Darwin's Spectre

"A spectre is haunting the modern world," writes evolutionary biologist Michael Rose in a sly echo of Karl Marx, "Darwin's spectre, Darwinism." Ancient as scientific theories go, Charles Darwin's 19th-century ideas about speciation, adaptation, and natural selection continue to inform modern science and to shape our understanding of the world; as Rose demonstrates, Darwinism retains its intellectual force today, although it has been put to bad use politically (as, for instance, a justification for racism, the dismantling of welfare, and the imposition of authoritarian social controls). Rose discusses the growth of Darwin's thought through three major issues: the nature of heredity, the operation of natural selection, and the pattern of evolution. Darwin helped solve a vexing puzzle of his day, namely how different species emerge; he also helped explain why, in an apparent lack of natural economy, there should be so many species of animal and plant life to begin with. For all Darwinism's intellectual power, Rose notes, most theories of human nature continue to be resolutely non-Darwinian. Rose's discussion is lucid and accessible to nonspecialists, and it makes for an eminently readable essay in the history of science. --Gregory McNamee