Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. This week’s installment of “Meet the Materialists” is particularly fitting for the week of Halloween. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini was performing macabre experiments on decapitated oxes, horses, lambs… and humans. “The unenlightened part of mankind are apt to entertain a prejudice against those… who attempt to perform experiments on dead subjects,” Aldini later acknowledged, but he maintained that such experiments were justified because the object was to improve human welfare. “It is… an incontrovertible fact, that such researches in modern times have proved a source of Read More ›

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin. One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms Read More ›