This chapter takes a broad view of evolutionary theory, exploring the divergent theories that abounded in the modernist period. The first section, ‘Tigers under Our Hats: Alternative Evolutionary Identities’, focuses on comparative anatomy, demonstrating that Between the Acts highlights the resemblances between human bodies and animal forms – and, in doing so, decentres a universalized upper-class, human identity. The second section, ‘“Embryo Lives”: Recapitulation Theory’, considers Woolf’s representations of individual development in The Waves, ‘On Being Ill’, and Orlando – specifically her focus on the continuity between the self and its hereditary past, and on the multiplicities of bodily identity. It demonstrates that the central conceit of Orlando can be linked to recapitulation theory; the novel is a biography of Vita Sackville-West which shows her to recapitulate the lives of her ancestors. The final section, ‘“Unacted Parts”: Creative Evolution’, highlights resonances between Flush and Henri Bergson’s evolutionary scheme, especially his argument that qualities lost over the course of evolutionary development still exist in a ‘latent’ state in the self. It concludes that, in Woolf’s later writing, engagement with the community is a means of recovering the ‘unacted part[s]’ that are lost over the course of a lifetime.

How does the organicist tackle the nature and justification of moral claims? Through the upward rise of the evolutionary process. Morality is helping it on its way to produce ever-better humans. This has been known in the past as “Social Darwinism,” and has a dreadful reputation. Supposedly, it leads straight to Hitler and the gas ovens. It cannot be denied that dreadful things have been said in the name of Darwin. Spencer wanted to drive widows and children to the wall. Andrew Carnegie was one of the worst robber barons of the late nineteenth century. Friedrich von Berhardi epitomized the worst kind of rapacious German general. But there is another side too. Spencer was in favor of free trade and virtually a pacifist. Carnegie used his fortune to found public libraries. Von Bernhardi got more from the Prussian militaristic ethic than from the Origin of Species. Hitler didn’t believe in evolution! Today, too, the story is more complex. Julian Huxley was into large-scale public works. E. O. Wilson is an ardent conservationist. The naturalistic fallacy, you cannot get ought from is, is no deterrent. Organicists do not accept that the world is value-free. Organicists and mechanist/Darwinians are in different paradigms.

Chapter 3 investigates the fundamental role that ideas about racial and cultural difference play in the development episteme. The emerging discipline of physical anthropology in the nineteenth century challenged the notion in Darwin’s evolutionary theory that all human beings are part of the same species. Combined with social Darwinist ideas of the time, this set the stage for racialist discourses that linger in the development discourse. Social Darwinism also fed into the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century, creating new theories of race that pathologized blackness. This racialist thinking viewed Africans and people of African descent as biologically different from whites and in need of evolutionary intervention. Positive eugenicists advocated social welfare to “improve” Africans because they believed environmental factors affected their ability to “evolve” – or in twentieth-first-century terms, “modernize.” Evolutionary humanist theories based in ideas of cultural inequality emerged in the post–World War II era, but these also drew on social Darwinist ideas of race that viewed people of European descent as the evolutionary standard to which all races should strive. This eugenic history of early development policies has largely been forgotten but the rhetoric on racial difference, now masked as “culture,” has stubbornly endured.

“Decolonizing Ecology,” addresses environmental recovery efforts after WWII leading up to the explosion of environmental movements in the 1960s. With a pivot to rhetoric of “recovery” and “regeneration,” nature protection gained national validation with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy. Coinciding with this inward turn, however, the formation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ensured the United Kingdom’s continued involvement in foreign lands. I look to Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel No Longer at Ease to complicate the unevenness of environmental recovery in relation to decolonization. Through a juxtaposition of main character Obiajulu, whose name means “the mind at last is at rest,” and Mr. Green, a 1950s counterpoint to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz, I explore modernism’s environmental legacy in regard to the end of colonialism and a newly emerging “green imperialism” that seeks to manage natural spaces on a global scale.