Ideology and Evolution in Nineteenth Century Britain

Evelleen Richards is Honorary Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney. She has published widely on the social analysis of contemporary scientific and medical controversies, with particular reference to the sociology of clinical trials and on the contextual history of evolutionary biology. Her most recent book, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (2017), won the 2018 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize, awarded biennially by the History of Science Society for the "best book in the history of the life sciences and natural history".

Introduction; Part I: Romantic embryos, radical monsters, and racial others in evolutionary theorising; 1 “Metaphorical mystifications”: the romantic gestation of nature in British biology; 2 A question of property rights: Richard Owen’s evolutionism reassessed; 3 The “Moral Anatomy” of Robert Knox: the interplay between biological and social thought in Victorian scientific naturalism; 4 A political anatomy of monsters, hopeful and otherwise: teratogeny, transcendentalism, and evolutionary theorising; Part II: Darwinian science, good wives, the “shrieking sisterhood”, suffering animals, and radical birth control; 5 Darwin and the descent of woman; 6 Huxley and woman’s place in science: the “woman question” and the control of Victorian anthropology; 7 Redrawing the boundaries: Darwinian science and Victorian women intellectuals; 8 “The greatest of all possible evils to mankind”: Annie Besant vs. Darwin at the Knowlton trial and beyond