-century culture, scientific practice gradually veered away from confirmation of religious assumptions. This trend culminated in the shock of Charles Darwin's theory of species development, which troubled many scientists and religious believers both for its explicit naturalism and for the unprovable probabilism at the heart of its method. Two key players — and antagonists — in the reception of Darwinism in America, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray, actually agreed in their assessment of the probabilistic quality of Darwinism, but they split over how much uncertainty to wel-come into their science and their religion. Agassiz became intellectually marginalized because he continued to demand certainty, while Gray's acceptance of uncertainty represented a growing trend among intellectuals of science and religion.     

现代性的歧路:清末民初的社会达尔文主义思潮

自进化论传入中国,斯宾塞的社会达尔文主义提供了一条物竞天择、适者生存的富强之路。斯宾塞的竞争进化论,与中国文化传统中儒家的经世致用、法家的富国强兵相结合,形成了近代中国物质主义与功利主义的狂潮。社会达尔文主义颠覆了两千年来中国传统的礼的秩序,代之以竞争为核心的力的秩序,并产生了以强者为主导的新国民人格。然而,这一去价值、去伦理的力的秩序,在清末民初产生了严重的政治后果,它造就了民国,却毁了共和。五四知识分子痛定思痛,重新思考中国的复兴之路,开始了从富强到文明的历史转变。