A C Grayling
A Theory to Believe In
A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination
By Marek Kohn
Faber & Faber 392pp £20 order from our bookshop
UNQUESTIONABLY, THE BIOLOGICAL theory of evolution by adaptive natural selection is one of the most significant ideas in human history. The fact that it remains contested by creationists to this day is proof enough of the impact it has had on humanity’s perception of itself and the world, not least through its effects on religious thought, whose inclusive ambitions to explain the origins, duties and destiny of humankind it has impugned.
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