The Art of Evolution

The Art of Evolution PDF Author: Barbara Jean Larson
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584657750
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A timely and stimulating collection of essays about the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture

The Art of Evolution

The Art of Evolution PDF Author: Barbara Jean Larson
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584657750
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A timely and stimulating collection of essays about the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture

Evolutionary Theory and Visual Culture

Evolutionary Theory and Visual Culture PDF Author: Michael Dorsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138015999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution bore a decisive influence on aesthetic thought that was nothing if not diverse. From biological models to European paintings, Darwinian theory offered art historians and artists a rich, evocative lens through which to view the world anew. This volume explores the effect of Darwinian theory on visual culture through analysis of popular graphics, scientific illustration, natural history diorama, as well as the more traditional art historical material such as painting and sculpture. It extends the discussion to examine the lasting impact the theory of evolution has had on the development of art history as an academic discipline.

Visual Culture and Evolution

Visual Culture and Evolution PDF Author: Kevin Finneran
Publisher: Issues in Cultural Theory
ISBN: 9781890761165
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Though commonly relegated to modern-day science, the concept of evolution is ingrained in representations of life and nature in the visual arts, and artists and scientists have much to share on the meaning of human origin, human existence and human fate. The present volume documents an online symposium in which a distinguished panel of artists, curators, scientists, historians, educators, media theorists and critics participated in a lively, informative conversation on the interface of art and science.

Picturing Evolution and Extinction

Picturing Evolution and Extinction PDF Author: Fae Brauer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443884375
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
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. It is also an opportune moment to show how human-driven extinction, as designated by the term, Anthropocene, has long been acknowledged. The halcyon days of European industrial progress, colonial expansion and scientific revolution trumpeted from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1930 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, Louis Landouzy, Félix Le Dantec, Cesare Lombroso, Thomas Huxley, Bénédite-Augustin Morel, Louis Pasteur, Élisée Reclus, Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Wundt, among others. This book presents pioneering explorations of the interrelationship between these discourses and modern visual cultures and the ways in which the “picturing of evolution and extinction” by artists as diverse as Roger Broders, Albert Besnard, Fernand Cormon, Hélène Dufau, Émile Gallé, František Kupka, Pablo Picasso, Carles Mani y Roig, Sophie Taeuber and Vasilii Vatagin betrayed anxieties subliminally festering over degeneration alongside latent hopes of regeneration. Following Darwin’s concept of evolution as Janus-faced, the dialectical interplay of evolution and extinction and degeneration and regeneration is explored in modern visual cultures in Australia, America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Switzerland at significant spatio-temporal junctures between 1860 and 1930. By unravelling the “picturing” of the dread of alcoholism, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid and rabies, alongside phobias of animalism, criminality, hysteria, impotency and ecological disaster, each chapter makes an original contribution to this new field of scholarship. By locating these discourses and visual cultures within the “golden age of Neo-Lamarckism”, they also reveal how regeneration was pictured as the Janus-face of degeneration able to facilitate evolution through the inheritance of beneficial characteristics in propitious environments. In striking such an uplifting note amidst the dissonant cacophony of catastrophism, this book reveals why the art and science of Transformism proved so appealing in France as elsewhere, and why visual cultures of regeneration became as dominant in the twentieth century as the picturing of degeneration had been in the nineteenth century. It also illuminates the paradoxical inversion that occurred in the twentieth century when devolution became equivalent to evolution for many Modernists. Hence, whilst this book opens with the picturing of indigenous people in Australia and North America as “doomed races” by the first publication of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, it closes with the quest by 1930 for a regenerative suntan as dark as the skin of those indigenous people.

Victorian Science and Imagery

Victorian Science and Imagery PDF Author: Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987996
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History PDF Author: Barbara Larson
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409448709
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.

The Seductions of Darwin

The Seductions of Darwin PDF Author: Matthew Rampley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079002
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect. Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge. Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.

Darwin's Pictures

Darwin's Pictures PDF Author: Julia Voss
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016310X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
"Not only does Voss weave about these images a story on the development and presentation of Darwin's theory, she also addresses the history of Victorian illustration, the role of images in science, the technologies of production, and the relationship between specimen, words, and images."--Jacket.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory PDF Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417925
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1460

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Book Description
The world’s most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision. With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould first describes the content and discusses the history and origins of the three core commitments of classical Darwinism: that natural selection works on organisms, not genes or species; that it is almost exclusively the mechanism of adaptive evolutionary change; and that these changes are incremental, not drastic. Next, he examines the three critiques that currently challenge this classic Darwinian edifice: that selection operates on multiple levels, from the gene to the group; that evolution proceeds by a variety of mechanisms, not just natural selection; and that causes operating at broader scales, including catastrophes, have figured prominently in the course of evolution. Then, in a stunning tour de force that will likely stimulate discussion and debate for decades, Gould proposes his own system for integrating these classical commitments and contemporary critiques into a new structure of evolutionary thought. In 2001 the Library of Congress named Stephen Jay Gould one of America’s eighty-three Living Legends—people who embody the “quintessentially American ideal of individual creativity, conviction, dedication, and exuberance.” Each of these qualities finds full expression in this peerless work, the likes of which the scientific world has not seen—and may not see again—for well over a century.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture PDF Author: Joseph Carroll
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030461904
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas: Imagination: Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions Myth and Religion Aesthetic Theory Music Visual and Plastic Arts Video Games and Films Oral Narratives and Literature Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media. The chapters “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts” and “The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).