darwin loves you

[...]... ennobled It is in this sense that I can call myself a true Darwinian and suggest, indeed, that Darwin loves you xviii PREFACE I have written this book and represented the Darwin I most care about because I believe we need a passionate, world-loving secularity, a devotion to the understanding of the workings of nature, and of our own natures Darwin, with all the flaws and limits historians have been... about Darwin, attempts to lay out the primary charges against him, and explains the problem of “disenchantment” while proposing a counterargument affirming the possibility of “enchantment” in a scientifically explicable world In order to build a reasonable case for the Darwin who loves you, ” for an enchanted Darwin, I consider in chapter 2 as many of the arguments against my reinterpretation of Darwin. .. at all Darwin s extraordinarily creative and useful theory developed out of the rigors of his scientific work and the pressures of his cultural being It is absurd to think that these days one can argue about the implications of Darwin s theory without stumbling into ideological conflict In America today it is virtually impossible even to use the word Darwin without getting a rise out of people Darwin. .. for Darwin it may well have been a dog-eat-dog world, but for Kropotkin, to take one example, Darwin s ideas served as a strong theoretical basis for anarchism and mutual aid Of course, I don’t mean to say, then, that Darwin s theory is rightly interpreted as anarchist in orientation, but there can be no doubt that it can be used by smart anarchists, and was so used The political connections of Darwin s... world that seems often so busy destroying itself and threatening us It matters also, then, that we can recognize in a figure like Darwin someone whose passion for the world drove him to see everything and know as much as he could and tell us what he knew xx PREFACE Darwin Loves You thus becomes quite serious to me, beyond the ironies I’m sure my son was indulging when he gave me, smiling, the bumper... to lock it into later ones), I was not disturbed by the fact that I was finding in Darwin yet another set of cultural implications My major responsibility, I believed, was to honor what Darwin actually wrote It is part of the overall argument of this book that any interpretation of Darwin has such a responsibility to Darwin s own words, and to the evidence one can find in his life and work The fact of... enchanting power of Darwin s scientific secularity, finding in Darwin a way of knowing that is deeply human, saturated with value and feeling, and rigorously honest at the same time I have tried to locate in Darwin s prose something rather more than the literal meanings that continue to be of such importance in the world of science and the worlds of ideology (insofar as these can be separated) Darwin s metaphors,... after all kindred spirits out there; Rebecca Stott, whose work on Darwin and the barnacles is truly enchanted in just the ways that the Darwin I imagine here should be; Jonathan Smith, a true gentleman and one of the very best literary scholars of Darwin around, who critiqued one of the chapters and has himself written a stunning new book on Darwin; Janet Browne, who read an earlier version of the manuscript... A student in a class I taught that required her to read On the Origin of Species told me one day that when she read Darwin on her subway ride she had to cover the book, because not infrequently she was accosted by people hostile to the theory of evolution and to Darwin Writing about Darwin and the intellectual history of his ideas, I found myself increasingly disturbed not merely by the usual American... “disenchantment” of the world that came with a belief that all natural phenomena might someday be explained rationally and naturalistically, hardly seemed Darwinian to me As against the life-enhancing energies of Darwinian explanation, I have found the new (largely anti-Darwinian and implicitly antiscientific) religiosity that has followed from the sense of spiritual emptiness dangerous in virtually every way It . this sense that I can call myself a true Darwinian and suggest, in- deed, that Darwin loves you. PREFACE xvii I have written this book and represented the Darwin I most care about because I believe. the Darwin I am focusing on is the complete historical Darwin, or that the virtues I am most enamored of are all there are to Darwin s work. I do want to argue strongly, however, that the Darwin. beliefs, sharing most of them, and aware that I was still fascinated by Darwin, gave me a bumper sticker that read, Darwin Loves You. ” My son is given to an irony and comic cynicism that I have always