As a side-note: In class we looked at some images of Darwin’s hand drawn evolutionary trees, and professor Siperstein said he’d concluded that lemurs were the original relative of humans. That information sounded familiar to me, so I tried to research if that was true. From what I can find, lemurs were the first primate to evolve, which lead to apes, monkeys, and us. It boggles my mind that Darwin was able to deduce, without genetics, that lemurs gave rise to the rest of the primates correctly, since they look more like cats than monkeys. It’s an example of the trust he had in methodical observation and empirical data, and his unwillingness to settle for the easy explanation…

His theory of evolution in The Origin of Species was a departure from an anthropocentric agenda in science that was typical at the time. American and European culture was greatly influenced by Christian traditions, namely that humans are created as an image of the Creator, and that dominion of the world/environment is granted as a basic right. The 1800s was an age of machine tools, for the sole purpose of benefiting the gamut of human endeavors. From the early to mid 19^th century (origin of species published 1859), the battery, photograph, plastic, revolver, lightbulb, phone, and tin can came about (inventors.about.com). Outside of career inventors, there weren’t many fields that had professional scientists. “Gentleman naturalists”, like Darwin, were about the closest thing. The naturalist perspective grew from the Newtonian tradition that there was a set of measurable laws that governed the world. This idea didn’t directly clash with the role of humans being the pinnacle of this system of laws, so it was accepted by general society under the context that studying these laws was like studying God’s hands at work. There was an inclusion of scientific objectivity, but a cultural commitment to religious anthropocentrism. Darwin’s theory, however, rejects the view of human interest having any special priority by saying that any organism (including us) is no more than a product of successive random variations and concurrent natural selection. The spiritual element in this idea is still intact: that it may represent a deeper understanding of God’s design. However, it does square off with the deep-rooted Christian view of Creationism and important belief that we’re the one species in His favor and made in His image.

Darwin’s text isn’t really ecocentric either. His argument isn’t an ethical one and he never ranks the ‘interest’ of one thing over the other, whether it be the environment or among species. Instead, he focuses only on describing the process, so his writing is process-centric (?). As a scientist of that time, there wasn’t very much to draw on in order to lend a useful hand to an ethical argument. No raised sea level, no accelerated extinction rate, ozone depletion, sewage and by-product build-up, ship oilspills etc. The damage being done to the eco-system at such an early stage in the process of technology was better viewed intuitively, with reason, rather than through data and understanding—Enter Thoreau! I think this is why Thoreau resonates as such an important environmental figure. Way ahead of the curve, he brought images of natural disturbance to his readers, like the devilish iron horse passage, yet also had credibility based in all empirical scientific work he includes in his texts.