Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #590151 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Although the bumper-sticker title seems glib, Levine's book is most assuredly not. It will be a difficult read for nonphilosophers, even though Levine, professor emeritus of English at Rutgers, raises noteworthy points. His main premise is that a close reading of Darwin disproves Max Weber's contention that a "rational scientific" outlook "expels meaning and value from the world." Levine argues persuasively that an understanding of Darwinism can lead to a secular enchantment of the sort experienced by Darwin himself as he worked to make sense of the world around him: "an attitude of awe and love toward the multiple forms of life" in all their extraordinary diversity. Enchantment of this type, Levine explains, is no less important or meaningful than enchantment arising from religion. Levine also offers a textual analysis of Darwin to demonstrate that much writing that claims to derive from Darwin, especially within the realm of politics, does not necessarily follow from his original intent. With polemicists from all portions of the political spectrum attempting to use Darwin to their own advantage, Levine offers a fair warning to readers to be wary of the political extrapolation, because scientific theories themselves have no political content. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
"Levine's book is one of the most appealing and subtle attempts to bridge biology and the humanities."

Review
George Levine . . . tries to vindicate Darwin for students of literature by emphasizing his modest 'sense of wonder,' the almost mystical awe at the sheer existence of life in the universe; Darwin disenchanted believers in Heaven, but he reenchanted lovers of Earth. Levine's book is one of the most appealing and subtle attempts to bridge biology and the humanities.
(Adam Gopnik The New Yorker )

Levine restores and celebrates Darwin's humanness, arguing for the vital important to modern democracy of a radically secular, ethical engagement with the world...an engagement that is scientific and sympathetic.
(Angelique Richardson Times Literary Supplement )

Levine argues persuasively that an understanding of Darwinism can lead to a secular enchantment of the sort experienced by Darwin himself.
(Publishers Weekly )

George Levine's book Darwin Loves You confronts Weber's problem of the loss of enchantment head-on. Levine's thesis is that this all-too-common view of science in general and evolution in particular is dead wrong and that, in fact, Darwinian evolution provides a model for what he calls 'secular re-enchantment.'...The book is erudite and wonderfully interdisciplinary.
(Robert T. Pennock American Scientist )

Levine's readings of Darwin himself are infectiously enchanted ('Who else would have thought of playing the piano for worms?'), and emphasize the crucial point that Darwin's scientific achievement depended on his capacity for imaginative sympathy with other animals.
(Steven Poole The Guardian )

Levine's intelligently designed case for secular enchantment seeks to show that Darwin's theories, long reviled by literal creationists, can co-exist with a deep love of natural beauty that does not depend on divine creation.
(Kathy English Globe and Mail )

A considered, carefully worked and sensitive argument for Charles Darwin the man.
(Henry Nicholls Times Higher Education Supplement )

Darwin Loves You combines passion, subtlety, critical scrutiny and moral purpose. . . . Levine is surely right to see hope for our own times in an avowedly Romantic Darwinism.
(ek Kohn," The Independent )

George Levine has written a fascinating book about the impact of Charles Darwin's ideas on Western culture and how they affect people's moral and spiritual values. . . . This book, which represents an admirable attempt to humanize Darwinism, is welcome in today's climate. . . . This book should appeal to the lay public concerned about the growing threat of fundamentalism.
(Choice )

Levine's Darwin is a dedicated and scrupulous observer who insisted on scientific clarity and rational precision whether studying finches, barnacles, worms, or human beings. Levine is inspired by the great naturalist's awe before the ordinary, which he characterizes as a kind of inverted sublimity.
(Steven G. Kellman San Antonio Current )

Customer Reviews

A Literature Professor Holds Darwin Under the Microscope.
As the book's cover indicates, "Darwin Loves You" is inspired by a bumper sticker once seen by the book's author. The bumper sticker is, of course, a play on the platitudinous "God Loves You" bumper sticker. And it is easy to suppose that most who have this latter bumper sticker would never own - or see any truth in - the former. AFter all, Darwinian evolution is generally seen as a cold and caustic theory that dashes hopes in the soul or the reality of those pesky intangible values. No awe here; only dessication.

That is the view that literatre professor George Levine aims to dispel. Darwinian evolution - not "Darwinism," as Darwin is not a deity and evolution, not a religion - does not HAVE TO BE a view hostile to values and devoid of happiness. It can be inspiring; it can be beautiful; it is fully compatible with a world of poetry, music, and meaning.

Firt, though, Levine devotes several chapters to the myriad of ideologies that people have based on Darwinian evolution: Marx claimed Darwinian authority for communism, Spencer for capitalism. Kropotkin claimed Darwinism supported anarchism, while others saw it as a rallying cry to support state intervention.

All of these, says Levin (and Douglas Hofstadter before him), were quite understandable but essentially flawed attempts to bolster the less certain world of philosophy and ideology with hard science. And all of their mistakes can be traced to the pesky dilemma that conflates descriptions of what is with prescrptions of what ought to be. Darwinian evolution does not have any positical indubitable conclusions; any attempt to use it as a moral/political doctrine is to stretch the theory into unnatural areas and force square 'facts' to fit round 'values.' (Yes, lovers of science make this mistake often, but more often, the mistake is made by those who oppose science. They fail to realize that the unfavorable doctrines they point to as showing the evils of 'Darwinism,' there are as many noble ones they can just as easily point towards.)

Levine is perhaps hardest on the ideas of sociobiology and reductionism - the idea that every trait can be explained as an adaptation, and that science will subsume every other way of thinking about our world. These, Levline notes, are beliefs about the supremacy of science that do not themselves utilize the methods of science. They rely on speculation, unjustified faith, and a very faulty inductive logic of the type that science is very careful to ever make. Yes, these beliefs may be true, but they may well NOT be true. They are, like the best religions, treated as tenets of faith held with deifying fervency.

These waters, of course, have been tread before, and I was actually starting to get frustrated with Levine during this portion of the book. Historical recountings and refutations of various Darwin-based philosophies have been done before, and Levine seemed not to realize that what he was doing was recounting what has been recounted.

The next section, though, makes up for that. It is an exploration of Darwin's own writings in order to show that Darwin saw the awe-inspiring nature of his theory. He did not see it as a pessimistic and cold theory, but one that makes nature and the world all the more beautiful. That we - products of evolution - can live in a world of beauty, value, art, and ideas, made all of this seem all the more special. Like any good scientist, Darwin was certainly cognizant that these things made his theory seem less plausible, and was certainly open to the idea that if no evolutionary explanation was capable, his theory may be refuted. (Levine points out that Darwin was no dogmatist; he was always open to refutation.) Even then, Darwin speculated as to how values, ideas, art, etc., were capable of being produced evolutionarily and was right about as much as he was wrong.

With the skill of literary exegesis and interpretation, Levine shows that Darwin was at the same time a product of his culture and an iconoclast. Darwin realized the threat his theory posed to Biblical literalism, but never viewed his theory as the type of "universal acid" that Daniel Dennett would later claim it was. Like Levine, Darwin saw his theory as grand and beautiful, a theory able to highlight the diversity of nature as well as explain it.

This is a book that needed to be written not so much because champions of the theory miss this point, but because critics of the theory almost ALWAYS miss it. Set aside the fact that, contra Dawkins, there is nothing INHERENTLY atheistic about evolution (though it does make the 'seven days' theory quite hard to hold.) Set aside the fact that theistic evolution is a perfectly cogent and plausible idea. Levine adds to this that Darwinian evolution is not the killjoy that creationists often suggest, and that a life full of meaning is fully compatible with Darwinian evolution.

So, if we see the first half of the book for what it is - a rehashing of what has been rehashed and what should have been obvious if it had not been - the second half of the book repays us. Hopefully, this book will dispel some of the myths we commonly hear about the "morally corrupt" Darwinism that fuctions as a "universal acid" to destroy things like value and beauty.