This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
It also looks at the early twentieth-century ‘Station for Experimental Evolution’ in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries’ theory of mutation.
Jim is Visiting Gresham Professor in the History of Science.
He is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Sussex and specialises in Victorian natural history and the modern genetics and has presented programmes for BBC Radio 4.
Professor Endersby's lecture series are as follows:
2021/22 How Not To Be Human: Exploring Humanity Through Science Fiction
2020/21 Darwin's Descent: Monkeys, Orchids and Myths
2019/20 Utopian Gardens
All lectures by the Visiting Professor in the History of Science can be accessed here.
