We argue here that one common myth regarding Darwin’s influence - namely, that it led to an “immediate” change in the life sciences - is false. Darwin’s ideas regarding natural selection were not immediately and widely accepted by the scientific community. We document challenges to natural selection, alternatives considered and endorsed, and show that, rather than a rapid, “revolutionary” change, this eventual embrace of “Darwinism” was gradual, drawing in part on Kuhn’s ideas regarding revolutionary science.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

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.

The Good News finally snagged him. In late September 1881, he was near the end, bedridden, languishing in a soft purple robe, still able to read, though he always preferred to be read to. Lady Hope entered the drawing room at the top of the stairs quietly, respectfully, as the golden hour gently illuminated corn fields and English oak forests through his picturesque bay window. The faintest crown of white hair encircled his head in the late afternoon light; the rest was wizardly beard (Figure 6.1). Lady Hope, the well-known evangelist, was visiting the Darwins, and she approached the old scientist cautiously. But she needn’t have. In his wrinkled hands he held the Bible, open to the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews. “The Royal Book,” Darwin called it, serenely, mentioning a few favored passages.

The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been.

“Origin Myths,” explores how literary historians narrated the origins of Persian and Urdu languages and literary traditions. I challenge the nationalist narratives around these traditions, of Iranian continuity and Indo-Muslim rupture, which remain dominant today. Tracing the reception of evolutionary theories and Orientalist philology in Iran and India, I analyze fundamental differences in nationalist thought in the two contexts. Iranians articulated a vision of linear language history, emphasizing continuity with pre-Islamic precursors to modern Persian which the addition of an Arabic element did not fundamentally change. On the other hand, Indian Muslims offered a contrary account of Urdu’s origins, emphasizing rupture with the pre-Islamic past and the constitutive role of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish in Urdu’s formation. Through a comparative reading of these "origin myths" I demonstrate how historically contingent the dominant narratives around Persian and Urdu were.

Lev Tolstoy was not hostile to the natural sciences, although the impression that he was is understandable given his critical remarks about contemporary medicine. Throughout his life, Tolstoy remained consistently aware of developments in the natural sciences, and if some of his polemical representations about them are taken out of context, it is possible to misinterpret his positions. This chapter places three of his more prominent negative engagements with the sciences in context to show how those views emerged from specific local circumstances. First, his dismissal of university education in the sciences is juxtaposed with his own education in Kazan. Second, his very prominent rejection in Anna Karenina of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection adopted a specific ethical stance in the context of a vibrant Russian debate about the biological and philosophical limitations of Darwinism. And, finally, his satirizing of séances and “spiritualism” in his play The Fruits of Enlightenment is examined as emerging from his domestic surroundings.

Chapter two delineates ‘the science of language’ as it developed from the philosophical speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder to the establishment of the ‘New Philology’ in the 1860s. Even as philosophers recognised significant continuities between birdsong, speech and poetry, they also, however, increasingly turned their attention to the internal, mental faculties as the distinguishing marks of an evolved and uniquely human language. This chapter examines the wider implications of a developing equation of language and thought in the long nineteenth century. The apparent absence of language in animals was widely seen to reflect a lack of intelligence, reason or even consciousness. Since language reflected the unique faculties of the human mind, philosophers of all stripes raced to discover an intrinsic set of principles common to all human languages throughout time and across continents. According to this same principle, however, differences between languages were also seen to reflect or even determine differences in the minds of their speakers. As they responded to these larger debates, scientists and poets throughout this period, from William Wordsworth to Charles Darwin, reflected on their personal experiences and the notorious difficulty they habitually encountered in attempting to translate their own thoughts into words.

Since birds have been trained to sing for centuries, the scientific studies of birdsong examined in chapter one drew from an old and deep well of popular knowledge and experience. Naturalists relied on a mass of supporting evidence from an ancient and evidently lucrative trade in singing birds. The chapter examines records of bird-catching from eighteenth-century training manuals to Henry Mayhew’s extended discussion of the metropolitan ‘bird-trade’ in London Labour and The London Poor (1851) and the eventual decline of the London chaffinch-fanciers as recounted in W. H. Hudson’s Birds in London (1898). It then assesses the importance of this popular and highly competitive sport to an emerging scientific method based on practical experience, direct observation and controlled experiment. While Daines Barrington and Gilbert White observed apposite similarities between birdsong and human speech, the chapter observes an irregularity in how their studies were received: Barrington’s findings were relegated to the footnotes and appendices of natural history throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes by showing how this wealth of material was excavated from the footnotes and explicitly used to identify birdsong as ‘the nearest analogy’ to human speech in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871).

This chapter analyzes how the later Nietzsche proposes we resolve the pathological fragmentation that he sees threatening both modern individuals and communities. I reconstruct how, within his theory of the will to power, he develops a novel account of healthy organization – one purged of the problematic metaphysical presuppositions that compromised his earlier synthetic program (outlined in Chapter 3). Against his agonistic readers, I argue that his later theory of organization still comprises a combination of instrumentalization and exclusion that renders it incompatible with his notion of agonal conflict. I examine how he concretely applies this abstract theory of organization to the problems of individual and collective disintegration. With regard to his account of self-cultivation, I contest those who construe Nietzsche as a thinker who prescribes the sublimation, but not the elimination, of troublesome psychological drives. With regard to his theory of collective organization, I take issue with both his agonistic and his radical aristocratic readers. My contention is that each group of interpreters unduly distorts Nietzsche’s political outlook, making it appear either far softer or more brutal than is in fact the case.

Chapter 2 illuminates the transformation of the European and global international system in the first decades of the “long” 20th century (1860–1914). It analyses how the turn towards ever more uncompromising power politics, the emergence of modern states and the intensification of ever more unlimited imperialist competition between older and aspiring world powers – essentially, the European great powers, the United States and Japan – came to recast Europe and the world. It throws into relief how this competition and the rise of dominant imperialist, militarist and “civilisational Darwinist” doctrines and assumptions not only led to the creation of a new global hierarchy characterised by unprecedented inequalities between imperial world states, smaller states and those who were subjected to different forms of informal imperialist domination and formal colonisation. And it offers new perspectives on how the confluence of European balance-of-power practices and escalating global rivalries successively corroded international peace.