"This Coral Episode" : Darwin, Dana, and the coral reefs of the Pacific / David R. Stoddart -- Darwin's biogeography and the Oceanic Islands of the Central Pacific, 1859-1909 / E. Alison Kay -- Evolution, biogeography, and maps : an early history of Wallace's Line / Jane R. Camerini -- John T. Gulick and the Active Organism / Ron Amundson -- Embryology and empire : the Balfour students and the quest for intermediate forms in the laboratory of the Pacific / Roy Macleod -- Darwin's correspondents in the Pacific / Janet Garber -- The Darwinian legacy in the Pacific Northwest : Seattle's Young Naturalists' Society, P. Brooks Randolph, and conchology / Keith R. Benson -- "Science at the Periphery" : Dr Schomburgk's Garden / Pauline Payne -- Missionaries and the human mind : Charles Darwin and Robert Fitzroy / Janet Browne -- British missionaries and their contribution to science in the Pacific Islands / Niel Gunson -- The Melanesian mission and Victorian anthropology / Sara Sohmer -- The color blue : from research in the Torres Strait to an ecology of human behavior / Henrika Kuklick
Darwinism, social Darwinism, and the Australian Aborigines / Barry W. Butcher -- The Darwinian enlightenment and New Zealand politics / John Stenhouse -- Environment and race : geography's search for a Darwinian synthesis / Nancy J. Christie -- Varieties of social darwinism in Australia, Japan, and Hawaii, 1883-1921 / John Laurent
Summary:
No scientific traveler was more influenced by the Pacific than Charles Darwin, and his legacy in the region remains unparalleled. Yet the extent of the Pacific's impact on the thought of Darwin and those who followed him has not been sufficiently grasped. In this volume of essays, sixteen scholars explore the many dimensions - biological, geological, anthropological, social, and political - of Darwinism in the Pacific
Fired by Darwinian ideas, nineteenth-century naturalists within and around the Pacific rim worked to further Darwin's programs in their own research: in Seattle, conchologist P. Brooks Randolph; in Honolulu, evolutionist John Thomas Gulick; in Adelaide, botanist Richard Schomburgk; and in Malaysia, biogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace. Lesser-known enthusiasts furnished Darwin with fresh material and replied to his endless inquiries, while young aspiring biologists from Cambridge tested Darwinian ideas directly in the "laboratory" of the Pacific. But the implications of Darwinism for the understanding of human nature and history turned it into a public theory as well as a scientific one. Anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, politicians, and social commentators - from Australia to Japan - all found ways to adapt Darwinism to their own agendas
Darwin's Laboratory demonstrates the variety and richness of Darwinian ideas in the Pacific and, in so doing, shows how the region functioned as a testing ground for the theory of evolution. Further, it illustrates how Darwinian ideas and their European contexts helped invent and define the particular conception we have of the Pacific. Both the general reader and the specialist will find controversy, illumination, and entertainment in this, the first book to probe the extent of Darwinism and Darwinian thinking in the Pacific