Thoughts on Darwinian View of Looking at the World and English Obsessions with Genealogy

It’s interesting to note that there isn’t really a way to conceive of the modern worlds in an academic rigorous way or even a casual way without referencing Darwin or science. I just wonder if it’s possible to regain some of the scientific curiosity of imagining the world what it was like before Darwin in interpreting things without a Darwinian perspective of dissent with modification and genealogies of that nature. I’m sure that you could look at it from a Lamarckian perspective if you were going exactly chronologically. But I don’t think even in that case that you were looking at it Darwinian style.

Charles Darwin, c. 1854, when he was preparing On the Origin of Species for publication (Source and description from Wikipedia. I claim no ownership of the image or description).

I think there’s also something to be said about the English obsession throughout history with genealogical charts. A lot of English royal disputes were based on English genealogical charts and a large focus of English law was on property rights. So perhaps that was really present in the mind of many English people perhaps much more so than in other parts of the world because they didn’t use a civil law system meaning that judges could sort of come up with a law in some sense of the word. So perhaps that creative approach to identifying genealogies was part of the tradition and thus expecting a theory of evolution coming from a culture obsessed with genealogy at least in the upper class was to be expected.

© Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV