Word: eiseley
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...Star Thrower, by Loren C. Eiseley...
...Eiseley wrote wonderful dreamy essays about science and nature which always start my mind wandering freely. He somehow combines the best of travel writing with the best of science writing. Any of his collections of essays are great, in case you can't find this one. I suggest this book... because he spends most of his time in these essays trying to bring the big picture into tiny fascinating details—perfect for the summer...
...Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls. And when it does not, then the human arrangement breaks apart." In the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, Clarence Darrow argued essentially that crime (including the murder of 14-year-old Bobby...
...according to Loren Eiseley. For decades prior to his death in 1977, the distinguished anthropologist and writer (The Immense Journey) tried to trace the origins of the ideas credited to Darwin. Now, in this collection of posthumously published essays, he reveals his findings. "There will always be an ineluctable mystery concerning the origin of the theory of natural selection, just as there will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that...
...Eiseley's most significant accomplishment, though, is to rediscover another English naturalist named Edward Blyth, who as early as 1835 set forth the tenets of what later became known as the the ory of natural selection. Darwin, Eiseley argues persuasively, was more than just a little familiar with Blyth's work, and even quoted from one of his papers. But Darwin never publicly acknowledged, let alone discharged, his debt to Blyth, and history has been no kinder. Eiseley's ex pose in no way diminishes Charles Dar win's importance, but it does help ex plain...