Darwin and the Industrial Revolution

Reading Origin of Species, Chapter II.

In this chapter, Darwin, having previously discussed artificial breeding and its results, talks about variation under nature. He more than once uses a locution I found interesting: the manufacture of species. The word manufacture has the literal sense of to make something by hand, but here he has begun to talk about the manufacture of those species by impersonal forces of nature rather than by the hand of man or God. It's interesting, I think, to speculate about the role that the development of organized methods of manufacture at the center of the industrial revolution might have played in freeing the mind from the notions of special creation.

Technology, by placing some distance between the literal hand and the items it created, might play that part. There are lots of other notions borne by the intellectual winds of the time which might claim equal or greater credit, of course.

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