Darwin Loves You : Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World

Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across America. Medallions of fish symbolizing Jesus are answered by ones of amphibians stamped "Darwin," and stickers proclaiming "Jesus Loves You" are countered by "Darwin Loves You." The bumper sticker debate might be trivial and the pronouncement that "Darwin Loves You" may seem merely ironic, but George Levine insists that the message contains an unintended truth. In fact, he argues, we can read it straight. Darwin, Levine shows, saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too--if we look at his writings and life in a new way. Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism--a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it. Contents Volume One C.C. Barfoot and Valeria Tinkler-Villani: Introduction: Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow I: The Conflict of Science in Literature Todd H.J. Pettigrew: “Millions Infinite”: Martial Mathematics in the First Part of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Helen Doss: Milton’s Satan: Rationalizing Experience and the Experimental Scientific Method in Paradise Regain’d Stephen Voyce: “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”: Restoration Poetics under the Microscope C.C. Barfoot: “The Eunuch’s Child”: William King’s Transactions with the Royal Society John R.M. Ames: Re-ordering Creation: Materialism, Monism, and Scientific Iconoclasm in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature Rebecca Knell: Re-evaluating Science and Romanticism: The Case of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants Renata Schellenberg: Revising the Obvious: Goethe’s Opposition to Scientific Convention J.D. Ballam: “Science as the Base of Wonders”: Rational Enquiry in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm Malte Herwig: Ironic Science: Some Remarks on Humanism, Science, and Literature Lucia Boldrini: Rattling the Cage of Meaning: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, the Two Cultures, and the Ethical Duty of the Writer II: Bodily Science and Literature Danielle Gurevitch: The Weasel, the Rose and Life after Death: Representations of Medieval Physiology in Marie de France’s Eliduc William Henry Spates: Mythopoeia and Medicine: Decoding Fracastoro’s Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus Monique W. Dull: “Little Irritations” in Mansfield Park Elena Anastasaki: When Science Meets Fiction: Immortality in Balzac’s Le Centenaire ou les deux Béringheld Galia Ofek: Thomas Hardy’s Morphology: Hair Formations in Scientific and Fictional Narratives Amanda Mordavsky Caleb: Amoral Animality: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau Eric Miller: A Defect in Nature: The Figure of the Passenger Pigeon in Graeme Gibson and Other North American Writers Lorna Fitzsimmons: Tertium Quid: Gertrude Stein and Psychical Research Rosario Arias: Life After Man?: Posthumanity and Genetic Engineering in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Marie Aline Ferreira: “Toward a Science of Perfect Reproduction”?: Visions of Eugenics in Contemporary Fiction May Chehab: Autobiography, Autobiology, Tautology: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du Monde Priya Venkatesan: The Narratives of Science: Literary Theory and Discovery in Molecular Biology Evert Jan van Leeuwen: Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: A Countercultural Perspective on Alchemy, Gender and the Scientific Revolution Kathleen Williams Renk: Debating Darwin: The Alchemy of A.S. Byatt and Pauline Melville Carmen Lara Rallo: “She Thought Human Thoughts and Stone Thoughts”: Geology and the Mineral World in A.S. Byatt’s Fiction Greta Olson: Transfers Between Science and Literature: Sexual Selection, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and T.C. Boyle’s Drop City Ellen L. Arnold: Healing with Holograms: Science and Orality in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus Volume Two III: Physics Old and New in Literature Eva-Sabine Zehelein: Staging Science with Albert Einstein Candice Kent: “How Does the Mind Move to Einstein’s Physics?”: Science in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and Mary Butts Anthony Enns: A Sum Over Histories: Faulkner’s Reconfiguration of Space-Time Jocelyn Emerson: What’s Love Got to Do with It?: A.R. Ammons, Leslie Scalapino and Chaotic Poetics Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells: Chaos and Complexity in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy Burt Kimmelman: “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself”: The New Physics, Charles Olson, and Avant-Garde Poetics Peter Mudford: Contemporary Drama and the Uncertainty Principle Michael H. Whitworth: “Within the Ray of Light”, and Without: The New Physics and Modernist Simultaneity IV: The Politics of Science in Literature Robert Druce: “The Iron Horses of the Steam”: Dickens, Thoreau, Zola and the Steam Locomotive Elmar Schenkel: H.G. Wells and Speed Robert S. Friedman: Surveying the Empirical Sublime: Thoreau, Literary and Scientific Philip J. Kowalski: “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”: Lamarckian Domesticity in Catharine Beecher and Horace Bushnell Marguérite Corporaal: “So Cold, so Lofty and so Distant”: Science, Religion and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American and Canadian Women’s Poetry Jerry Hoeg: Literary Portrayals of Science as a Function of Socio-Environmental Relations in the Spanish-Speaking World John Cusatis: “The Curious Desire of Knowing”: Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Science Patricia McCloskey Engle: Reprising the Epistemological Function of Narrative: Intersections of Science and Mysticism in Ceremony and Slaughterhouse-Five Derek C. Maus: Luddites of the Nuclear Age: Cold War Satire and the Fallacies of Quasi-Scientific Rhetoric Derek J. Thiess: Lighting Cigars at the Heart of a Nightingale: Aestheticism and the Science Wars in L’Eve future Sarah Dauncey: Forensic Anthropology and the Reconstruction of History in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Naama Harel: Constructing the Nonhuman as Human: Scientific Fallacy, Literary Device Notes on Contributors Index I: Selected Motifs, Topics, Themes Index II: Authors, Texts and Publications, Selected Proper Names

darwin Loves You Is The Most Interesting Book I Have Read This Year. It Is Wise, Brave, And Beautifully Written. Levine's Reflections On The Important Issue Of Darwinism As An Ideology Are Bound To Engage Readers. He Shows That Darwin's Science Is Not Dehumanising Or Amoral And That It's Possible To Be A Darwinist And Still Believe That The World Has Meaning.--janet Browne, Author Of charles Darwin: The Power Of Place

george Levine Has Thought Deeply About Darwinism, Its Cultural History, And Its Implications For Moral And Spiritual Values. darwin Loves You Should Be Read By Everyone Who Thinks That Their Values Are Threatened By Evolutionary Theory.--david Sloan Wilson, Author Of darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, And The Nature Of Society And how To Be A Good Evolutionist

darwin Loves You Is A Very Important Work That Deserves To Be Read By Many People Well Outside The Narrow Circle Of Darwin Specialists. First, It Is A Brilliant Account Of How A Science Is Taken Up And Used For Diverse Cultural Ends, Far Beyond The Intention Of The Author And The Content Of The Text. Second, It Is Crucially Relevant To The Present Day With The Horrifying Rise Of Fundamentalist Religion In America And Abroad. It Shows How Science Gets Misused And Misunderstood In Dangerous Ways By Fanatics. Third, And Most Important Of All, It Introduces Us To A Man Who Is Deeply In Love With His Subject, Wanting To Engage The Reader. One Learns Here Truly Why Scholarship Is Such A Joyful Activity.--michael Ruse, Author Of the Evolution-creation Struggle

this Is A Rich And Multilayered Argument For A Wider Appreciation Of A 'kinder, Gentler' Darwin. It Examines Many Of The Ways In Which Darwin's Writings Have Been Appropriated By Later Social Darwinist And Eugenicist Thought. Levine Makes A Cogent Defence Of The Practice Of Close Reading Both Darwin And His Many Commentators. The Result Is A Subtle But Powerful Argument About The Way In Which Distinctive Strands Of Darwin's Intellectual And Personal Identity--as Romantic Materialist And Emotional Subject--need To Be Appreciated As A Possible Resource Of Re-enchantment, Overturning Pessimistic, Rationalistic, And Technological Disenchantment.--david Amigoni, Keele University, Coeditor Of charles Darwin's Origin Of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays

passionate, Erudite, And Polemical, darwin Loves You Draws Its Arguments From A Heady Array Of Writers And Philosophers. This Is A Book To Think With.--rebecca Stott, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, Author Of darwin And The Barnacle

steven G. Kellman - San Antonio Current

levine's Darwin Is A Dedicated And Scrupulous Observer Who Insisted On Scientific Clarity And Rational Precision Whether Studying Finches, Barnacles, Worms, Or Human Beings. Levine Is Inspired By The Great Naturalist's Awe Before The Ordinary, Which He Characterizes As A Kind Of Inverted Sublimity.

Secular Re-enhancement -- The Disenchanting Darwin -- Using Darwin -- A Modern Use: Sociobiology -- Darwin And Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating -- And If It Be A Pretty Woman All The Better: Darwin And Sexual Selection -- A Kinder, Gentler, Darwin -- What Does It Mean? George Levine. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [275]-296) And Index. Stickers proclaiming 'Jesus Loves You' are countered by 'Darwin Loves You'. This book insists that the message contains an unintended truth. It shows that Darwin saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too - if we look at his writings and life in a new way. Without minimising or sentimentalising the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, this text makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism - a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it