Darwin's Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World Book

Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories about how organisms relate to one another and their surrounding environments, and how these relationships have changed over time, have become as much part of the cultural landscape in the West as The Bible. Within a few years of the 1858 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin's ideas had spread like wildfire. Michael R. Rose shows how "Darwin's spectre" has crossed cultures, disciplines and time, gripping the imagination of an enormous variety of people (Karl Marx is one notable example), reaching far beyond the small and elite group of upper-middle-class academics and intellectuals that Darwin knew in mid-19th-century England. As a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, Michael R. Rose is deeply involved in the scientific branch of the Darwin industry and is clearly fascinated by its ramifications. In a series of eminently readable essays aimed at the general reader Rose explores three themes, from "distilling the main elements", through "applications" such as agriculture and breeding, to the influence of Darwinian ideas on perceptions of the evolution of humans and our psyche. Like that other great 19th-century invention, Freudianism, Darwinism has come to be used and abused in a quite uncontrollable way that would have horrified its author. Rose does not balk at addressing these uncomfortable questions but still claims, nonetheless, that "Darwinism is helping us to understand human nature ... the hardest thing of all", and that without it we would "lose our way in a twilight of the mind". --Douglas PalmerRead More