Word: darwin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws, where some protective coating, some layer of civilization, keeping Darwin's jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads as if it had been written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than 12,000 "ghost soldiers"--nonexistent employees--have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys...
Think of it!" says Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, as he stands beside a table in the rare-book room of the garden's library and reads aloud from the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. "All that difference, elaborately constructed, produced by laws...
...bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. --Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species...
Then he rereads the entire paragraph, which gives one chills, partly for Darwin's understatement. What the author deemed "interesting to contemplate" was nothing less than the world's biological structure, which he (and others) had discovered, and which now, at the end of his monumental study, he quietly celebrated in sublime summation. The "tangled bank" he had initially attributed to an unnamed power, but in the third and subsequent editions, he included God in the evolutionary process. The book now ends on this glorious sentence, over which Raven exults: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with...
Dawkins' memes have proved nearly as controversial as Darwin's ideas about natural selection once were. Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press), which goes so far as to suggest that we are our memes, is sure to escalate the war of words that periodically rages on the pages of the New York Review of Books and the Boston Review...