Most Adaptable to Change: Evolution and Religion in Global Popular Media

In a globalized and networked world, where media crosses national borders, contributors reveal how transnational processes have shaped popular representations of scientific and religious ideas in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Spain, Turkey, Israel, and Japan. Most Adaptable to Change demonstrates the varied and divergent ways evolutionary ideas and nonscientific traditions and ways of understanding life on Earth have transformed across the globe. By examining a range of popular media forms across a multitude of different geopolitical contexts from the 1920s to today, this book traces how different evolutionary traditions and figures have been championed or discredited by different religious traditions, their spiritual leaders, and politicians using the cultural authority of religion as leverage. It analyzes the ways in which evolutionary theory has been mobilized explicitly for the purposes of addressing wider sociopolitical questions, and it is the first collection of its kind to explicitly explore the role of popular media formats themselves as mediators in institutional debates on the relationship between evolution and religion.

Alexander Hall is assistant professor in science communication in the School of Interdisciplinary Science at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Evolution on British Television and Radio: Transmissions and Transmutations and a contributor to the edited volume Identity in a Secular Age: Science, Religion, and Public Perceptions.

Will Mason-Wilkes is assistant professor in engineering, technology, and innovation in society at the Institute for STEMM in Culture and Society at the University of Birmingham. He is coauthor of The Face-to-Face Principle: Science, Trust, Democracy and the Internet and a contributor to the edited volume Science, Belief, and Society: International Perspectives on Religion, Non-religion, and the Public Understanding of Science.