Fushigi no Kuni no Bird - Vol. 4 Ch. 15 - Itou's Memories

[MangaDex]

 

[Fuko]

Thanks!

 

[Kaiser92]

wow what a dick

 

[Iceblade20]

It's back....and back to old school British douchebaggery

 

[DjAlexDubCheck]

So great to see this again

 

[Chet31]

Guessing that idiot never read the works of Charles Darwin, even tho he studies horticulture. That's just a failure in education, even if you didn't believe him.

 

[toriaezu]

Keep in mind that the story is set in 1878. Origin of Species was only published in 1859 and didn't become truly central to modern evolutionary theory until the 1930s. In fact, from about the 1880s to 1930s there was a "eclipse of Darwinism" when most biologists believed in natural selection or other theories. Maries' botany teacher was a proponent of Lamarkism inheritance, which states that an organism can pass on characteristics that it has acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime to its offspring. So it's completely within reason that Maries wouldn't fully accept Darwinism or reject it altogether.

Doesn't mean he's still not a douchelord, he's just a historically accurate douchelord.

 

[Northern]

@Chet31
I was about to write a response about Darwin, but see that toriaezu wrote an excellent one already. I'll just expand further.
In Darwin's time there was no agreed-upon model of heredity; in Chapter I of Origin of Species, Darwin admitted, "The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown." Darwin accepted a version of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (which after Darwin's death came to be called Lamarckism) as toriazu noted.
Darwin wrote a second book in 1868 called The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, which tried to explain heredity through his hypothesis of pangenesis. Although Darwin had privately questioned blending inheritance, he struggled with the theoretical difficulty that novel individual variations would tend to blend into a population. However, inherited variation could be seen.

It was not until the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s that a model of heredity became completely integrated with a model of variation.

You can't blame Maries for a lack of familiarity with concepts that would not be fully understood for another 50 years.

 

[owlette]

finally it's back. love this manga

 

[chamllw]

Wonder if the real Maries was actually this bad. I guess he might've been, trying to uphold a contract no matter Ito's opinion on it. It's not like he'd been paid in advance.

I'm not sure how much I like the real Isabella. Did she just travel around to insult people that looked different from her.

 

[toriaezu]

@chamllw There's not much info left about Maries besides his botanical work, but a contemporary biography lists an example where Marie's entire collection of dried plants of the region was destroyed by disgruntled Chinese locals because he was "difficult" with them. Read into that as you will.

Real! Isabelle was, let's face it, a 40-year-old spinster at the height of Imperialism. Frankly she's remarkably open-minded for the age. Some of the other memoirs of Japan in that era are so disgustingly racist/sexist/overly pompous they're downright unreadable, as any actual historical fact is seen through the lens of colonialism.

 

[chamllw]

@toriaezu I guess both Isabella and Maries were products of their time and culture. I can't judge them by our current standards can I?

Thank so much for your splendid work on the manga and the research. I've learnt a ton.

 

[toriaezu]

@chamllw "Product of their time" is too often used to excuse unpardonable acts. There's a difference between thinking bad thoughts and acting upon them. The real Miss Bird, for all her unflattering/occasionally racist descriptions, was essentially acting as an anthropologist. She never treated the locals with anything but respect, and didn't tell them what she really thought of them. Maries on the other hand, is classic colonizer, stripping the country of the plants he wanted, demanding what he saw as his due from the "lesser" people. Miss Bird was a product of her time, Maries was an asshole.

 

[Greyvenn]

WHAT THE FUCK

it's unusual for a manga to make me so angry at a character...