Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. Leon speaks to us from the future, 1 million years after humanity is supposed to have $ extinguished itself. Among the survivors are a handful of tourists and Ecuadorian Indians on Santa Rosalia, an island in the Galapagos. It was there, in 1835, that Charles Darwin observed the variety of species that inspired his theories of natural selection. But according to Vonnegut, nature goofed: Homo sapiens' highly developed cerebral lobes were responsible for the world's troubles. Thinking generated opinions, rationalizations and a peculiar sense of pleasure from cruelty. Says Leon the friendly ghost: "This...
California's textbook-development director Francie Alexander charged that "there's just less and less information about evolution" in publishers' recent offerings. The Charles E. Merrill Principles of Science, for example, meekly allows that Charles Darwin developed "a theory that explains why there is a great number and variety of plant and animal species...
...controversial, says Honig, "and publishers kept watering it down until children couldn't understand what evolution was." Indeed, over the past decade pressure from believers in the literal truth of the Bible's creation story prompted many of the 22 states with textbook adoption codes to back off from Darwin. Market-sensitive publishers swung into line...
Cohen is a superior scholar and his case studies make for stimulating reading. Particularly noteworthy are the chapters on 17th century figures including an especially pleasing section on Vesalius, Paracelsus and Harvey. The chapters on Darwin and Freud, and the saga of sea floor spreading, a revolution in earth science, are also splendidly wrought, commendable for their cogency and conciseness. Cohen's analysis focuses on revolutionary significance, but he simultaneously yields a wealth of stimulating narrative history...
Cohen was relentless in his research. He traveled to Darwin's library in Kent, England to examine the copy of Das Kapital that Karl Marx presented to the naturalist. Revolutions in Science is the culmination of a lifetime of serious, inspired scholarship--and the results show...