Derbyshire on Darwin

The Great Disturber [John Derbyshire]

Darwin Day! Plenty of people have interesting things to say about the Great Disturber. The old boy's ideas are as disturbing to the modern egalitarian Left as they are to the fundamentalist Right. That homo sap. is a Chosen Species is improbable on Darwinian grounds; but then so is the Psychic Unity of Mankind. Steve Sailer has interesting things to say here. It was Steve, I think, who summed up Darwin's equal-opportunity disturbingness in the apothegm: "The Right believes in biology but not in evolution; the Left believes in evolution but not in biology."

A sensitive soul like myself is naturally above all this grubby metaphysical bickering. In a proper Darwinian spirit, I prefer to contemplate Darwin's large and fascinating family tree, which had musical, military, and literary branches, as well as scientific ones. There was, for instance, Darwin's granddaughter Frances Cornford, who was a rather good poet. I've recorded one of my favorites here.

02/12 09:59 AM