From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Feb 28 2002 - 14:26:40 MST
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573221929/thehermit0d]"Darwin,
His Daughter, and Human Evolution", Randal Keynes, 2002[/url]
A stunning book and wonderful read, offering a look at the CoV's, for now,
only Saint.
Here is the Scientific American review.
Editorial Reviews
>From Scientific American
When descendants of Charles Darwin get together, some still tell the story
of a long-ago servant who expressed pity for the family patriarch. The poor
man, she said, was so idle that she saw him staring at an ant heap for a
whole hour. Darwin's full-time, self-created job, of course, was to observe
every animate creature, from the ants and bees in his garden, to giant
tortoises in the Galápagos, to his own family. He even published a monograph
on the behavior of his infant children. Randal Keynes, a
great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin (and also a descendant of John
Maynard Keynes), has crafted a superb intellectual and social history about
Darwin's quiet years (c. 1842-1882) at his country estate, long after his
HMS Beagle adventures. Charles and Emma Wedgwood Darwin produced 10 children
but lost three--an infant daughter and son, and the bright and charming
10-year-old Annie, whose death plunged her parents into profound
bereavement. Annie's fatal tuberculosis (a cogent diagnosis suggested by
Keynes, although it was problematic in Darwin's day) was the most wrenching
event of the naturalist's middle age. Among his family's heirlooms, Keynes
discovered Annie's writing case, containing her goose-quill pens and
stationery, a lock of her hair, and her father's mournful yet objective
daily notes on her deteriorating condition. (The British edition of the book
is titled Annie's Box.) Initially inspired and affected by these mementos,
Keynes came to realize that "Charles's life and his science was all of a
piece." With impeccable scholarship, he has woven clips from Victorian
magazines, contemporary poems and novels, family letters and keepsakes, and
even recollections of living people into a stylish narrative that is both
moving and thoroughly documented. Darwin had often wondered whether his
powerful affection for family could be explained in evolutionary terms. His
then radical conclusion: our deepest emotions are rooted in the evolution of
primate social organization. If we had descended from bees instead of from
apes, he once opined, "there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried
females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their
brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no
one would think of interfering." According to Keynes, Darwin was at a loss
to understand why most naturalists at the time thought they saw evidence of
ubiquitous, benevolent design in a world so full of pain, death and disease.
"There seems to me," he wrote, "too much misery in the world" for a loving
deity to have designed it that way. He had witnessed genocide of the Indians
in Argentina and the torture of slaves in Brazil. He had written of wasps
whose larvae devour a living caterpillar from within, leaving the beating
heart for last. With the slow death of Annie, the misery became personal.
Some contemporary critics painted Darwin as a cold intellect with no place
for love in his famous "struggle for existence." Keynes shows he was
actually a man of uncommon warmth. While he was "anxious to observe
accurately the expression of crying child," according to his son Francis, he
usually found that "his sympathy with the grief spoiled his observation." To
comfort his friend Sir Joseph Hooker when the botanist's young son fell ill,
Darwin drew on his own agonizing deathwatch of Annie: "Much love, much
trial, but what an utter desert is life without love." As the first
evolutionary psychologist, Darwin was breaking new ground by seeking the
roots of human behavior in our species' mammalian history. In On the Origin
of Species (1859), he had predicted that "psychology will be based on a new
foundation," which he attempted to establish in his 1872 book The Expression
of the Emotions. Comparing the behavior of dogs, cats, monkeys, orangutans,
infants and tribal peoples from all over the world, he argued that human
affection, sympathy, parental love, morality and even religious feelings had
gradually developed from a primate base. Such "evil passions" as rage and
violence were also part of Grandfather Baboon's legacy. Once I had a rare
chance to examine Darwin's printer's proofs of this treatise on comparative
psychology, which contain his handwritten corrections. The title, as
printed, was The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Lower Animals. Darwin
had emphatically crossed out the word "lower."
Kind Regards
Hermit
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