John Gray
Transmuting the Point
A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change – and the Limits of Evolution
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Oxford University Press 294pp £20 order from our bookshop
In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’. Fernández-Armesto writes, ‘This is almost as nasty as any odium theologicum rival religious dogmatists have ever exchanged.’ It is a characteristically civilised comment on what has become a thoroughly uncivilised debate. For some of its most ardent proponents, Darwinism is not a scientific theory about the origins and development of living things but instead a comprehensive world-view. For these evangelists, evolution enables us to understand everything that exists – not least human culture.[1pass]
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