Darwin Darwinian Darwinism : Charles (Robert) (1809-82), English naturalist renowned for his analyses of his notes on the species of flora, fauna (including non-white humans) taken when he explored some European colonies. His reputation rests entirely on the fact that he managed to publish his analyses before a painstaking European researcher in the same field could publish his, – such is the power of the breaking-news media on thinking & unthinking humanity. The result his inferences regarding past, present & future evolution created in Europe’s scientific, religious, social & political classes of his time had a disastrous influence on the non-whites in Europe’s colonies & in European countries [s/a St Paul’s School].
... line. Taking the three essential tenets of Darwin’s theory – variations, inheritance and natural selection – as three such points, Darwinians have always connected them by a circle, showing that their idol’s theory is the ideal one, or by a triangle, imposing the dogmatic knowledge of Darwinism as the only valid explication of the evolution of life. But Darwinism is no more than an intellectual idealization... , Charles Darwin. Weismann was actually an anti-Darwinian on two accounts: Darwin had in the revised editions of the Origin integrated more and more Lamarckian elements, and the germ plasm with its biophores condemned the gemmules to oblivion. When Weismann proclaimed his theory, Mendel had not yet been rediscovered. Once this happened, one or two decades later, the original Darwinism would be hardly... questions of the standard theory. All the same, the fame of Darwinism, built up by the crusading activism of its proponents, had in academic circles augmented to a degree that “Darwin had become the obligatory reference” and all plausible theories, even anti-Darwinian, were in some way integrated into in what was in the course of being invented: ‘Darwinism’. “The Modern Synthesis” Trying to overcome ...
... disbelievers in evolution, or in Darwinism. They are about the scope and proper limits of Darwinian explanation.” 23 Nonetheless, if the controversies have been so nasty that “the enmities made in that struggle persist to this day,” their stakes must have had deeper than theoretical roots. Andrew Brown is of the same opinion, for the subtitle of his book The Darwin Wars is “the scientific battle... permanence contradicting the continuous effect of Darwinian natural selection. Of this stasis, the coelacanth is now known to be only one example among many. Little by little the theory of evolution has made room for “macroevolution” side by side with “microevolution.” The latter, evolution in small (micro) steps, is the only one Darwinism and neo-Darwinism accept, for its mechanism is the selection of... but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.” 4 Darwin’s conviction could not be expressed more clearly. (Equally clear is the fact that, if a theorist holds the opposite view, he cannot claim to be a Darwinian.) However, the gaps in the fossil record are undeniable. They were already a constant headache for Charles Darwin himself. His theory of variations and natural selection demanded ...
... grounds of Darwin’s original system, but on what later has been put together as so-called ‘Darwinism’. Both Koons and Berlinski are outspoken critics of Darwin, as is André Pichot who terms the awe in which Darwin and his work are held “the Darwinian mythology.” Daniel Dennett, on the contrary, is another ‘arch-Darwinian’, but he too has to admit that “no one knew better than Darwin himself the... Copernicus had put the Earth in its right place as a planet among the other planets; Darwin had put the humans in their right place as animals among the other animals. Most Darwinian authors enjoy reminding their human readers of this “fact,” rubbing them with their noses into their animality, so to speak. Finally, Darwinism is so often used as an argument against anything related to God, religion, sp... that it has become synonymous with godlessness. As mentioned before, some neo-Darwinians have gone on an all-out attack on creationism and “intelligent design,” a movement that in its scientific form finds the works of nature too complex to have been brought about by the material mechanism of ‘Darwinism’. We know about Darwin’s religious struggle, which resulted in agnosticism. His present-day followers ...
... denigrating irony. All the same: “Darwin is not a strict Darwinian,” and the man who said so was none other than a renowned self-proclaimed Darwinian, Stephen Jay Gould. 7 In fact, as we will see, Darwin was anything but a strict Darwinian in the current sense. “Darwin must be distinguished from modern Darwinism. One of the primary justifications for examining Darwin’s own views is precisely to expose... whereby life arose from non-living matter and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.” 6 Darwinism and ‘Darwinism’ It is erroneous to associate evolution exclusively with Charles Darwin, although proclamations that “we live in the age of Charles Darwin” and comparisons of Darwin with Copernicus, Newton or Einstein are rife in the popularization of science as divulged by the media... Daniel Dennett credits Darwin with “the single best idea anyone has ever had.” 12 What, then, is ‘Darwinism’? It is an agglomerate of theories assembled and frequently revised under an umbrella postulated to be Charles Darwin’s original idea. It is this cluster of more or less integrated theories which, after Darwin and up to the present, claims to prove that Darwin’s evolutionary machinery ...
... Necessity. “I have tried to show why I believe that the problems [of ‘Darwinism’] are too serious and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework, and that consequently the conservative view is no longer tenable,” wrote Denton. 9 His was a strong challenge indeed. “Darwin’s model of evolution is still very much a theory and still very much in doubt... movement. On its cover is printed: “New developments in science are challenging orthodox Darwinism.” Denton had no religious program; his criticism of Darwinism, which in most cases meant neo-Darwinism, rested on purely scientific grounds and is generally respected, although it came as a shock after the triumphalist Darwinian wave in the 1950s and 1960s, Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape and Jacques Monod’s Chance... routinely present Darwinism as the one and only scientific evolutionary theory, outlined by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species . So does for instance David Attenborough in his BBC documentary on Charles Darwin, and so do most other popularizations of evolution. This is not only historically incorrect, it is also misleading as to the contents and significance of Darwinism, as it is of evolutionary ...
... selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory,” affirms Dawkins in The Selfish Gene , “expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would immediately have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism.” 27 (Elsewhere in the same book he writes: “Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin, if he read this book... Gypsy lost in the margin of the universe. Dawkins has been called “the ultimate ultra-Darwinist.” He sees himself as “an enthusiastic Darwinian … a real-life Darwinian.” Edward Wilson calls him “Darwin’s most ardent representative on Earth.” 22 Major Darwinian elements in Dawkins’ thinking are, firstly, his stance against eighteenth century theological naturalism, of which William Paley had become... in his pseudo-Darwinian scheme.) And on the same page we read the astonishing words: “As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist ...
... The Process of Evolution Charles Darwin (1809-82) The process of evolution was detected in ancient times. Both in India and in Greece, there were important ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707-88), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers. On the Origin... generations. The two original components of Darwin's theory were (I) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin's time. Page 27 Many naturalists accepted Darwin's gradualism because it accorded well with what... gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the paleontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought ...
... ss, “the attitude of Darwin and the Darwinians towards Lamarck bestows honour neither on their intelligence nor on their intellectual honesty,” writes Pichot, 30 who pillories the systematic and often ill-founded denigration of which Lamarck is the object with many biologists and historians of biology. We will see that some quite level-headed authors allege that ‘Darwinism’ has become a fanatical... we know that Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics cannot happen” (Michael Shermer 29 )? The ‘Darwinian’ camp, as usual, refers its opinions to their source in holy scripture, Darwin’s texts. Darwin wrote disparagingly about Lamarck as he did about his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, although the pioneering thought of both of them had provided essential elements of his hypothesis. The recluse... late Gould still identified Lamarck with ‘acquired characteristics’.] Evolutionists have long understood that Darwinism cannot operate effectively in systems of Lamarckian inheritance, for Lamarckian change has such a clear direction and permits evolution to proceed so rapidly that Darwin’s much slower process of material selection shrinks to insignificance before the Lamarckian juggernaut.” 31 One ...
... struggle for life and of natural selection,” writes Pichot, “Darwin has not only revolutionized biology and natural philosophy, he has also transformed political science. … The idea of applying Darwinism to the human society and politics has been immediate.” 9 This goes to show how sudden was the impact of the Darwinian revolution, and how Darwin had brought into the open ideas which were ripening in... these are the words of an early critic of social Darwinism, Jacques Novicow, who wrote in 1910: “Darwinism has profited from the archaic instincts of brutality, so deeply ingrained in the brains of the traditionalists, the conformists and the ignoramuses of whom still consists, unfortunately, the immense majority of the human race. When the Darwinian theories came in fashion, Marshall von Moltke [the... merely one of many planets revolving around the Sun. Darwin shows that Man is not a species apart from nature or above it, but, like all species, one among many of the branches of the tree of life. Darwin shows us that our self-image needs cutting down to size. Our species is unique, but uniqueness is ubiquitous in nature.” 4 Social Darwinism Simultaneously the opinion was abroad of the s ...
... environment.” 20 Another point of disagreement was Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which Wallace would never accept. (If natural selection is the one and only mechanism, as is still vociferously asserted, how can it ever be replaced or supplemented by another mechanism?) And a third point, mostly kept under wraps by Darwinians, was Lamarckism. For Darwin had bit by bit integrated more Lamarckian elements... non-adaptive phenomena.” (Darwin’s reaction reminds of Sigmund Freud’s when Carl Jung tore himself loose from him. Maybe it is typical for all founders of a faith when the beloved disciple turns his back on them.) Many other members of the scientific elite joined Darwin is his rejection of Wallace’s deviation, “for his views were at odds with two major tenets of the Darwinian philosophy, which were that... enforce my differences from some of Darwin’s views, my whole work tends forcibly to illustrate the overwhelming importance of Natural Selection over all other agencies in the production of new species … Even in rejecting [Darwin’s] phase of sexual selection depending on female choice, I insist on the greater efficacy of natural selection. This is pre-eminently the Darwinian doctrine, and I therefore claim ...
... challenge. Thought through, Darwinism declared nature to be the playground not of Life but of Death; in the words of a French biologist: “Life is the totality of functions which resist death.” The racial egoism of the time, however, took a positive view of Darwinism as a daring, manly, quasi aristocratic attitude towards life. “To understand the obsession with war in Darwinian sociology, one has to know... what extent and in which way Darwinism influenced biology towards the end of the nineteenth century.” 415 As Poliakov mentions: “Max Nordau noted already in 1889 that Darwinism was becoming the supreme authority of the militarists in all European countries: ‘Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and give free play to their ... This is the form it has kept until now and which owns, all in all, rather little to Darwin himself.” 417 Darwin’s theory of evolution, contrary to what is often thought, became an instant success and “the idea of applying Darwinism to society and politics was immediate”. “As soon as The Origin of Species had been published, perceptive thinkers understood that not only the ideas about history and ...
... Mother's Chronicles - Book Four 22 Darwinian Evolution Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose's letter set me thinking. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It was the most important book to come out in the second half of the nineteenth century; for it not merely opened a new era in biology but, causing a sensation as it... beneficence and knowledge towards which our evolution yearns"? But man, the crest of the Darwinian evolution, will man ever make it his business to evolve something greater in him than he is at the moment? Is there such a yearning in him? Or, will the world never change? Need the formula of the material world, as the Darwinians rediscovered it —the eater eating is eaten—eternally remain the law of evolutionary... it did, it helped transform attitudes to God and to the human race. To men of intelligence Darwin's theory of evolution — 'natural selection' or 'the survival of the fittest' —carried conviction. They shuddered to visualize what could happen in future under certain circumstances. Dr. Ghose speaks of the very real danger of multiplying to infinity beasts and idiots. What we don't realize is that when ...
... evolution began to develop in the 18th century through the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707-88), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), and in the 19th century in the works of Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers. 'On the Origin of Species’ written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth... two original components of Darwin's theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin's time.4 Inadequacies of the Scientific Theory Many naturalists 5 accepted Darwin's gradualism because it accorded... gradualism. They argued that if Darwin was right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the paleontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought ...
... ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707-88), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers. On the Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth evolved by... The two original components of Darwin's theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin's time. Page 273 Many naturalists accepted Darwin's gradualism because it accorded well with... gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the palaeontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought ...
... science finds it easier to take its distance from Darwinism, authentic or pseudo. As the aforementioned references are mainly from French sources, they should be counterbalanced by Anglo-Saxon ones. The following are culled from the online edition the popular American magazine New Scientist. Its issue of 9 July 2008 carries the title: “Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance.” It starts as... generations. … Inheritance of this kind forms no part of neo-Darwinian theory. On the contrary, it is close to the great taboo that is called ‘Lamarckism’. … A lot of effort is now being devoted to exploring such effects. We are at the beginning of what may be a long and exciting process of discovery. … Lamarckian inheritance would not exclude Darwinian selection. It would complement it, providing yet another... what they do without the proteins. And the proteins are not free agents either. They respond to influences from across the rest of the organism and ultimately from the environment too.” 27 ‘Darwinism’ “alienated the inside from the outside, by making an absolute separation between the internal processes that generate the organism and the external processes, the environment, in which the organism ...
... these mechanisms of life actually worked, Darwin had as yet no idea, but future science would certainly find out. Like Laplace he neither needed a God anymore. Gradually, Gradually Darwin had met Charles Lyell (1797-1875) personally and had felt much honoured by their acquaintance, for the slightly older geologist was already a person of esteem and Darwin still a nobody. Professor Lyell was building... adaptation (which were still unexplainable at the time). The illumination which brought it all together in Darwin’s mind, Malthus’ theory, proved to be a chimera. As Tim Lewens writes in his book on Darwin: “Modern evolution has no essential commitment to the Malthusian view that lies at the heart of Darwin’s theory.” 16 × ... awakened by the Muse of art – and not a blade of grass or scrap of information about nature the budding ‘naturalist’. Charles Darwin drank it all. Evolution was in the air, and we know how he had listened when Robert Grant expounded animatedly Lamarck’s theory of evolution. Darwin talked with any expert he met and read anything about nature he could lay his hands on. He recalls in his Autobiography how ...
... La société pure de Darwin à Hitler , Flammarion, 2001 Porter, Roy: Flesh in the Age of Reason , Penguin Books, 2004 Prigogine, Ilya: La Fin des certitudes , 1998 — Order out of Chaos , Bantam Books, 1984 Rose, Hilary and Steven (ed.): Alas, Poor Darwin , Vintage, 2001 Rothman, Tony, and others: Doubt and Certainty , Basic Books, 1998 Ruse, Michael: Darwinism and its Discontents... Ullica: Defenders of the Truth , Oxford University Press, 2000 Shanks, Niall: God, the Devil, and Darwin , Oxford University Press, 2004 Shapiro, Robert: Origins , Bantam Books, 1987 Shermer, Michael: In Darwin’s Shadow , Oxford University Press, 2002 Simmons, Geoffrey: What Darwin Didn’t Know , Harvest House Publishers, 2004 Singh, Simon: Big Bang , Harper Perennial, 2005 Smolin... 2003 Lewens, Tim: Darwin , Routledge, 2007 Lewontin, R.C.: The Doctrine of DNA , Penguin Books, 1992 — The Triple Helix , Harvard University Press, 2000 Lindley, David: Uncertainty , Anchor Books, 2008 Lovejoy, Arthur: The Great Chain of Being , Harvard University Press, 1964 Mayr, Ernst: What Evolution Is , Phoenix, 2002 McCalman, Iain: Darwin’s Armada , Simon & Schuster ...
... higher embodiment of consciousness. “All the facts show that a type [i.e. a species] can vary within its own specification of nature, but there is nothing to show that it can go beyond it.” While ‘Darwinism’ assumes smooth gradual transitions between the species, the fossil record, as we have seen, suggests otherwise – and so did Sri Aurobindo. Emergence from below and descent from above seems to be... working of the inner Force and not in the outer process of the evolutionary transition …” (LD 709-10) In this passage Sri Aurobindo avows the difference between the outer, materialistic (e.g. ‘Darwinian’) explanation of evolution, and its explanation (e.g. his own) through an inner Force. Yet, he also points out that ascribing the works of nature to “an inconscient Energy of creation” – or to an... without our knowledge.” (LD 774) If all this may seem rather abstract, its application to the present day search for factual coherence in the theories of evolution becomes very concrete. Dogmatic Darwinian gradualism prevented paleontology from taking the fossil record at face value; the enormous gaps in it, the ‘missing links’, were a priori held to be provisional and were expected to be filled up ...
... stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Alister McGrath comments on this attitude: “Some might draw the conclusion that Darwinism encourages agnosticism. Far from it: for Dawkins, Darwin impels us to atheism [actually to anti-theism]. It is not merely that evolution erodes the explanatory potency of God, it eliminates God altogether.” This “scientific” conclusion concerning... causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success – nothing else, and nothing higher.” And Richard Dawkins made his famous proclamation: “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution [meant is Darwinian evolution], that person is ignorant, stupid... precedes manifestation and expression.” “A theory of spiritual evolution,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution [e.g. the Darwinian theory]; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory ...
... And as a sin this act will be avenged.” 289 “Racism and Darwinism are entering into a symbiosis in Hitler’s Mein Kampf ”, writes Zentner. 290 The link is obvious: pure blood means a healthy, strong, superior race; mixing of the blood results in degeneration. The fittest, the purest of blood survive. But here racism drew an un-Darwinian conclusion: the fittest-purest also have the right, conferred ...
... industrial revolution in these peoples. Nevertheless, however fictitious the evolutionary degree may have been as a criterion of the hierarchization of the races, it worked perfectly within the social-Darwinian ideology of the time, and it supported its inherent racism by giving it a semblance of scientific justification.” 429 Another surprise of Haeckel’s tree of humanity is that he, though a prominent... translations of his works appeared in many languages. Of Die Welträtsel, the riddles of the world, published in 1889, 400 000 copies were printed up to 1933. Haeckel was one of the first adherents of Darwinism, which he popularized in his writings. He was also an important scientist in his own right, and a many-sided one, for his research touched fields outside zoology and biology. As his basic outlook ...
... biologist “fascinated by plant pathology, and he might well have become a scientist had it not been for his health. Instead, he fused his scientific training with a mystical love of nature and a Social Darwinism which was so typical of much radical thought. This transformation from scientist to radical racist was catalyzed by his encounter with the work of Richard Wagner … He provided the New Romanticism... gloriously positive outlook. Like many of his contemporaries, including Nietzsche, Chamberlain had a problem with the descent of the human from the primates, which did not prevent him to accept Social Darwinism, “so typical of much radical thought”. Radicals do tend to deem themselves superior to others. Chamberlain found convincing support for his view in animal breeding. A race was in fact a soul seeking... rival racial theories,” writes George Mosse. “Most of them had grown with the refinement of the anthropological criteria and had incorporated elements of the ‘survival of the fittest’ axiom of Social Darwinism. They were correspondingly more optimistic about the direction history was taking. Instead of concentrating on the inevitability of racial contamination and the consequent decline of civilization ...
... to look down on peoples who were in their opinion less favoured by the Creator. These were also the years in which Darwinism became accepted even by religious persons, who managed to combine an outlook based on chance with the omnipotence of their God and with Providence. Social Darwinism suited racism admirably and gave it a new impetus. That this is not one jot exaggerated may be shown by a paragraph ...
... It is this truth that Darwinism sought to express in the formula of the survival of the fittest. But as the scientific mind sought to extend to Life the mechanical principle proper to the existence and concealed mechanical consciousness in Matter, not seeing that a new principle has entered whose very reason of being is to subject to itself the mechanical, so the Darwinian formula was used to extend... conscious desire, the sense of a limited room and capacity and the struggle to increase, to expand, to conquer and to possess. These three terms are the basis of that status of evolution which the Darwinian theory first made plain to human knowledge. For the phenomenon of death involves in itself a struggle to survive, since death is only the negative term in which Life hides from itself and tempts its ...
... style tho' some of them tried to infuse it with emotion, directness and greater simplicity. To this school belong the minor writers who formed the main current of verse during the time; of whom Erasmus Darwin &Gifford are the only notable ones. (4) The school of country life and the simpler feelings, consisting of Cowper and Crabbe.(5) The school of romantic poets & restorers of mediaevalism, consisting... ideal. This movement had been already anticipated by Johnson who wrote contemporaneously with Gray & even with Thomson. It was now taken up by Goldsmith, carried on by Churchill & culminated in Erasmus Darwin. Johnson & Goldsmith returned to the ideals of Pope, they violently opposed & disparaged Gray, they kept to the use of the heroic couplet & conventional language, to the narrowness of culture and... also helped the disintegration of the eighteenth-century style by a complete abandonment of Pope's elaborate & rhetorical art, which he attempted to replace by a rude & direct vigour. Lastly Erasmus Darwin took the exact model of Pope's style, not only the metre & language but the very construction & balance of his sentences & reduced this & the didactic spirit to absurdity by trying to invest with poetical ...
... letter addressed to the geologist Lyell. At Lyell's suggestion, Darwin and Wallace read their respective memoirs, in July 1858, at a sitting of the Linnean Society of London. Soon after, in 1859, Darwin published the essence of his ideas in the form of a book: thus was ushered the epoch-making publication, The Origin of Species. Herein, Darwin presented an enormous mass of evidence which made it clear... armed with new evidences 6. Weismann, Vortr ä ge ü ber Descendenztheorie , 1902, I, p. 32. Page 6 in favour of transformism. We are of course referring to Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882). Darwin was an extremely scrupulous and keen observer. Through his minute observation of the variation of flora in South America and in the Galapagos archipelago, undertaken during the navigational... geocentric cosmology could not prevail for long, and before the blast of the evidences accumulated by Darwin the anthropocentric creed, too, soon dissolved. It is interesting to note in this connection that in his first published Page 7 book, The Origin of Species, Darwin intentionally left aside the problem of the origin of man. But the conclusion he did not want to draw ...
... move in the Hardyan direction is that he is unconscious of a subtle point about those plumages. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, brings up the puzzle in his Tropical Nature (first published in 1879). Criticizing Darwin's theory of "sexual Page 325 selection" in this field, Wallace, as quoted by Hardy, writes in his chapter, "Colours of Animals":... capable of carrying to their ultimate conclusion the implications his speculative genius lays bare in the field of biology. But he goes sufficiently far for the purpose of opening eyes like those of Darwinian extremists. We may again draw upon the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement to finish our survey. He follows up thus his reference to telepathy and biology: From this it is not a far... lies not only in suggesting at the end more persuasively than ever before a background of psychism to the evolutionary process, which sets this process ascending in the midst of the energy modem Darwinism reckons with in the play of random-seeming genetic mutation and in the work of natural selection upon this material to bring about the survival and propagation of the forms best adapted by heredity ...
... his theory of Man, Nature and God. It is said that The Bible, Newton's Principia Mathematica, Marx's Das Kapital, and Darwin's Origin of the Species rank among the most influential (if least read!) books of all time. The full title of Darwin's book spells out its message unambiguously: The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; it has also a subtitle which ... there are mechanistic theories of Darwin, Spencer, Weisman, and De Vries. According to these theories there is no goal in evolution, and evolution is purely the outcome of chance variation in structure and function. The Lamarckian theory introduces the element of purpose in evolution. Bergson's creative evolution opposes both the mechanistic theory of Darwin and also the ideological theory... , the Marxist conception of an ideal society, and the religious ideal of a transcendental fulfilment of life. Such an exploration will inevitably lead us to an examination of Marx, Freud and Darwin, the dominant intellectual influences of our age. In my opinion, although each one of these thinkers has brought to humanity a great truth, the illumination Sri Aurobindo's writings throw on ...
... creationism and the scientific thesis of evolution; both standpoints, and several in between, were defended by estimable persons like Leibniz, Robinet, Erasmus Darwin and Cuvier. Till Lamarck published his theory of transformism (1800) and Darwin his theory of transmutationism (1859). Man was no longer the lord of creation. He was now occupying the middle rung of the Scale of Being, “midway from nothing... Robert Shapiro in his much-appreciated Origins . 2 The origin of life is of course one of the most important problems – if not the most important one – in any theory of evolution. Charles Darwin, cautiously, left it untouched. But in the process of evolution there is also that other important problem: how can the mind act upon and through the matter of the brain? According to Larry Witham... and leave an absolute chasm between man and the Great Mind of the universe. Such a supposition seems to me in the highest degree improbable.” 7 While Alfred Wallace, as a naturalist another Darwin but also a great human being, saw the different levels of reality as “the last outcome of modern science,” scientific materialism judged this conception of his to be a fatal mistake and condemned him ...
... evolve step by step from the original starting-point of the Inconscience. The Sankhyan theory of Prakriti also refers to a process of evolution. But the facts of the universe as marshalled by Darwin have demonstrated to the contemporary scientific world some clues to the process of evolution. Even then the scientific theory of evolution has not received universal acceptance. Many philosophers ...
... anti-modernist. He was, moreover, a highly cultured writer who could muster a wealth of arguments and historical facts to confer an appearance of veracity to his theses. And his theories preceded those of Darwin, for the four volumes of his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races were written before the publication of The Origin of Species . Yet, “Gobineau was not a biologist but a literary man of the... novels and essays” and who acquired a permanent place in French literature with works like The Pleiades, Tales of Asia, History of the Persians and The Renaissance. “His Essay has in common with Darwin’s Origin that it is much more often mentioned than actually read … Gobineau’s racism really has not much to do with the biological notion of race. His inspiration is not so much taxonomy as a certain... Therefore Gobineau was a pessimist through and through, and, like the Catholic Church at the time, “terribly reactionary and retrograde”. Taking all this into account, Gobineau could never agree with Darwin. As a Catholic he had to stick to the biblical story of the creation of man and could not try to provide a scientific explanation. He had no justification for the existence of a superior race, or races ...
... And just so shall man be to the superman.” 690 No doubt, Nietzsche knew Darwin; Walter Kaufmann even mentions that the young Nietzsche “was aroused from his dogmatic [Protestant] slumber by Darwin”. Yet, although Nietzsche accepted the possibility of transcending a given natural state, he was “consistently hostile” to Darwinism because it was a theory of chance, numbers and pure matter, which left no ...
... Naked Ape Was it Charles Darwin, more than Nicolaus Copernicus, who knocked man from his pedestal? In the public mind nowadays Charles Darwin is the giant who thought out the theory of evolution and thereby initiated a radical shift in the conception humans had of themselves. This, like so much else in popular science, is a misconception. It might be said that Darwin was the midwife who, in 1859... even now). Secondly, Darwin’s own theory was far from fully justified scientifically. He never touched on the origin of species, even though so proclaiming in the title of On the Origin of Species , could only sketch the formation of species by natural selection, and had not a clue about the inheritance of the natural characteristics in animals, now called genetics. Darwin was also a recluse who... December 2008 examined the question: “Who did most to knock man off his pedestal?” Was it the tandem Copernicus-Galileo who removed us from the centre of the universe? Or was it the tandem Linnaeus-Darwin who put an end to the illusion that humans are created in the image of God and placed them among the animals? But then there is also the question: what is a human being, and what kind of human being ...
... degrading, the former exciting but heartless. Then there is the question of vivisection. Darwin, the most gentle of men who would not deliberately hurt a fly, is on record as declaring that one who objects to experiments on living animals for medical research can never be a true friend of humanity. But I am sure Darwin wanted the vivisecting friends of humanity to be as humane as possible in their experiments... meat-eaters and vegetarians. There is the broad question: "Has Nature evolved man as a feeder on flesh or as an eater of vegetables?" One school points to the gorilla - a cousin of ours, according to Darwinism - and preaches vegetarianism to us. The other school points out our canine teeth as Nature's signal that we are historically meat-eaters. There is also the ingenious argument that all animals that ...
... which might be called Jewish? The historical data are dubious, according to André Pichot, to whom we turn once more for our information. At the time of Vacher de Lapouge and Ernst Haeckel, when in Darwin’s footsteps the first trees of humanity were drawn up, the Jews sometimes came out on top on the same level as the Aryans, although, as we have seen, many of those trees were the result of a fertile ...
... course, he was not yet 'Sri' Aurobindo, just Arabindo Babu. This Cambridge-educated young man seemed to have gathered into himself all the qualities and more of his illustrious predecessors like Bacon, Darwin, Milton, Newton, Wordsworth, all Cambridge men. Arabindo Babu's keen wit was more than a match for the subtle and daring policy of Curzon, who was a statesman of unusual genius. It was disturbing ...
... the evolution of consciousness which is the theme of Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine. It is difficult to understand at first but persistent study will bring »"$ne the Light of Truth and Knowledge. Darwin has in his "Origin of Species" dwelt at length only on the evolution of the form—insect, worms, reptiles, amphibious creatures like frogs and tortoise, then higher and higher types of animal formation ...
... the building elements in the grandiose and extremely complex order of evolution as a whole and of each of its gradations in particular. This means, briefly summarized, that the three pillars of neo-Darwinism, and accordingly of the generally accepted theory of evolution at present, are without foundation. Equally important is the fact that the famous ‘missing links’, the untraceable transitory forms... self-delusions and often a form of demagogy practised by the creed of materialism, not to say an untruth consciously kept alive. Francis Hitching puts it as follows: in three crucial areas where neo-Darwinism [at present still the generally recognized evolutionary ‘school’] can be tested, it has failed. 1. The fossil records reveal a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than gradual change. 2. Genes do... Monod, *Le hasard et la nécessité* , 178 × Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, or Where Darwin Went Wrong, 103 × Idem, 22 × ...
... not inconscient like Matter, but until the higher knowledge comes, they are in the Ignorance. I do not understand what you mean by "It has nothing to do with Darwin." The evolution I speak of is not the evolution of the Darwinian theory. I understand that the interference of the Avidya or the hostile forces were the causes of man's degeneration and delay in his evolution and that they were... certain stage and perverted it. My statement does not bear the meaning you give it. Supposing that this physical body has evolved on this planet in the way understood by Darwin ... It has nothing to do with Darwin. Page 645 yet it seems from inner knowledge that it was essentially an action of the Supermind below, the Supermind above and the psychic being, and all the struggle... out of Inconscience came Ignorance and Ignorance is easily a field of deviation and error. Probably you spoke of a psychological evolution whereas Darwin spoke of the evolution of the physical species. Quite so. Many centuries before Darwin Puranic and Tantric writers spoke very explicitly of an evolution of the soul's birth through the vegetable and animal to man. Psychic innocence is ...
... could Hitler preach the elimination and extermination of the Jews while saying that their evil, the poison of a demonic race, was there in all of humanity, including every German in his audience? Darwinism, as interpreted by Chamberlain and Rosenberg, was much more straightforward and handier. Anti-Semitism, after all, is a matter of gut feelings, and any combination of simplistic arguments will do ...
... actions. If ever I had known what it is to procreate chidren, I am sure I could not have mustered courage enough to marry. ... As far as my reading goes I think that Darwin was an addendum to Moses. Moses said, Go and multiply; Darwin said 'Mind, only the fittest of those you multiply will survive.' Now turn and twist the principle of ethics as you like. Even your devotion to an Almighty God will not ...
... have finished with the superstition of immortality. Will you deny the progress of enlightenment? My friend, let these ghosts rest in their shadows." And nothing would induce him to give God a chance. Darwin and Huxley and Haeckel had settled the Creator's hash for Him; it was res judicata . It is wonderful how easily man tramples on one formula merely to bow reverently before another. Nature replaces ...
... (with white skins) were stronger, more intelligent and inventive, and more religious than other people (mostly with coloured skins). “What today we find abominably racist in the writings of Gobineau, Darwin, Haeckel, Büchner, Vogt, Gumplowicz, etc. … was then the prevalent opinion, common to the point that hardly anybody thought of criticizing it, either on the left or on the right”, writes André Pichot ...
... the same as insight into a philosopher’s thinking. “It must be understood that young Hitler in no way drew from primary sources, which means that mostly he did not have his knowledge from let us say Darwin, Chamberlain, Dühring, Le Bon, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Schiller. He drew his knowledge in the first place from articles about all this in newspapers, brochures and popular writings.” (Brigitte Hamann ...
... Fascism means adventure and also, as in Sorel, ‘the deed and nothing but the deed’ … But what in the first decade of the [twentieth] century was nothing more than a theoretical aspect of Social Darwinism became after the war, to the generation which had survived the trenches, a concrete experience and a standard of behaviour. The former combatants considered themselves the bearers of a spiritual mission: ...
... confined within an obscure group or sect. The Ostara was printed in great numbers and widely read. In Lanz’s ideas, as in those of List, resounded the feelings of racial superiority, supported by Darwinism, but also inspired by the longing for the realization of higher ideals that were rife at that time in Germany and Austria. Such feelings were among the driving forces of the multifarious völkisch ...
... not help coming into contact, and many times we would speak freely with each other." Sri Aurobindo said, "Even the ordinary criminals I found very human, they were better than European criminals." Darwin too had remarked on the human qualities of Indian convicts. "Such noble-looking persons," he wrote in the Voyage Round the World, after seeing convicts in the Andamans. "These men are quiet and well ...
... not the least important are now questioned. The idea of the struggle for life tends to be modified and even denied; it is asserted that, at least as popularly understood, it formed no real part of Darwinism. This modification is a concession to reviving moralistic and idealistic tendencies which seek for a principle of love as well as a principle of egoism in the roots of life. Equally important are ...
... dissolving into its intra-atomic emptiness. And all was rolled in the wave and filled with delighted ease – perhaps like a jellyfish! There was suddenly a new structure, which did not need to wait for Darwinian millennia and the slow modifications of carapace from one species to another. That density kept you standing upright on your own, without framework, through the sole power of its... fluid density... 1 Evolution II A mighty child in the womb he is called the son of the body Rig-Veda, III.29.11 He discovered the truth, the Sun dwelling in the darkness Rig-Veda, III.39.5 Darwin must have more than once felt perplexed when it became increasingly clear to him that Queen Victoria too was unquestionably descended from a she-monkey. And the great Archbishop of Canterbury. It... hang the assassin, which is all very well, but he carries on in another shirt” (!) Man's shirt is beginning to be rather old. Assassins, too. Our ideas, too – one more coil round the great snake? Darwin studied iguanas, turtles and armadillos – they at least lend themselves to study, and fossilize without popes or pomp, without ideology either. But after all, the little fishes too change shirts, and ...
... murderous struggle for existence, in the most skilful, discreet and successful fashion. We had to feel the full weight of that system and learn the literal meaning of this industrial realisation of Darwinism. It has been written large for us in ghastly letters of famine, chronic starvation and misery and a decreasing population. We have risen at last, entered into the battle and with the Boycott for a ...
... s charged subatomic particles (protons, electrons) greatly increasing their energy. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): British naturalist and biologist, author of a theory of organic evolution claiming that new species arise and are perpetuated by natural selection, known by the name of Darwinism. Don Quixote: Tragicomic hero of a Cervantes novel. Don Quixote's main quest in life is to revive... (1820-1903): British philosopher and sociologist, who was one of the principal proponents of evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, his reputation rivaled that of Charles Darwin. Page 105 Radioactivity: name given by Marie Curie, in 1898, to the atomic property of certain heavy elements which spontaneously emit radiation; this property is persistent ...
... known. Scientists may be said to be more intuitive than inspired — though the case of Kekule is as of a visionary poet or painter. Possibly Darwin too "saw" the truth in the instance of which Sir Julian Huxley spoke some years ago in a broadcast: "Darwin... in Ch. 4 of the Origin of Species explains at some length why natural selection inevitably produces diversification (and in his autobiography ...
... 4 Vide., Asimov, Isaac, Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 'Garden City, Doubleday, New York, 1982; vide also, Dobzhansky, Theodosius, American Biology Teacher, 1973; Darwin, Charles, Life and Letters, John Murray, London, 1988; Kitcher, P., The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993; Salmon ...
... context the terse statement of Ernst Mayr, a founder of neo-Darwinism, deserves to be mentioned: “All so-called evolutionary laws are contingent [i.e. accidental, random] generalizations … with numerous exceptions, and are quite different from the universal laws of physics.” And he quotes Bernhard Rensch, another architect of neo-Darwinism: “Evolutionary ‘laws’ are greatly restricted in time and place... of one-time events, each of them particular and never exactly repeated. A law cannot be the general abstract description of single, one-time events – which is the error at the basis of Lyell’s and Darwin’s gradualism, stubbornly defended by Dawkins. “There is no reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no ‘life force’ to rival the fundamental ...
... justified in holding that human thought is not divided into watertight compartments. His citing the example of Darwin's theory of natural selection is most apt. Samuel Butler revolted against Darwinism by shouting: "It banishes mind from the universe." Strictly speaking, he is not right. Darwinism merely stated that evolution proceeds not by an urge in the organism towards a certain way of living but by... the rest. He caustically offers an analogy: "Natural selection is a purely scientific theory. If in the early days of Darwinism the then Archbishop had asked what effect the theory of natural selection would have on religion, ought the answer to have been 'None. The Darwinian theory is a purely scientific theory, and has nothing to do with religion'?" Is Eddington's interpretation of Einstein's... consciousness present in the world or, if there is, it is totally explicable in physical terms. Darwin points to neither conclusion. But his theory does definitely lessen the importance of consciousness in the world-process. If religion involves stress on the play of consciousness, as it certainly must, the Darwinian theory is anti-religious. If there is an intelligence at the back of the world, we surely ...
... occasions that humans are animals – although, when it suits their view, they will declare them ‘special animals’, whose constitution and functioning remains for the greatest part unknown. “By taking the Darwinian ‘cold bath’, and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages: that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent... remarkable that these passionate words of Richard Dawkins, already quoted previously, are from a man who considers himself a scientist, and whose name is now often conjoined with the name of Charles Darwin. “I have never heard such hardline, aggressive promotion of atheism under the guise of science as I have heard from the Darwinists,” writes Denyse O’Leary. “It is, at best, amusing to hear Darwinists... necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of teaching error.” (Leo XIII, 1893 6 ) Galileo barely escaped burning, Bruno did not. Descartes hesitated to publish, Newton hid his Arianism, Darwin stalled writing what would become the Origin for twenty years, the theologians Küng and Schillebeeckx were forbidden to teach, liberation theology was forbidden, many of the most important writings ...
... occur? Whether they are small or great, gradual or abrupt, we cannot trace them to the influence of the environment. For types without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. Darwin's view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations. Modifications and variations do not come singly but in complexes, involving many minor ...
... Peter: Himmler – Reichsführer-SS Pagels, Elaine: The Origin of Satan Paxton, Robert: Vichy France Persico, Joseph: Nuremberg – Infamy on Trial Pichot, André: La société pure – de Darwin à Hitler Picker, Henry: Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier Pletsch, Carl: Young Nietzsche – Becoming a Genius Plewnia, Margarete: Auf dem Weg zu Hitler – Der ‘völkische’ Publizist ...
... ic laws inherent in the organism's activity as a specific biological whole instead of accepting unreservedly the formulas of Neo-Darwinism. such denouement to the "crisis" suggested by him is indeed disappointing and ultimately as inadequate as the Neo-Darwinian formulas. A life-force with a godhead hidden Page 269 in its depths, exploding through the obscurative and obstructive... a host of researchers, especially R.A. Fisher T R c8 Haldane and Sewall Wright. But, whatever the new understanding of natural selection, the blind nature of evolution affirmed by Darwinism is "confirmed" by Neo-Darwinism In fact it has been further emphasised, since characters and adaptations desired and acquired by individual organ- isms are no longer considered inheritable and as the mutational... about the particular course and the specific process? Do they support our vitalistic finalism or do they allow a materialistic picture? Let us look at the picture painted by materialism. The old Darwinian version is well-known: minute variations some- how occurring as between individuals and gradually piling up to radical changes, a struggle for existence among the bearers of these changes as well ...
... believed the only flaw of the ancient tribes was their failure to destroy all peoples within their reach. We must correct this error, he insisted, and also breed for superior human types, as dictated by Darwinism. However stern the measures necessary, Aryan blood must be purified, liberating its martial spirit and creative power. “The Jew was the most powerful foe. Other races were merely inferior, but ...
... evolution there is a design, defined by an Intelligence and worked out by It. Etc. And all this ordered within a coherent system, valid before the positivist theories of evolution (Lamarck, Darwin, de Vries, Neo-Darwinism) were fashioned, and equally valid after those theories have been seriously questioned and will within a not too distant future become history. Vroeger toen ik groot was! (Before, ...
... also the time of many utopian social systems and of militant anarchism. Marx was only one of the thinkers directly influencing the age; the other principal ones were Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Darwin gave a severe blow to the image man had of himself as the king of creation. Nietzsche, “the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe”, proclaimed the end of ...
... culture will continue to be somewhere in Central Asia, just as the sun kept revolving around the earth for a few centuries after Copernicus, and species remained forbidden to evolve for decades after Darwin. But how did this theory come to be so widely accepted if it is wholly groundless? To begin with, it was propounded by European scholars who could not help finding striking similarities between ...
... iousness is, on the other hand, based on his yogic vision, and is as plain and valid for him as an effect following a cause in the world of Newton's physics, or as life emerging from Matter in Darwin's world of biology. Purifications despite its sublime romanticism remains only a "fragment" compared with Sri Aurobindo's epic of the spirit. The De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)... dimension vast enough; but not as vast as Savitri' s. Not Milton's fault perhaps; because in age in which he lived he could not but be bound to Christian theology; Copernicus was only just known and Darwin and Einstein were yet to come. Then, despite lines of vision like: About him all the Sanctities of Heaven Stood thick as stars and from his sight received Beatitude past utterance. ...
... that the evolutionary history of the earth has witnessed the evolution of Life in Matter, Mind in Life, but the mechanism of the evolution is, according to Sri Aurobindo, not identical with what the Darwinian theory wants us to believe. According to him, the Law of evolution has three processes. There is, first, the multiplication of forms of Matter; when these forms become numerous and complex, the e... of Mind in Life and we see in our present earth-situation that Mind is also evolving. In the process of evolution, we find certain laws. According to one theory of evolution, which was developed by Darwin, the Law of evolution consists of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. There are, indeed, debates on this theory. But there is also a spiritual theory of evolution that we find in the ...
... Alexander, Holism of Smutts, Ingressive Idealism of Whitehead, and Spiritual Evolution of Teillard De Chardin. In India, Sri Aurobindo's theory of Supramental Evolution is a formidable answer to Darwinism and to materialism in general. Page 202 A major difficulty lies in the insistence laid by the physical sciences on the application of their methods on all sciences, even when subject matters... the same time, the climate has greatly changed. Science has become less rigid, and it is unable to reject a priori any claim of supra-physical experience. In the field of Biology, while the Darwinian Theory of Evolution by random chance, natural selection, struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is still surviving, powerful trends have emerged to challenge it through theories such as ...
... —The terms of the second status which we recognise as vitality, are death, hunger and conscious desire, sense of limited capacity and the struggle for survival and mastery. This is the basis of the Darwinian conception of Life, the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. But this struggle involves a third status whose preparation is marked by the emergence of the conscious principle of love ...
... inwards and subjected to close scrutiny all that had gone before. This happened in literature (Proust, Rimbaud, Mallarmé), philosophy (Nietzsche and Bergson), psychology (Freud and Jung), biology (Darwin, Pasteur) and physical science (the Curies, Planck, Lorentz, Einstein). The incredible twentieth century, the greatest show in all history, was being prepared. And Impressionism – thanks to the passion... Utopian world on Earth. Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy was published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Mirra saw them around her, in ‘that crawling mass on the move’ that was Paris, the ‘thousands of lowly employees and workers, all those oppressed, luckless, downtrodden ...
... conception of special creation is exhumed for fresh consideration, well, one should not be astonished at the turn over. The most serious lacuna in the concept of evolution, at least in the Darwinian form of it, is, as is well known, the missing link. The transition stage between one form of life and another, between one species and its higher evolute is always absent, has left no trace of any ...
... next step in earthly evolution, a job none of the other Avatars had come to carry out. The very idea of "evolution" as understood and expressed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in our present post-Darwinian age could not be there in the times of Rama or Krishna or any other Avataric descent. Page 187 ...
... evolution of a Gnostic being and a Gnostic nature, Gnostic Purusha and Gnostic Prakriti. Humanity today is, in respect to the higher possible evolution, much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian Theory. That ape, leading his instinctive arboreal life in primitive forests would have been utterly incapable of conceiving that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new... ancestor Ape, if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man. And yet, when we study the law of evolution in the light of the operations of spiritual consciousness, and if we compare the Darwinian Ape and the human animal that we call Man more intimately, and when we discover the soul in man and the intentions of that soul as also the intention that seems to be operating of the supermind that ...
... since my attire was quite elegant and rather conspicuous, I attracted a great deal of attention wherever I went.” Yet, for all that, Mira Ismalun was no featherbrain. She read Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, Darwin, and, like Mother, was endowed with a remarkable poise and knew how to reconcile opposites. "One of my most invariable policies has been to maintain the head and the heart in a constant state of balance ...
... himself or herself in a long march through the night, surrounded by foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards the goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. In modern times, Darwin has formulated in Biology the law of evolution, and its formula is that of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Bertrand Russell, describing the law of struggle in another context, points ...
... according to an imposed law of conduct or a constructive thought or perceptive contrivance.” 41 “We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory”, writes Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. “It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an... wrote Sri Aurobindo, “this aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable.” 15 Scandalously new and causing a terrible furore in the West since 1859, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, evolution has been part and parcel of the Hindu view of things at least since the time of the Upanishads, which in their turn point back to the Vedas. 16 “… The ...
... Host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty*. I admit my own profound suspicion of what (perhaps only superficially) resembles the Superman thought of Nietzsche, and the evolutionism of Darwin is also antipathetic to me. But there I admit that I am probably understanding in Western terms what Sri Aurobindo in- Page 74 tended in a very different sense - as the 'evolution'... passes beyond any discussion of literature or poetry. Of that I cannot possibly judge and in my guarded Page 83 attitude towards the suspicion of Western influence (Nietzsche and Darwin) in some aspect of his thought I think I have certainly misunderstood him. I am not a philosopher, or a mystic, or even a poet in the sense of Yeats or Shelley or any of the poets I love. I have done... empyrean and sweep back to earth to give our familiar cosmos and our historical process a novel significance. This significance is not, as you may fancy, a sort of transmogrified evolutionism caught from Darwin or Nietzsche; it has its birth beyond their ken, they were only vague prefiguring signs of a forward-looking epoch prepared by a secret Time-Spirit which was to manifest the Avatar of the Supermind ...
... reality that shattered the foundations of their world view and forced them to think in entirely new ways. Nothing like that had ever happened before in science. Revolutions like those of Copernicus and Darwin had introduced profound changes in the general conception of the universe, changes that were shocking to many people, but the new concepts themselves were not difficult to grasp. In the twentieth century ...
... conceived of a struggle between good (the Aryan side) and evil (the Jewish side) in humanity as a whole and in each of its members in particular. But Hitler had now recast these principles in the Darwinian-racist mould, stimulated, especially after Eckart’s death, by Alfred Rosenberg, who “wielded a tremendous influence on Hitler” (Hanfstängl). From this man, steeped in the virulent Russian anti-Semitism ...
... naturally and inevitably a competitive society. Where man is regarded as nothing more— and, of course, nothing less—than a bundle of rights, the human aggregation is bound to be an exact image of Darwinian Nature—red in tooth and claw. But 'Rights' is not the only term on which an ideal or even a decent society can be based. There is another term which can serve equally well, if not better. I ...
... naturally and inevitably a competitive society. Where man is regarded as nothing more – and, of course, nothing less – than a bundle of rights, human aggregation is bound to be an exact image of Darwinian Nature –red in tooth and claw. But Right is not the only term on which an ideal or even a decent society can be based. There is another term which can serve equally well, if not better ...
... enfolds not only the mind but also in another way the mind's very instrument, the brain, making it outstandingly an "evo-lute" inexplicable in sheer neo-Darwinian terms. Hinting at a secret planning elan, one of the authorities on genetics and evolution, A. Tetry, has pronounced: "It... from its mouth? An impartial survey in Science in the Twentieth Century tells us about "the so-called 'synthetic' or neo-darwinian theory of which G. G. Simpso has been one of the leading exponents": 73 "...despite its many advantages and despite the mathematical analyses of Fisher (1930), Wright... The Life Divine 45. Ibid. 46.P. 22, col. 2. 47. Issues in Evolution, Vol. 3 of Evolution After Darwin, Sol Tax, Editor (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964), pp. 139, 112. 48.Op. tit., p.90 49.Op. cit.,139-97 ...
... accept it any more than I accept Russell's. 6 Let us, however, leave the flinging of authorities, often the same authority for opposing conclusions, Russell quoted against Russell and Darwin against Darwin, and let us come to the point [ incomplete ] Shaw I do not think Harris' attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken very seriously any more than can Wells' jest about his pronunciation ...
... Matter? Closed or open? Darwin opened it, as did his contemporary Jules Verne. Max Planck, Heisenberg and Einstein opened it, as did their impressionist, fauvist or pointillist friends — Matter burst forth on all sides. Sri Aurobindo and Mother belong to that side. Some astrophysicists too. And why should it be closed with the biologists? Sri Aurobindo was ten years old when Darwin died in 1882; he had... species which have disappeared from the earth?” This was in 1957. It took Darwin more than twenty years to dare to express what he had sensed in the Galapagos archipelago. The Origin of Species dates back to 1859. Even so, he said, “It is somewhat like confessing a murder.” I am before Mother's story rather like Darwin before his iguanas. “Come now, is it possible?” And what will the biologists... Introduction We are before an extraordinary mystery, which could truly be a fairy tale. The fairy tale of the species. We set forth from the Galapagos archipelago, where, around 1835, Darwin first conceived his theory of evolution: iguanas are not forever iguanas... nor is man forever a man. We have never been told anything more serious since then — nor more captivating, or let us say ...
... said that the evolutionary concept of Sri Aurobindo needs to be clarified. KJ said that there are many theories of evolution. He pointed out that, basically, the idea was put forward by Darwin in the modern times although the Upanishads speak of evolution and there was also the original Vedic idea of evolution. He also referred to the modern thinkers like Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Smutts ...
... human mind at its present critical stage. Sri Aurobindo had made a detailed study of human history as also of the evolutionary processes, and not only as we find them in the light of modern theories of Darwin, Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin and others but more importantly in the light of Indian knowledge of spiritual forces working behind the external developments of forms that ...
... this, while others talk about multiple universes, baby universes, or an all-in-one multiverse. The atom is still commonly depicted as a miniature solar system, a view abandoned by science in 1927. Darwin was the father of the theory of evolution? Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and others formulated coherent evolutionary theories before him, and Alfred Wallace at the same time as he. The big apes were our ...
... subconscious drives, impulses and urges, and the self, as it exists for consciousness, is only a composite formed of disparate tendencies. Then, again, on the threshold of this 'Age of Anxiety', Darwin taught that man evolved from the humblest form of life by a 4.Arnold J. Toynbee, "Modern View of Man" in Man's Right to Knowledge, p. 2 5. Quoted by John Passmore in Hundred Years ...
... gradual or abrupt, it is not always easy to trace them to the influence of the environment. For types without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. It is even argued that Darwin's view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations. It is true that there is in the world unaccountable freak and fantasy in the cosmic phenomenon ...
... the biological, but also to the social: he is indeed a socio-moral creature. It may well be that there are other deeper and higher realms to which he belongs, of which he is not aware as yet. Darwin has taught that man has evolved from the humblest form of life by a process of natural selection that was quite automatic; and, in particular, "instead of Adam, our ancestry is traced to the most grotesque ...
... 268 Klaus von See: Barbar, Germane, Arier – Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen , pp. 191, 193. 269 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., pp. 505, 542, 548-49. 270 André Pichot: La société pure – de Darwin à Hitler, p. 15. 271 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., p. 549. 272 Id., pp. 469, 279, 288. 273 Id., p. 280. 274 Id., p. 228. 275 Anthony Read: The Devil’s Disciples – The Lives and Times of... Fest, op. cit.,, p. 616. 408 Fritz Fischer: Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall, p. 186. 409 Id., pp. 187-88. 410 Id., p. 191. 411 Id., p. 192. 412 André Pichot: La société pure – de Darwin à Hitler, p. 386. 413 Dietrich Bronder, op. cit., p. 291. 414 In Léon Poliakov: Le mythe aryen, pp. 195, 220, 223, 225. 415 André Pichot, op. cit.,, p. 61. 416 Léon Poliakov, op. cit ...
... described by a name which means ordinarily food and they said, we call it food because it is devoured and devours creatures. The eater eating is eaten, this is the formula of the material world, as the Darwinians rediscovered when they laid it down that the struggle for life is the law of evolutionary existence. Modern science has only rephrased the old truths that had already been expressed in much more ...
... to the third degree; by this would be prevented that descendants from Jews would infiltrate the order”; 2. “Special value would be attached to the propaganda of racial science”, understood in the Darwinian sense; 3. “The principles of the pan-Germans were to be extended to the whole Germanic race; a unification of all peoples of Germanic blood should be prepared”; 4. “The battle against everything un-German ...
... to a certain degree and speak about an “anti-Semitism of the reason” in contrast to the impulsive anti-Semitism of the pogroms, but he will found his eschatological world view on a crude racist, Darwinian theoretical basis. All this makes one see Eckart in a way quite different from the usual manner of depicting him as a Bavarian Stammtisch hero. This he was also, but this aspect of his character ...
... limitations of the mind and enter into the manifestation of the Supermind. Considering that the process of evolution has only recently been expounded and confirmed in modern science since 1850 when Darwin in his book Origin of Species put forth the data concerning evolution, the Vedic description of the process of development seems truly astonishing. There Page 98 are also several instances ...
... died very early otherwise he would have been an even greater poet than Rabindranath. Bernard Shaw listened to him and kept silent for a while. Then Shaw said: "Let it be Dilip. You remember Darwin's theory, don't you? Let's not go back in time so much. For who knows where we might end?" (85) D uring the holidays, when we had some free time, a few of us used to go on motorbike-rides ...
... as the fulcrum of the movement —impulse and desire—the tendency is to increase, expand, to seize and possess; and therefore the nature of this life is struggle,—a struggle for life. All the laws of Darwin are included in this second phase of life. It strives not only for survival but also for possession and perfection. This is what life wants to do here, in the second stage when it is moving toward ...
... conceive of an existence still human, yet radically changed in what are now our fixed circumstances. We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty ...
... only that, just as the evolution of the thinking mind has led the evolutionary process to develop a human body with special characteristics and structure that distinguish it from the body of the Darwinian Ape, similarly, there would come about, according to Sri Aurobindo, in the evolution of a supramental being the appearance also of a body, which would be appropriate to the operation of the supramental ...
... a matter of fact, religious traditions and orthodox reactions have stood violently in the way of science, burned a Bruno at the stake, imprisoned a sixty-seven years old Galileo, heaped abuses on a Darwin and often represented a force for retardation, superstition and oppressive ignorance. And all this simply because "men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion ...
... step of a process of Nature, which has, of course, always Supernature behind it. Sri Aurobindo is an evolutionary avatar in a spiritually scientific sense. In the Age of Science - the post-Darwinian age, strictly speaking - the so-called "accomplished avatar" would be an anachronism. And though it may surprise you, the "evolutionary avatar" is missioned to do much more than simply bring down ...
... concepts, which are fundamental to Hindu religion. There is first the concept of evolution, an evolution of Consciousness and not a merely Page 19 material evolution of the Darwinian type. Next come the concept of Rebirth and Karma and finally the worship of idols. The concept of Evolution The Indian concept of evolution is based on the following: ...
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