theory of evolution
Article
theory of evolution is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 09, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Charles Darwin discovered the theory of evolution”; “Darwin’s theory of evolution”. It most often appears alongside Aage Bohr, Abanindranath Tagore, Aboriginal.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 09, 2021
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Aage Bohr (1 shared issues)
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- Abanindranath Tagore (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal society (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigine (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines of Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aldous Huxley (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Anderson Cooper (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Huxley (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Charles Darwin discovered the theory of evolution. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin also groped towards some kind of proto-evolutionary theory, made contributions in botany and pathology, and founded the influential Lunar Society of scientists. His other grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was a pottery tycoon who "pioneered direct mail, money back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogues" and became "one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the 18th century". Charles' cousin Francis Galton invented the modern fields of psychometrics, meteorology, eugenics, and statistics (including standard deviation, correlation, and regression). Charles' son Sir George Darwin, an astronomer, became president of the Royal Astronomical Society and another Royal Society fellow. Charles' other son Leonard Darwin, became a major in the army, a Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Geography Society, and a mentor and patron to Ronald Fisher, another pioneer of modern statistics. Charles' grandson Charles Galton Darwin invented the Darwin-Fowler method in statistics, the Darwin Curve in diffraction physics, Darwin drift in fluid dynamics, and was the director of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (and vaguely involved in the Manhattan Project).
In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”. We still remember some of these fondly: the classic motif of a caveman clubbing a random woman and dragging her off to be his wife comes from a real theory by anthropologist John McLennan that this was the original marriage ritual of humankind, with advanced cultures eventually adding epicycles like “consent” and “courtship”. There is still dim cultural awareness of James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, which purports to prove that all religion came from an ur-ritual of killing the king to ensure the fertility of the land. Still, observers eventually noticed that “all savages do P” isn’t true for basically any P, and after some delay anthropologists stopped trying to argue that surely some X was actually a distant distorted cultural memory of P which all savages must have done in an even-more-savage past.