Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:12:18.931Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Genesis: Why Do We Care About Nature–Nurture?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2024

Eric Turkheimer
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access

Summary

The theory of evolution, as espoused by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species in 1859, was difficult to accept for religious believers whose assumptions about the world were shattered by it, but Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published 12 years later, posed even greater challenges to people who did accept it, and those challenges continue today. It has often been noted that a disorienting consequence of the Enlightenment was to force people to recognize that humans were not created at the center of the universe in the image of God, but instead on a remote dust-speck of a planet, in the image of mold, rats, dogs, and chimps. For the entirety of recorded history, moral beliefs about humans had been based on the idea that people were in some fundamental sense apart from the rest of nature. Darwin disabused us of that notion once and for all. The scientific and social upheaval that has occurred since Darwin has been an extended process of coming to terms with a unification of humans and the rest of the natural world.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×