Revival of the Fittest

...And Hyman is a good guide on many other matters...

...Or, though the deviation occurs from within, it may be thought of as having been prodded into being by "external conditions...

...Incidentally, Hyman reminds us that for all of Darwin's interest in man's sheerly biological pedigree, he took good care of his investments, so that they were worth much more when he handed them on than when he had inherited them...

...There is the idea of mutations that arise within the mutant and are handed on...

...was ordained and 'guided by an intelligent cause...

...For instance, "Darwin's Essay of 1844 is included in its entirety, as a substitute for The Origin of Species, which by itself would more than fill the pages of this present volume...

...7.50 Reviewed by KENNETH BURKE Author, "Grammar of Motives," "Philosophy of Literary Form" As we are reminded in the introduction to this edition, it was no easy job to select 170,000 out of the three million words that Darwin accumulated, "building, like his corals and earthworms, an enormous change at a pace almost imperceptible...

...In his Introduction, Stanley Edgar Hyman gives an expertly succinct review of the gains and losses that follow from his choice...

...As he himself said, he aimed to show "that the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree...

...Many other exciting matters could be discussed in connection with this basic book...

...It has to do with Hyman's hunch that Darwin's stomach trouble indicated what we now would call "psychogenic" origins...

...The reader who takes those paragraphs into account should find the solution quite reasonable...

...Whereas Western theology proclaimed a qualitative distinction between man and other animals, and whereas many naturalists were similarly inclined (at least partly, perhaps, in response to the same religious tradition), Darwin expressly objected to "placing man in a distinct kingdom...

...To get the idea quickly, try substituting purely formal terms for his two quasi-materialistic ones...

...a respectfully attentive report on the habits of worms, whose "castings" are so beneficial to the soil...

...In all decency, and lest we dishonor the many non-human species that are trying to eke out an honest living, we should at least categorically distinguish between all those other poor devils and the kind of symbol-wielding animal that can produce Isms, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, yellow journals, a Hitler, a Birchite, an occasional softspoken, cross-burning Southerner, and exalted calls to wage thermonuclear, chemical, and bacteriological war in the name of progress and freedom...

...But he does not concern himself with the kind of Hegelian evolutionism that stresses "self-consciousness" (or Aristotle's "thought of thought"), a reflexive faculty characteristic of human language, with its special aptitude for talk-about-talk...

...that is, the deviation happens from within the given organism, and it survives purely because the new form is a better fit for the situation...

...To discern the transitions of an organ (for instance, to observe the various modifications whereby a swimbladder becomes transformed into a lung) is by the same token to observe the notable respects in which unlike things are, au fond, like one another...

...The less "controversial" suggests that, when mutations do arise from within the mutant and get handed on, external conditions decide whether the new form will manage to prevail...

...And he quotes with approval Huxley's proposition that there "is no justification for placing man in a distinct order...

...We can see how readily a program of work was indicated by this approach when we read: "in accordance with the principle of evolution it was impossible to account for climbing plants having been developed in so many widely different groups unless all kinds of plants possess some slight power of movement of an analogous kind...

...Then you would have something like: "the common ground (or unitary source) of the specific...

...The varied exhibits include: A section on the expression of emotions in monkeys (expressions "closely analogous to those of man...

...There are also two differently pointing notions in Darwin...

...the entire Autobiography (readers will prize in particular Darwin's anecdotes about his shrewd yet friendly father, and the pages tracing the evolutionist's calm development from religious belief to agnosticism, which make an interesting contrast with Mark Twain's agitated pages on the same subject, published in the recent issue of the Hudson Review...

...In particular, when going back over the pregnant pages in the light of recent controversy—and having in mind the fact that both sides of the Iron Curtain, each after its fashion, recently worked up some trick ways of politicalizing biology—I was struck by a quandary of this sort: Darwin seems to set up the terministic situation for quite different possibilities...

...Typically, for instance, in a passage not here quoted (and I personally wish that Hyman had included Darwin's pages on language, perhaps making room by thinning out some of the stuff on the sheer machinery of mayhem expertly contrived by the botanic insectivores), Darwin speaks of language's resemblance to bird-song on the grounds that both must be learned...

...So much for the problem of human pedigrees implicit in the dialectic of a scientist who, in disclaiming any "philosophic" aptitude, automatically obligated himself, things being as they were then, to overlook the full implications of man's peculiar tricks with "symbolicity...

...So we can be sure that not all readers will be equally satisfied with whatever set of selections the hard-pressed editor might deem naturally fittest to survive for republication under such exacting conditions...

...Understandably, as regards man's "descent," heraldic shifts show up...

...He was not thinking of the ironically suicidal possibilities with which the recent perfecting of the physical sciences now confronts us...

...a section on the most fascinating of plants, the ones that trap and digest insects...

...In sum, terministically, there is a paradox (or at least an ambiguity) implicit in Darwin's formula, "origin of species...

...And man's body "is constructed on the same homological plan as that of other animals...

...from The Voyage of the Beagle, excerpts effectively contrasting life in Tierra del Fuego and in the Galapagos Archipelago...

...So you have stylistic choices, at different stages along the way...

...But many persons have already noted the traces of 19thcentury British politics in Darwin's philosophy of nature...

...You could pick (italics mine): "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled...

...Thus he remarks (and I for one wouldn't want to deny it...

...There is another quite different dimension touched on in these expert excerpts...

...Along those lines, and in keeping with the Hegelian proposition that a difference in quantity can make a difference in quality, one might reasonably hold that, regardless of man's biologic origins, his specific aptitude for symbol-systems marks the passing of a critical point (as with the steps that divide water from ice or steam...

...Doubtless in keeping with this stress upon considerations of degree rather than kind, Darwin pays astoundingly little attention to language as a special human aptitude...

...and this volume is clear evidence that he left a lot of engrossing pages for specific selection...

...We can know for sure only that, whatever was or was not wrong with Darwin's guts, he survived...

...Or you could pick: "Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality...

...In this connection Darwin refers to the effects of food...

...That's a different species yet, as regards problems of origin...

...His assumption was, of course, that man's eventual extinction would result from purely natural causes...

...If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception...

...The cunning, totally skeptical free-thinker, Remy de Gourmont, said that the theory of evolution threw out the magic of one big creation—or innovation—by postulating a lot of little ones...

...and from The Descent of Man, a chapter "On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man...

...two personal letters ("Will you honestly tell me . . . whether you believe that the shape of my nose (eheu...

...I think it would be fair to say that the power of Darwin's evolutionism centers in his systematic concern with what he calls "degrees of resemblance...

...And all that here survives of the later and longer work is the six-page "Conclusion...

...Darwin, it was not nice of you to play down the fact that we are something special, endowed with the ability to be the unkindest kind of all...

...While quietly content to describe himself in his old age as "like a man who has become colour-blind" where religious belief is concerned, Darwin did believe in a future interregnum when man "will be a far more perfect creature than he now is," though "he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress...

...All told, this set of selections from Darwin does give us an excellent opportunity to consider "the essence of his works...

...Thus Darwin's great skill in lining up a set of such modulations through a series of different species naturally prompted him to be on the lookout for respects in which, despite their obvious dissimilarities, the organic functions of various species might be traced back to a common ancestry: "Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype...