Darwinism and Victorian Values: Threat or Opportunity?
نویسنده
چکیده
POPULAR understanding of the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ is dominated by the metaphor of a war between science and religion. We are used to being told that Darwin’s theory was perceived as a threat to the religious values that most Victorians accepted as the moral foundations of their society. The claim that we had evolved from the apes would undermine the assumption that the world of moral and spiritual values existed independently of material nature. The most popular expression of this image of conflict is the confrontation between ‘Darwin’s bulldog,’ Thomas Henry Huxley, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. Huxley is supposed to have triumphed over the bishop’s efforts to discredit Darwinism and thus hold back the march of scientific rationalism. From the viewpoint of a rationalist, of course, this was a good thing yet our interpretation of late-Victorian thought is also influenced by another image of conflict which paints a less rosy picture of Darwin’s impact. It is claimed that for some Victorians, at least, the philosophy of ‘social Darwinism’ legitimized the replacement of traditional values with the worship of brute force and success at any price. The vested interests which underlie these conflicting interpretations are obvious enough. Scientists want to see Darwinism as a symbol of modern humanity’s ability to throw off the shackles of outdated superstition and face up to the harsh realities of nature. Some religious thinkers want to
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