Off-Duty Darwinism. "Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender", by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (eds). [review]

Abstract

The tension between strict Darwinism and transformist evolutionary schemes not founded on natural selection is central to "Disseminating Darwinism". The best chapters (those by Eric Anderson, Scott Appleby, David Livingstone and Jon Roberts) are also those that most explicitly acknowledge this tension. With one exception, the collection originated as papers presented to a conference held in Dunedin in 1994. As if guided by a hidden hand (or, as is more likely, by determined convenors), the contributors bring a strikingly consistent set of concerns to bear on their separate accounts of the ways in which Darwinism was received, interpreted and rhetorically deployed by different interest groups in different parts of the English-speaking world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.