Picturing evolution and extinction

de Fae Brauer, Serena Keshavjee

With the increasing loss of biological diversity in this sixth age of mass extinction, it is timely to show that devolutionary paranoia is not new, but rather stretches back to the time of Charles Darwin. The halcyon days of European industrial progress, colonial expansion and scientific revolution trumpeted from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Great Depression of 1929 were constantly marred by fears of rampant degeneration, depopulation, national decline, environmental devastation and racial extinction. This is demonstrated by the discourses of catastrophism charted in this book that percolated across Europe in response to the theories of Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, as well as Marcellin Berthelot, Camille Flammarion, Ernst Haeckel, Felix Le Dantec, Cesare Lombroso, Thomas Huxley, Benedite-Augustin Morel, Louis Pasteur, Elisee Reclus, Rudolf Steiner, and Wilhelm Wundt, amongst others.