Title: Darwin down under: science, religion, and evolution in Australia
Abstract: Darwinism came early to Australia. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species appeared on sale in Sydney only four months after its publication in Britain. Within a year, worried presidents of the local scientific societies were joining forces with church leaders to warn of the social and intellectual dangers of “the development hypothesis,” and various Australian scientists were privately expressing fears about the adverse effects of Darwinism on traditional thinking. Yet within three years of the arrival of Darwin's book, an Australian scholar had pioneered, in the application of Darwinism to political economy, an achievement that elicited approval from no less a person than Herbert Spencer; and within fifteen years Darwin himself was praising an Australian botanist for his contributions to organic evolution. By the last decades of the century, Darwinism had become entrenched in the major teaching institutions of the country, and many churchmen were comfortably accommodating the new science of life to Christian theology.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-12-28
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 4
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