Word: darwins
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...real object of Fowles' bifocal vision, though, is not so much the Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical...
...find some resonances in human behavior. Baboons also become addicted to intoxicants, it appears, and feel let down just as evening falls. But Marais too often labors over speculations about the origins of the human unconscious in ancient animal instincts. Marais was a self-educated naturalist who had read Darwin but came to grief over the noninheritance of acquired characteristics-a turn-of-the-century incomprehension he shared with Bernard Shaw...
Anyone seeking the forerunner of modern study of animal behavior will find the thing well done in the books of Darwin himself. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, for example, is crammed with observational detail and modest supposition. Almost a third longer at a third the price, with a modest preface by Konrad Lorenz, it is now selling briskly in paperback from the University of Chicago Press...
...Since the judges for the American Heritage's dictionary have decreed the death penalty for all who use like as a conjunction [Aug. 22], a hangman's noose would have been the appropriate end for Elyot, Shakespeare, Smollett, Southey, Newman, Washington Irving, Darwin and William Morris (of Morris chair fame, not the dictionary's editor). Edmund Spenser should perhaps have been flogged for anticipating the TVese use of host as a transitive verb. Since advise in the sense of "notify" is business and Army English, Willa Gather and Sir Richard Steele must have been members...
...agnosticism leads nowhere," he once wrote. "I hold as firmly as St. Thomas Aquinas that all truths, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired." Shaw believed in evolution, but was worried about the diverse effects of Darwinist thinking. He agreed, with Samuel Butler, that "by banishing purpose from natural history Darwin had banished mind from the universe." Shaw would have no part of a universe from which a first-rate mind (such as his own) was expelled...