The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist famous for his contribution to the theory of evolution through the theory of natural selection. The earlier scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a Swedish botanist who championed binomial nomenclature as our modern system for scientifically naming organisms (e.g., the wolf is Canis Lupus) and contributed to the study of plant and animal typology. Both are grandfathers of modern ecological sciences invoked in Davis’s lecture on the history of anthropology and wider Victorian interaction with indigenous peoples. After Linnaeus and Darwin proposed their theories, other scientists appropriated them to promote ethnocentric pseudosciences that attempted to categorize humans in the same way as animals, and thereby falsely prove European cultural and genetic superiority. Davis references these scientists to remind his audience that while well-intentioned, all science is a process of history embedded within the culture that produces it, and it must be carefully read for cultural bias. Davis’s critical reading of the flawed understanding of the soil ecology of the Amazon rainforest (86-88) is a good example of the application of such bias detection in the text.