{"id":5,"count":7,"description":"Long before evolution was a household word, Vanderbilt students were engaging with its core ideas. Meet pioneering figures such as professors Alexander Winchell, James M. Safford, and Paul Jones, whose bold teaching and collecting helped lay the foundation for evolutionary thought on campus. Featured artifacts include an 1884 edition of Charles Darwin\u2019s On the Origin of Species, early plaster casts, and fossils like those once displayed in Vanderbilt\u2019s original natural history museum.\r\nAlexander Winchell served as perhaps the most renowned expert to join the faculty in 1875, when Vanderbilt opened, and was the shortest tenured faculty after being fired in 1878. Winchell believed in evolution \u2013 albeit with strong disagreements to Darwinism \u2013 and his views on human evolution would go against the beliefs of the fundamentalists running the university at the time. Winchell wrote a book about evolution in 1874, and thus, it wasn\u2019t evolution perse that got him fired, but his ideas that black men evolved before white men. The exhibit features his writings on Sketches of Creation and the pamphlet that led to his dismissal Adamites and Pre-adamites.\r\nHis geology co-chair, James Safford, was a well-known local geologist. He would stay on longer than any other faculty until his eventual retirement in 1900. He likely touched on evolutionary theory in some form during his lectures as he covered paleontology and ran the natural history museum, In the exhibit, you can find pages from his USGS field notebook, a portrait, and a description of the early museum.\r\n\r\nOne of Safford\u2019s students, Paul Jones, would go on to have the first course listed in the catalog referencing evolution \u2013 Philosophical Biology. Jones completed all of his education at Vanderbilt and eventually became an adjunct professor in Geology until his untimely death in 1899. Paul Jones\u2019 dissertation cover is featured along with the course catalog page.\r\n\r\nWhile evolution was hidden deep in course content or actively avoided \u2013 it was certainly on folks\u2019 minds. In 1899, the meeting of the Round Table was held to discuss evolution. See the invitation in the exhibit.","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/evolution-vu\/section\/origins-vu\/","name":"Origins of Evolution at Vanderbilt","slug":"origins-vu","taxonomy":"section","parent":0,"meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/evolution-vu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/evolution-vu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/evolution-vu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/section"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/evolution-vu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item?section=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}