Jim Endersby – författare

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first - and most successful - British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, "Imperial Nature" gracefully uses one individual's career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By focusing on science's material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first - and most successful - British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, "Imperial Nature" gracefully uses one individual's career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By focusing on science's material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.  In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.  In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection is both a key scientific work of research, still read by scientists, and a readable narrative that has had a cultural impact unmatched by any other scientific text. First published in 1859, it has continued to sell, to be reviewed and discussed, attacked and defended. The Origin is one of those books whose controversial reputation ensures that many who have never read it nevertheless have an opinion about it. Jim Endersby's major scholarly edition debunks some of the myths that surround Darwin's book, while providing a detailed examination of the contexts within which it was originally written, published and read. Endersby provides a very readable introduction to this classic text and a level of scholarly apparatus (explanatory notes, bibliography and appendixes) that is unmatched by any other edition.