Other than Darwin being a bit racist, it's the usual classic. ( )

Reasons for reading Darwin:

1. Even Pope John Paul II believes in evolution, so there is no reason why a Christian shouldn't read Darwin;

2. Even if you disagree strongly with evolution, you still ought to read the book before you make up your mind because there are always two sides to a coin. Almost every scientist believes in evolution, and since we know they cannot all be stupid, there must at least be some truth in the theory;

3. Although it doesn't show in the picture on the right, the book cover is glamorously gilded in gold, so it looks fabulous on your bookshelf;

3. Besides Shakespeare, Karl Marx and Freud, Darwin is the person who changes the culture in the entire history of Western civilization. (How can anyone not read him for this reason alone?!)


And my last point is what Philip Appleman tries to show in the book. Humankind is now decentered; like the Copernican revolution, instead of nature revolving around us, we are now following the rules of nature. In other words, we're no longer "special" but are ruled by our genes and our nature. This has much repercussions in science, philosophy, sociology, religion and literature, which form sections in the book. If you're not interested in, say, science, you may skip that section and still understand the rest of the book (although I did read everything).

In these sections, Appleman has included many eminent thinkers, such as Pope John Paul II, Richard Dawkins (scientist), Stephen Jay Gould (sociobiologist), Andrew Carnegie (industrialist), Matt Ridley (philo-biologist), George Levine (literary critic) and Gillian Beer (literary critic). Don't think that Appleman doesn't give religion a fair airing. He has included religious scientists--sounds like an oxymoron doesn't it?--such as Phillip Johnson and Robert Dorit.

Because the selection is huge and varied, Appleman puts in only a few pages of each author's main thesis, hence you don't have to read 10, 000 books on the subject; you only need to read this book to get a grasp. Because the readings have few jargons, they are lucid and an intelligent reader can understand without much effort.

These scholarly essays form the second part of the book. The first part rightly goes to a very readable selection of Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and prevalent thinking and reactions in Darwin's time.

I freaked out in the midst of reading because I felt so small, so small. Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago; first signs of life, 4 billion years ago; 220 million years ago marked the first mammals; primates came at the 65th million-year mark; 3 million years ago, human's ancestor became bipedal; and only within the 100, 000 years are we fully formed as bodily functional beings. What is 70 years of human life compared to this eternal nature "red in tooth and claw"? Lewis Thomas says nothing makes sense anymore: "The universe is meaningless for human beings: we bumbled our way into the place by a series of random and senseless biological accidents. The sky is not blue: this is an optical illusion--the sky is black. You can walk on the moon if you feel like it, but there is nothing to do there except look at the earth, and when you've seen one earth you've seen them all. The animals and plants of the planet are at hostile odds with one another, each bent on elbowing any nearby neighbor off the earth" (305). But he is quick to assuage the reader's fear that there is at least one certainty in all these uncertainties (although I'm not convinced by him): "There is one central, universal aspect of human behavior, genetically set by our very nature, biologically governed, driving each of us along. Depending on how one looks at it, it can be defined as the urge to be useful. This urge drives society along, sets our behavior as individuals and in groups, invents all our myths, writes our poetry, composes our music" (307).

This is a rather engaging book. I would have given it five stars had it included essays on contemporary issues such as postcolonialism, sexuality and race although there are a few essays on gender. ( )

More than one copy.

Given to my by Kyle Sterup ( )