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    Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
    Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
    Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
    Ebook424 pages4 hours

    Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World

    By George Levine

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    About this ebook

    Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across America. Medallions of fish symbolizing Jesus are answered by ones of amphibians stamped "Darwin," and stickers proclaiming "Jesus Loves You" are countered by "Darwin Loves You." The bumper sticker debate might be trivial and the pronouncement that "Darwin Loves You" may seem merely ironic, but George Levine insists that the message contains an unintended truth. In fact, he argues, we can read it straight. Darwin, Levine shows, saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too--if we look at his writings and life in a new way.


    Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism--a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 10, 2008
    ISBN9781400827336
    Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World

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    • 2/5
      Have you ever had one of those uncles that start to tell you a "fascinating" story at dinner? The story starts with the salad course, and by dessert, you're tired of the set up and wish he'd just get on and tell the story already? The entire family is numb, staring at their plate, paralyzed by boredom? This is that uncle. I was unable to make it past the first chapter, where he managed to repeat himself pretty much every paragraph, making the same point over and over and saying next to nothing except that Darwin could bring enchantment back into the world - secular enchantment. This after getting so incredibly wrong the fact of how evolution happens - his statement that the individual evolves, not the species, is the sort of ignorance and misunderstanding you sort of learn to expect when English professors try to write about science, apparently without consulting scientists on the topic, since no scientist worth their salt would let that stand. Too sad, because the direction he was heading, I suspect I might have agreed with his premise, but I just couldn't stomach the tedium.
    • 5/5
      George Levine, literary critic and author of Darwin and the Novelists, attempts to answer the question of the lack of meaning of life after god is replaced by nature red in tooth and claw. Levine claims that it is in nature that re-enchants our disenchanted lives and Darwin shows this in his writing. Levine's prose is beautiful, easy-to-follow and funny. An intelligent reader can easily follow his line of argument.
    • 3/5
      The author tries to recover the enchantment of the natural world that science and specifically evolution supposedly take away by examining the writings and life of Darwin.

    Book preview

    Darwin Loves You - George Levine

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