It is a testament to this book that I have rather little to say about it. Normally I would measure a book by the extent to which it yields to my attacks and releases hidden layers of meaning, but this book is specifically designed to resist such an assault. It is, by intelligent design, so utterly transparent, that no chink in its walls could I find from which to mount my usual literary disassembly. The one less than satisfying point in Darwin's arguments, namely that regarding the reasons for the reduced ability of species to breed in proportion to the distance between them, would have been handily dispatched had he lived a few more decades to read of Miescher's discovery of nuclein.
So solid is Darwin's reasoning that the instinct is nearly irresistible to apply it to other fields of study, in particular: linguistics. Darwin even hinted at the affinity of this field to his thought in using it to illustrate his case on more than one occasion. After all, his argument hinges upon the idea that what we call a "species" is rather open to interpretation, and refers to the term as "a mere useless abstraction" and "arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other." How reminiscent this is of Max Weinreich's observation that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." One might even go so far as to apply the theory to poetry or literature, as Ferdinand Brunetiere did--unsuccessfully.
Nonetheless, there were in Darwin's time, and remain today, those who insist on disregarding this, in my opinion, well-proven and easily visible principle. If such ones would really bother to consider Darwin's evidence, they would be forced to admit, either that natural selection is a well-documented natural phenomenon, or that the divine creator executed her or his plan in such a way as to conceal her or his own existence. To do otherwise, as Darwin observes, "makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment