Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. (Reviews of Books).

James E. Strick. Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 283. $45.00. ISBN 0-674-00292-X.

In the struggle to redefine the sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century, few battles were more fiercely fought than that over the origin of life. Evolutionary theorizing had long been linked with spontaneous generation, part of a conceptual legacy that many Darwinians, anxious for respectability, were eager to disown. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin had spoken of life having been ...

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