Handbook on Evolution and Society read:
I have now had a week in which to go over the book, and a splendid read it is. Robin Fox takes what I understood – that sexual reproduction and speciation combine to impose a limit on the size of any random mating population – and extends it to bacteria.
The book is of course a textbook so it spends time looking at the history of ideas about evolution and society going back to Darwin and even back a few more years to Herbert Spencer, who seems to have had a better grasp of it than Darwin and who extends the concept of speciation to a general cosmic principle of increase followed by individualization. A number of the authors make clear that for many years and still to a certain extent the idea of thinking about humans in evolutionary terms was rejected for political reasons. That appears to be correcting itself.
In a number of chapters I found myself feeling that the author was going to want to rethink his remarks in light of the Fox principle.
In Dylan Thomas’ “Child’s Christmas in Wales” there is a description of uncles lying about on couches like beached whales smoking cigars and holding them at arm’s length, “Waiting for the explosion.” That is now my feeling. There has to be a reaction and I only wonder what it might be.
There have been 320 visitors over the past month and 67 times “Babies Triumph over Evil” has been watched on YouTube.