Although not entirely on the theme of religion, this, too, was in the NY Times today. It’s an article on Darwin and the abolitionist movement in Britain and the US.
- Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore
- Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik
The Gopnik book really sounds interesting. The reviewer, Christopher Benfey, writes:
… Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. “It might be true — there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true — that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science,” he muses. “We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity.”
Gopnik’s short book takes its impetus from a striking historical coincidence: “On Feb. 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic.” Those babies, one rich and one poor, as in a plot of Mark Twain’s, were Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Though he makes some dubious claims about parallels — “lives lived in one time have similar shapes” — Gopnik’s real comparison is between two writers. “They matter most,” he claims, “because they wrote so well.” More specifically, Darwin and Lincoln, drawing on their seemingly unpoetic backgrounds in legal argument and natural history, invented “a new kind of eloquence” that we still use for “the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public.”