Savage Society Chapter Summaries

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1. Savages in the context Captain Fitzroy and Darwin were people in their “most primitive state”. The natives Darwin and captain FitzRoy encountered were much different than the ‘civilized’ citizens of Europe. After researching the definition of the word ‘savage’ and putting the word into historical context, I believe natives were called savages because of their differences from European culture. Many traits of the natives were very different than that of the people Darwin was used to. The natives were also viewed as less sophisticated and organized. 2.Darwin had a passion for various fields in science. Science was his passion and he pursued this his entire life. Carroll describes Darwin as a well-mannered person who would never raise his …show more content…

One reason why science progressed so slowly was because sending messages across great distances took months. The book mentioned the anxiety Darwin would feel when sending his parcels of the specimens he caught back to Europe. Sending parcels at the time across seas took months and was not even guaranteed to arrive. To make matters worse, it would take even more months to get a reply back. Darwin was scared that the specimens he was sending back would not receive praise from his contemporaries back in Europe. In todays world messages can be sent from one point of the globe to the other in a matter of seconds. Physical parcels can be rushed from California to New York in 24 hours! Darwin’s travels across the world could have been taken only a year or two if he was able to take a plane. In the time of Darwin, the Catholic Church was much more powerful than it is today. What Charles discovered went against the teaching of the church. Most of the contemporaries of the time believed in divine creation as well. This is why Darwin had to subtly poke at natural selection in his works and did not publish his famous book On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection for decades after his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Today, new bold claims in science are not as critiqued as hard at they were in the