Word: darwinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scientists have been more tender, sympathetic parents than Charles Darwin, father of ten. But Darwin was a scientist first, a father afterward. From the moment his first child, William Erasmus ("Doddy"), was born, 100 years ago, the eager Revolutionist began to take notes on his infants' wailing, coughing, drooling, kicking, stretching, winking, frowning, screaming. "With a fine degree of paternal fervor," Darwin tickled the naked soles of his babies' feet with paper, "tried to look savage" to provoke tears. Purpose of his baby-baiting was to determine whether the instinctive reactions of childhood were similar to the gestures...
Director Arnold Lucius Gesell of Yale's famed Clinic of Child Development, writing in Scientific Monthly for December, gave Darwin credit for these experiments, because, in trying to bolster up his theory of man's lowly origin, Darwin gave a tremendous push to the infant science of infant behavior. Still a source book for child psychologists is Darwin's A Biographic Sketch of an Infant, published...
Gestures in which Darwin displayed greatest interest were: 1) monkey-like "contraction of muscles around the eyes just before crying"; and 2) pouting. "A dear young lady near here," he wrote, "plagued a very young child for my sake, till he cried and I saw the eyebrows for a second or two beautifully oblique, just before the torrent of tears began...
...Darwin Divide. Many scientists engaged in the controversy between biology and Mrs. Grundy over Darwin. Conklin was one of the few to do so who had a background of youthful religious fervor. He plumped for Darwinism early, tried to show reasonable Christians that there was no threat from evolutionary doctrine to a practical religion based on Faith, Hope & Charity and the Golden Rule. (Today his religion is a sort of altruistic, pantheistic idealism.) His feeling for religion did not cause him to spare his opponents a crack...
Second Division. After the first division between laymen and churchmen over Darwin came a second division between scientists who did not question that evolution was a fact. The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection declined in scientific favor. This "eclipse of Darwinism" began in the 19th Century, reached into the 20th. The tendency was to doubt that natural selection-the slow combing out and accumulation of small variations-could carry the whole burden of evolution. Many scientists grew so contemptuous of natural selection that they called it pure fiction. Darwin knew nothing of the Mendelian heredity laws, nothing about...