1 - The Evolutionary Darwins, 1794–1835

Summary

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.