DARWIN 1809-1882
I enjoyed this book - another one on my "Must Read" list. It made me want to go and read The Voyage of the Beagle. I didn't actually make a lot of notes while reading this book. It all seemed to make sense to me, though I was still amazed that Darwin could figure this all out and put it all together in the 1800s. Thinking about him travelling around and collecting scads of animals, plants and insects and then bringing them all back to categorize and examine and try and figure it all out - it's an amazing thought. Made me think of the naturalist or biologist in Angels and Insects.
Darwin sees evolution as a big tree with branches sprouting off and some continuing to bud and sprout and others dying at the ends and ceasing to grow.
This is the most sobering aspect of this book - that Darwin could see so clearly the "rightness" of natural selection and the danger of man's manipulations for his own, shallow purposes and yet here we are, over 100 years later, and we muck around with species as if we are mixing paint.
I enjoyed this book - another one on my "Must Read" list. It made me want to go and read The Voyage of the Beagle. I didn't actually make a lot of notes while reading this book. It all seemed to make sense to me, though I was still amazed that Darwin could figure this all out and put it all together in the 1800s. Thinking about him travelling around and collecting scads of animals, plants and insects and then bringing them all back to categorize and examine and try and figure it all out - it's an amazing thought. Made me think of the naturalist or biologist in Angels and Insects.
It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form some advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do, so as to succeed. It will convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings.." pg 78How I wish that this were true but instead we have scientists who either through hubris or greed think they can play havoc with species and organisms in order to create something which they [mankind] think is 'good' or 'useful'. They are busy inserting genes into different species, making GMOs, most frighteningly Monsanto which creates Frankenfoods that will only survive if you use their chemicals. We have geneticists and fertility specialists playing around with lethal genetic diseases. We're a long way from being 'convinced of our ignorance.' How can our notion of 'good or useful' compare with an inanimate entity whose only measure is survivability. For Darwin, "the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." pg 79
Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends." pg 82-83And Darwin was only speaking of breeders. I don't think he could have even contemplated the drastic changes that science is now able to perform.
Darwin sees evolution as a big tree with branches sprouting off and some continuing to bud and sprout and others dying at the ends and ceasing to grow.
This is the most sobering aspect of this book - that Darwin could see so clearly the "rightness" of natural selection and the danger of man's manipulations for his own, shallow purposes and yet here we are, over 100 years later, and we muck around with species as if we are mixing paint.
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