Darwin’s missing links

The historical process underlying Darwin’s Origin of Species (Origin) did not play a significant role in the early editions of the book, in spite of the particular inductivist scientific methodology it espoused. Darwin’s masterpiece did not adequately provide his sources or the historical perspective many contemporary critics expected. Later editions yielded the ‘Historical Sketch’ lacking in the earlier editions, but only under critical pressure. Notwithstanding the sources he provided, Darwin presented the Origin as an ‘abstract’ in order to avoid giving sources; a compromise he acknowledged and undertook to set right in later editions, yet failed to provide throughout the six editions under his supervision. Darwin’s reluctance to publish the historical context of his theory and his sources, particularly sources which were also ‘precursors’, may be attributed as much to the matter of intellectual ownership as science, or even good literary practice. Of special concern to Darwin were issues of priority or originality over ‘descent with modification’ and especially over Natural Selection. Many later historians have argued that Darwin was unaware of the work of his precursors on Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory was an example of independent discovery, albeit along with such obscure precursors as Matthew or Wells, who were unknown to Darwin until after the publication of the Origin. Both Matthew and Wells had a medical education, like James Hutton or Erasmus Darwin earlier in the eighteenth century, or even (in part) Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory, at least in Britain was a product largely of the medical evolutionists rather than the natural historians which ‘history’ has chosen to select for the focus of attention; and among the medical evolutionists the figure of John Hunter stands out as theorist, experimentalist and teacher: the medical evolutionists were predominantly the product of Hunter’s legacy or of the medical profession and particularly the Scottish Universities. Much recent Darwin scholarship has focused on the private Notebooks, to establish Darwin’s discovery of Natural Selection around 1837–1838 and demonstrate Darwin’s ignorance of his precursors; requiring an explicit acknowledgement by Darwin as the legitimate substantiation of any claim to prior influence. The precursors have been categorized as uniformly obscure or irrelevant to the science of evolution which may be defined exclusively as ‘Darwinian’. The inclination to acknowledge influences, however was not something Darwin was gratuitously given to doing, especially on matters of priority. The Notebooks are not Darwin’s private thoughts; from an early stage he considered them incipient public documents and later sought to protect them as proof of his originality. William C. Wells was not an obscure thinker, but a celebrated scientist whom Herschel, Darwin’s guide to scientific methodology, had recommended as providing a model of scientific method. Darwin discovered Wells through Herschel, and quickly acquired a copy of Wells’ recommended work, no later than 1831, and held it thereafter in his library at Down House. This book, the 1818 edition of Wells’ Two Essays contains a third essay, Wells’ account of Natural Selection. Later, in the Descent of Man (1871) Darwin acknowledged his separate discovery of the correlation of colour and disease immunity in man, also earlier recounted by Wells.     

The Nanjing Massacre and the traumatic memory of Nanjing residents

ABSTRACT

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937 is a historical tragedy that is hard to erase from the collective memory of Nanjing residents. Since 1982, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and other monuments have been established as a Chinese response to the Japanese revision of their high school history textbooks, and these facilities have opened a mnemonic channel for the Nanjing people to link history to reality. In the Nanjing people’s traumatic memory, the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre of the contemporary nationalistic sentiments are entangled and symbiotic. Many survivors have profound factual memory of the massacre, yet they have shown tolerance and forgiveness to the victimizers. While their memory has transcended the primitive stage of retaliation, the traumatic memory of mankind should be transformed into invaluable resource of the human endeavor to pursue peace.     

ON THE MANY WAYS OF SAYING MEMORY

This essay examines the concept and the discourse of collective memory in view of interpreting the novel function with which it has been endowed in recent decades and the problematic character of its interpretation. To this end, it focuses on the recent book by Manuel Cruz, On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History, which examines the contemporary functions that collective memory has assumed in recent decades and takes into account interpretations of it elaborated in a number of seminal works that have set the framework for contemporary ways of understanding it. My investigation engages critical analysis of the psychological approach to collective memory that Cruz adopts, which, in interpreting recent public preoccupation with collective memory as an expression of trauma occasioned by the Holocaust and other horrific twentieth‐century events, assumes that analogous psychic mechanisms govern forms of remembrance in the public sphere and memory in personal and small‐group interaction. By taking into account alternate possibilities of interpretation, suggested above all by the public function of the mass media, I seek to widen the scope of enquiry to scrutinize in a broader perspective the contemporary role of collective memory and its political significance in the public realm.     

Violent memories/memory violence

This review takes up three works that represent recent approaches to the anthropology of memory and affect. Echoing themes in Holocaust literature, a central issue here is the role of violent memory in forging collective identifications and sentiments. Taken together, these volumes suggest a continuing evolution of efforts to theorize the remembrance of violence and the social and bodily practices that mediate its reproduction. In particular, these studies demonstrate the value of ethnography in tracing the social career of violent memory as it is variously projected, suppressed, and transformed in moral communities and across generations.     

Confronting a history of war loss in a Spanish family archive

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.     

How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz,Stephen W. Kuffler,and John C. Eccles—Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911–2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980), and John C. Eccles (1903–1997) on the nerve–muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles’ team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749–1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783–1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774–1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve–muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.     

Narratives in Anecdotes,Memory and Interlocutors: An Early Engagement with Neville Alexander’s Story

In this article, I present a story about South African Marxist and activist-scholar Neville Edward Alexander. As historians, social scientists and intellectuals embedded in the humanities, a part of the job we have awarded ourselves or that we assume to be part of our disciplinary reasoning, our intellectual orbit, is to bring to life the periods that, and the people about whom, we reflect. This we do through writing and telling stories, often constructed with a “moral message” of sorts. In these acts of writing and story-telling, objectivity plays a disputed and a precarious role, and misrepresentations could be conscious or unwitting. The lack of objectivity in bringing to life the period and the people we talk about in our stories, in our exaggeration and our understatement about what we have read, about what we have heard, and then about what we write, is part of an academic’s narrative. These human traits of exaggeration and understatement can lead to historical error. In this early exploration of seeking answers to the questions, “Who is Neville Alexander?” and “What can we learn from his writings?” I offer two anecdotes about the man. My proposition is that overcoming historical error does not rest exclusively with factual verification. It has to factor in an appraisal of the ideological intention or even political wish of the people telling the stories, in written texts and orally, and of the interlocutors’ context that we recover in our historical studies. In writing this preliminary sketch of Alexander, I take a detour into higher education issues, particularly the field of doctoral studies, and I paraphrase some of the concerns that have been raised by Alexander. I conclude this introductory study with some thoughts on Alexander’s contributions to social change, to “race,” and to language policy and multilingualism.     

25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: symbolic dates of the past and Italy's transition

The twenty-year political period on which this paper focuses opened and closed with two highly symbolic commemorations. On 25 April 1994, just a few weeks after the electoral victory of the political alliance led by Silvio Berlusiconi (Pole of Liberty), more than 500,000 people took to the streets to commemorate the anti-Fascist foundations of the post-war Italian Republic: this was a timely reaction that ran counter to the climate of disaffection that since the 1980s had marked the annual celebrations of the Liberation. The second commemoration was on the night of 11 March 2011, when thousands of citizens took part in the ‘All Night Tricolor’ parties that marked the start of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. The scale of popular participation was in part a response to President Ciampi's commitment to re-launching a sense of ‘civil religion’, to the variety of ways in which the event was turned into a spectacle and the work of the organizing committee. But it also reflected the ways in which the significance of the commemoration of the distant founding of the Kingdom of Italy was considered to be ‘above’ (even ‘anti’) party politics. Both commemorations were rooted deeply in Italian history but took place in very different institutional circumstances: this essays compares the two commemorations and how they illustrate the changing political cultures in the time of the Italian transition.     

‘Rearranging the ground’:1 public and private space in Belfast,Northern Ireland

This article examines imaginings and uses of place in the city of Belfast which challenge the conventionally gendered and sectarian place discourses dominating politics and society in Northern Ireland. These alternative imaginings are articulated in two artworks, ‘Home’, by Mary McIntyre, and ‘Street Signs’, by Aisling O'Beirn. I present readings of these pieces with reference to concepts of public and private which signify through socio-political, geographical and psychological orderings of space. Focusing on the construction of public and private space allows me to approach the issue of sectarian territorialisation in Belfast obliquely, while recognising its physical and psychological potency and the complexity of its operations; further, it facilitates the exploration of how gender and memory are made to matter spatially, in general and specifically in Belfast. This analytical perspective clarifies certain exclusions and oppressions inherent in the framing of space, but also offers understandings of how these may be destabilised, allowing unorthodox or marginal identities and practices to emerge as co-constituents of space.