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333 Charles darwin’s work on species, including his discussions of the origin of species, the mutability of organisms over geological time scales, the mechanisms of natural and sexual selection, the importance of an organism’s relationship to its environment, physical and mental homologies across species boundaries, common descent, and the undirected nature of evolutionary processes, unfurl most famously in On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In these and other texts, Darwin reconceives how we should think about the form, history, function, and context of organisms across the evolutionary spectrum. Darwin’s observations and biological claims have ramifications for how humans conceptualize themselves and their relationships with the world. Or, as Michael T. Ghiselin puts it, “The species problem has to do with biology, but it is fundamentally a philosophical problem.” Taken together, Origin, Descent, and Expression promoted Darwin’s revolutionary decentering of the human subject. This decentering inaugurated a biological and philosophical reordering of how we understand life, a reordering that continues to resonate in the twenty-first century. Contemporary American author T. C. Boyle is one of our most astute interpreters of the way Charles Darwin’s work impacts ideas about humanness. Boyle’s interest in Darwin has been manifest from the beginning of his career, as the title of his first short story collection, Descent of Man (1979), makes clear. Stories from n i c o l e m . m e r o l a T. C. Boyle’s Neoevolutionary Queer Ecologies Questioning Species in “Descent of Man” and “Dogology” I’ve always been writing about Charles Darwin and our relation to the environment. T. C. Boyle 334 Nicole M. Merola that collection consider topics central to Origin and Descent: sexual selection, extinction , and competition for survival within a resource-limited environment. Tooth and Claw (2005), Boyle’s seventh short story collection, demonstrates his continued engagement with Darwin’s work. The collection opens with an epigraph from chapter 6 of Darwin’s Descent: “The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded ” (193). Many of the stories in Tooth and Claw satirize the notion that man is “the wonder and the glory of the universe,” and the title of the collection indexes Boyle’s interest in human and nonhuman wildness and in the kind of dispassionate environment Darwin describes as “cycling on” according to fixed natural laws. However, despite traces of Darwin’s work in Descent of Man, Tooth and Claw, and elsewhere in Boyle’s oeuvre, the relationship of Boyle’s writing to Darwin’s remains untheorized. One of the key Darwinian analytic categories Boyle deploys in his writing is the concept of species, and in this essay I examine how Boyle engages with Darwinian and post-Darwinian ideas about species and species boundaries in the short stories “Descent of Man” (1977), which features cross-species sexual competition, and “Dogology” (2002), which probes the contours of cross-species hybridities. Boyle investigates the idea of species in these texts through scripting interactions between human and nonhuman animals; such encounters abound in his work, and they are often included as a means for probing “our being animals in nature.” This remark indexes two related avenues of inquiry, both of which Boyle pursues. First, how do we think about humans as one among many animals in nature, that is, as organisms living in a shared environment? Second, of what does our animal nature consist, that is, what does it mean to have an animal nature and how is this related to our conceptions of human nature? These questions wonder about how species difference is constituted, where lines of difference are drawn or effaced, how these lines of difference are maintained or subverted, and who benefits from particular conceptions of species and species boundaries. These questions, and the ways Darwin and Boyle address them, mark both writers as participants in shifting how we understand species, animality, hybridity, fluidity, and relations among these concepts. Darwin’s work marks a critical turning point in a lengthy debate about the nature of organic species. As John S. Wilkins notes in Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today, the term “species,” a Latin translation of the Greek word...

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