Browsing by Subject "Darwin"
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Item Examining Darwin's influence on the education debate in Victorian England(2012-05-12) Elias, Yolanda; Elias, Yolanda; Hama, Mark; Kornasky, Linda; Dr. Shirley EoffEngland's reluctance to establish a national system of education throughout the nineteenth century allowed for the continued dominance of religiously controlled classical education which was forced to confront the growing demand for scientific education with Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Any move towards a primarily secular education would have significant implications for the Victorian social hierarchy and longstanding aristocratic rule. Consequently, Victorian culture spiraled into a heated debate over the future of education between the classicists, whose resistance was, in part, the result of rising religious tensions with the geological challenge to Genesis, and the scientific community, who argued that a classical education contributed little applicable knowledge for the technological advancement of society. Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species added a new dimension of religious controversy to the education debate and redefined the fundamental reasons for the irreconcilable clash between scientists and classicists.Item Explaining the success of Roman freedmen : a pseudo-Darwinian approach(2014-08) Sibley, Matthew John; Galinsky, Karl, 1942-In Roman society, freed slaves were elevated to a citizen-like status, yet they never had the full rights of their free-born counterparts. Despite the inequality of the system, many freedmen appear to have found great success in the realm of business. This report endeavors to reveal why it was that this group prospered within the Roman economy using a pseudo-Darwinian perspective. Scholarship has, for the most part, tended to avoid Darwinian lines of thought in sociological studies but this report shows the power of this type of thinking. The first chapter clarifies the nature of slavery in the Roman world and the wide variety of experiences that slaves could have. Chapter two considers the different ways that slaves could be manumitted and how a freedman’s status could differ depending on the formality of his release from servitude. The third chapter examines the literary representations of freedmen in the genre of comedy and Petronius’ Satyricon. Chapter four turns to the archaeological evidence and provides a sense of how freedmen represented themselves to the wider community. Lastly, the fifth chapter, using a pseudo-Darwinian model, will show that the image of the successful freedman is not an anomaly of the archaeological record or a trope of Latin literature but an inevitable outcome of the intense selection that slaves underwent.Item The Role of Metaphor in the Darwin Debates: Natural Theology, Natural Selection, and Christian Production of Counter-Metaphor(2012-07-16) Neumann, JulietThe presence of metaphorical language in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species has been the source of much debate, particularly in the interaction between Darwin's theory and the Christian faith. The metaphorical language used to describe "nature," "evolution," "natural theology," and "natural selection" is examined?within Christianity prior to Darwin, in Darwin's writing of the Origin, and in the responses of three Victorian Christian critics of science. "Natural selection" and "evolution" had metaphorical meanings prior to Darwin's use of these terms. "Nature" was a highly metaphysical concept, described by the metaphor of natural theology. "Evolution" was associated with epic understandings of human progress. The metaphor of natural theology was particularly important to the faith of Western Christians by the time of Darwin. In order to better understand the role of natural theology, the theories of metaphor developed by Kenneth Burke in "Four Master Tropes" and by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By are compared. This comparison results in the development of an expansion of Lakoff and Johnson's metaphor theory, a model termed experienced metaphor. This model is used to explain Victorian Christians' emotional adherence to natural theology. Many of the interpreters of Darwin's work, both secular and Christian, saw natural selection as a rival to natural theology. The works of three prominent Victorians who attempted to defend natural theology against the apparent onslaughts of science are evaluated for additional metaphorical language regarding nature and evolution. Philip Gosse, G. K. Chesterton, and Charles Spurgeon each produced counter-metaphors to defend natural theology?metaphors of awe/wonder and of sin/destruction. The rhetorical effects of these counter-metaphors promote the rejection of Darwin's theory of evolution. The counter-metaphors identified are still in circulation within the debate over Darwin and Christianity today. The presence of metaphor in this debate deserves greater attention, in order to understand how metaphor affects the thinking of both Christian and secular audiences regarding Darwinian evolution.