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3.0 out of 5 stars
A Literature Professor Holds Darwin Under the Microscope., June 30, 2008
As the book's cover indicates, "Darwin Loves You" is inspired by a bumper sticker once seen by the book's author. The bumper sticker is, of course, a play on the platitudinous "God Loves You" bumper sticker. And it is easy to suppose that most who have this latter bumper sticker would never own - or see any truth in - the former. AFter all, Darwinian evolution is generally seen as a cold and caustic theory that dashes hopes in the soul or the reality of those pesky intangible values. No awe here; only dessication.
That is the view that literatre professor George Levine aims to dispel. Darwinian evolution - not "Darwinism," as Darwin is not a deity and evolution, not a religion - does not HAVE TO BE a view hostile to values and devoid of happiness. It can be inspiring; it can be beautiful; it is fully compatible with a world of poetry, music, and meaning.
Firt, though, Levine devotes several chapters to the myriad of ideologies that people have based on Darwinian evolution: Marx claimed Darwinian authority for communism, Spencer for capitalism. Kropotkin claimed Darwinism supported anarchism, while others saw it as a rallying cry to support state intervention.
All of these, says Levin (and Douglas Hofstadter before him), were quite understandable but essentially flawed attempts to bolster the less certain world of philosophy and ideology with hard science. And all of their mistakes can be traced to the pesky dilemma that conflates descriptions of what is with prescrptions of what ought to be. Darwinian evolution does not have any positical indubitable conclusions; any attempt to use it as a moral/political doctrine is to stretch the theory into unnatural areas and force square 'facts' to fit round 'values.' (Yes, lovers of science make this mistake often, but more often, the mistake is made by those who oppose science. They fail to realize that the unfavorable doctrines they point to as showing the evils of 'Darwinism,' there are as many noble ones they can just as easily point towards.)
Levine is perhaps hardest on the ideas of sociobiology and reductionism - the idea that every trait can be explained as an adaptation, and that science will subsume every other way of thinking about our world. These, Levline notes, are beliefs about the supremacy of science that do not themselves utilize the methods of science. They rely on speculation, unjustified faith, and a very faulty inductive logic of the type that science is very careful to ever make. Yes, these beliefs may be true, but they may well NOT be true. They are, like the best religions, treated as tenets of faith held with deifying fervency.
These waters, of course, have been tread before, and I was actually starting to get frustrated with Levine during this portion of the book. Historical recountings and refutations of various Darwin-based philosophies have been done before, and Levine seemed not to realize that what he was doing was recounting what has been recounted.
The next section, though, makes up for that. It is an exploration of Darwin's own writings in order to show that Darwin saw the awe-inspiring nature of his theory. He did not see it as a pessimistic and cold theory, but one that makes nature and the world all the more beautiful. That we - products of evolution - can live in a world of beauty, value, art, and ideas, made all of this seem all the more special. Like any good scientist, Darwin was certainly cognizant that these things made his theory seem less plausible, and was certainly open to the idea that if no evolutionary explanation was capable, his theory may be refuted. (Levine points out that Darwin was no dogmatist; he was always open to refutation.) Even then, Darwin speculated as to how values, ideas, art, etc., were capable of being produced evolutionarily and was right about as much as he was wrong.
With the skill of literary exegesis and interpretation, Levine shows that Darwin was at the same time a product of his culture and an iconoclast. Darwin realized the threat his theory posed to Biblical literalism, but never viewed his theory as the type of "universal acid" that Daniel Dennett would later claim it was. Like Levine, Darwin saw his theory as grand and beautiful, a theory able to highlight the diversity of nature as well as explain it.
This is a book that needed to be written not so much because champions of the theory miss this point, but because critics of the theory almost ALWAYS miss it. Set aside the fact that, contra Dawkins, there is nothing INHERENTLY atheistic about evolution (though it does make the 'seven days' theory quite hard to hold.) Set aside the fact that theistic evolution is a perfectly cogent and plausible idea. Levine adds to this that Darwinian evolution is not the killjoy that creationists often suggest, and that a life full of meaning is fully compatible with Darwinian evolution.
So, if we see the first half of the book for what it is - a rehashing of what has been rehashed and what should have been obvious if it had not been - the second half of the book repays us. Hopefully, this book will dispel some of the myths we commonly hear about the "morally corrupt" Darwinism that fuctions as a "universal acid" to destroy things like value and beauty.
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