Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Literature (original) (raw)

2021

Abstract

This dissertation, “Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Literature” contends that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, originated in On the Origin of Species (1859), was a culturally disruptive force because it presented all species, including and especially the human, as mutable, unstable, and unfixed. This vision of endless transformation, fluidity, and change was unsettling, especially from a Christian point of view. Within a few decades, however, Darwin’s theories were normalized, if not universally accepted; at this point, his concept of the “living fossil”—an organism that closely resembles its ancestors because it has hardly changed at a genomic level—reemerged in scientific texts. Debates about whether genetically unchanged species really exist have followed us to our present. The living fossil has captured the cultural and scientific imagination precisely because it proposes unchangingness in the face of mutability; in other words, where ...

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