Show Me the Bone by Gowan Dawson;

Author:Gowan Dawson; [Dawson, Gowan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226332871
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

The law of correlation, in this idiosyncratic Anglican perspective, actually enabled the paleontologist to join the poet and prophet in intuiting the truth of the most fundamental Christian dogmas of resurrection and the heavenly afterlife. Clergymen such as Brodie and Wood were a significant constituency among popularizers of science in mid-Victorian Britain, and their prolific publications, as Lightman has shown, helped maintain a religious framework for scientific discussions that posed a direct challenge to the secularizing agenda of Huxley and his fellow scientific naturalists.32

This tension between theological popularizers and expert evolutionists was made especially apparent in the summer of 1859, when Paton James Gloag, a Church of Scotland minister, expounded “in a popular form” the most recent arguments for the harmony of geology and revelation in a concise treatise entitled The Primeval World. Shortly before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Gloag was particularly anxious at the spread of what he called, with evident distaste, the “theory . . . usually known in this country by the name of the development hypothesis.” This pernicious conjecture, he insisted, was “based upon mere assumptions and negative statements, and is wholly unsupported by a single scientific fact.” The most telling confutation of such transmutationism, Gloag assured his readers, was that it was “in direct opposition to the deductions of comparative anatomy and physiology.” After all, he observed:

It is now an ascertained fact, that all the parts and organs of an animal are so joined together, and so dependent upon each other, that no change can take place on one of them without a corresponding change upon all the rest. . . . Change, for example, the teeth of a tiger into teeth resembling those of an ox, and, in order to [sustain] its existence, the entire form, and organs, and habits, and food of the animal would have to be changed:—a change so great as to amount to a new creation.33

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.