Social Reproduction in Times of Crisis
4.1 A Household that Provides Income Resources and Receives Care
On one of TV’s most popular science-fiction series, The Outer Limits, each installment seemed to play into some facet of the
and 1965. This was especially true for the final episode of the se-ries, entitled “Origin of Species.”23
We lived in a very different world in 1963 than we do today.
We were just emerging from the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the im-ages from the nightly news reminded Americans of how vulner-able they were to atomic attack, and what to do if one happened.
(In all honesty, turning school desks on their sides to hide behind, as the announcements showed, would probably do little to protect students if an atomic blast actually occurred in their neighbor-hoods.) It was during this time as well that some of the earliest fossil remains believed to be human ancestors were discovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
Since the mid-19th century, scientists had been on a search to find fossilized evidence of the succession of human ancestors linking us today with our earliest beginnings, a succession believed to exist based on the “theory of evolution.” Because of the ideas that Charles Darwin proposed a century earlier, the fossils of ancient humanlike creatures found in Africa and elsewhere throughout the world were being linked with us. While the theories of Darwin were mentioned briefly earlier in the book, I promised a more in-depth description of his ideas and their implications, which I am glad to offer now.
Since 1859, the scientific discussion of human origins has cen-tered around a notion known best as the theory of biological evolution.
While countless versions of evolutionary theory have been described in countless classrooms, journals, and textbooks over the past 150 years, the general idea of evolution has remained essentially the same.
In a nutshell, the theory proposes that all life, including human life, is related, and began with a common ancestor. Since that ancestor, life-forms have changed over long periods of time to become those we see today. And while Darwin’s theories do not describe precisely how the common ancestor of all life came into existence, assump-tions drawn from his theories imply the answer.
Darwin first shared his ideas with the general public through the book most widely known by its popular title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. A closer look at the 1859 publi-cation, however, shows that the book was initially published with
intended and what it might address. Before being shortened to the familiar one we see today, the original title of Darwin’s book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preserva-tion of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.24
With this book, Darwin planted the seeds in his time of the con-troversy that continues to rage throughout the modern world today.
It’s the depth of the emotional response triggered by what his book implies, and the way that his ideas are interpreted, that is the root of some of the most divisive beliefs between peoples and the justifica-tion for some of the greatest human suffering in recorded history.
Darwin formed his evolutionary theory from firsthand obser-vations that he made over the course of his now-famous ocean voy-age that began in 1835. During this voyvoy-age, he observed a greater variety of plants and animals than had any other European scien-tist of his day. An excerpt from the Introduction to his book gives us a clue as to what the journey meant to him personally:
When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mys-teries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.25 Much of Darwin’s theory is based upon observations that he made while studying fossils and wildlife, especially species of birds, on the Galapagos Islands. It wasn’t until his return to Lon-don that he realized that what he originally thought were specimens collected from different families of finches, for example, were actually variations of the same family.
The question Darwin faced was how to explain the differences, such as beak size and shape, among finches that had developed iso-lated from one another on separate islands. The additional discovery of fossilized remains of creatures resembling modern-day animals, al-though much larger in size, added to the mystery Darwin confronted.
Using sound scientific methods of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and analysis, Darwin applied the best methods of his
day to explain what he had discovered during his historic journey.
The result of his work led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.