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Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life By Adam Gopnik 211 pages; Knopf...
Much has been made in recent weeks of the shared birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two juggernauts not only of their own age, but of all the years since. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explores their legacies in this book-length series of essays, focusing on their abilities as writers and thinkers of the highest caliber. As Gopnik writes, "Literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance." With their adherence to logic and observation, and devotion to thoughtful expression, Lincoln and Darwin - in addition to everything...
...larger effects of Darwin's writing: "[T]he most important way in which Darwin altered his era was by getting people who did do science to ask a new kind of question. Some scientific revolutions have surprisingly small ideological aftershocks; Michael Faraday's discovery that electricity and magnetism are the same thing was as large a discovery as any in the history of science, but it had a paltry aftereffect...For a new scientific theory to become a model in its time, vastly influential outside its immediate claims, it has to release thinking people from a bond that they...
...worth reading because they advance our liberal education. Just as we don't read Dante for a sneak peek at the afterlife or because we expect someday to be confronted with a diabolical architecture of circles within circles and punishments suited to our sins, we don't read Darwin because what he says is what scientists now believe - much of it isn't. We read him because a book of eloquent argument and well-ordered evidence...reminds us of the powers of the human mind to bring light to darkness, make a clearing in the wood of confusion...
Instead, at the end of the month, the nearby Bryan College (founded in 1930 and named for the victor of the Scopes trial) will be holding a symposium called "War and Peace: 150 Years of Christian Encounters with Darwin." The symposium will explore how Darwin's On the Origin of Species challenged creationist views. Retired professor Dick Cornelius says the town is committed to hearing all sides of an argument, "even if it doesn't favor our position." The motto of Bryan College is "Christ above...