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Article ID: CBB902634281

Race Before Darwin: Variation, Adaptation and the Natural History of Man in Post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790–1835 (2020)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 53
Issue: 3
Pages: 333-350

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/race-before-darwin-variation-adaptation-and-the-natural-history-of-man-in-postenlightenment-edinburgh-17901835/DFFD048E45E4AD98C442A8228E85A836

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087420000217

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Evolution Adaptation (biology) Variation (biology) Physical anthropology Science and race Race Natural history 19th century 18th century Edinburgh University of Edinburgh

This paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

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