Levelling Evolution

Abstract

A democratization of evolutionary thought has long been in progress: James Moore’s The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979), Peter Bowler’s Evolution: The History of an Idea (1984) and The Non-Darwinian Revolution (1988), Adrian Desmond’s Politics of Evolution (1989), and James Secord’s Victorian Sensation (2000) are the hallmarks of this trend, which extends the study of evolutionary paradigms to Darwin’s predecessors, influences, interlocutors, rivals, mis-readers, and adapters in different classes, genders, nationalities, and disciplines. It has extended the study of evolution to different media and genres, and it has suggested how many writers resistant to Darwinian evolution nevertheless embraced other Darwinian ideas or shared other Darwinian assumptions. Reticent to be thought to impugn Darwin’s reputation, many contributors to this trend – excluding the four scholars above – tend to reiterate the now dubious novelty of their approach, as if only novel approaches could produce novel knowledge.