Arabella Buckley's Epic: Uniting Evolutionary Epic & Spiritualism to Account for the Evolution of Morals from Mutualism

Abstract

Utilizing OU’s History of Science Collections, I focused my Honors College Research project on exploring the popularization of Victorian science, specifically that conducted by Arabella Buckley. Many of Charles Darwin’s contemporaries interpreted his theory of natural selection as evidence of competition ruling nature. Science writer and popularizer Arabella Buckley was the first to characterize Darwin’s theory of the evolution of morals as mutualistic rather than materialistic, and she did so through a unique consolidation of evolutionary epic and spiritualism. While scholars have stressed Buckley’s contribution to the evolutionary narrative as either driven by a maternal tradition or motivated by her spiritualistic beliefs, I aim to show that the significance of her distinctive, mutualistic addition to the debate on the evolution of morals lies in her unifying theory of traducianism.

University Libraries Undergraduate Research Award