Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (review)

"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love," wrote George Steiner at the start of a book (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky [1959]) published just as George Levine was entering the profession. Almost half a century later, now in retirement, Levine has written a debt-discharging book about Charles Darwin. Whether or not you agree that Darwin loves you, there is little doubt that Levine loves Darwin—loves reading him, thinking about him, thinking with him, and introducing others to the delights of Darwin's intellectual company. Levine writes to communicate the force of what he calls the "secular epiphany" (272) he has experienced by reading Darwin. The key lesson to be learned from Darwin, it seems, is how to experience the organisms around us as thrilling to our reason, emotions, and imaginations. Let these thoroughly secular forms of wonder and enchantment shape our sensibilities, and, Levine implies, we will be immune to the fatal charms of fanatical religion and fanatical scientism. Although Levine never quite comes out and says it, Darwin Loves You is guided by the idea that people enchanted by a world run by natural selection are on the whole respectful of diversity (without which there would be no selection) and too imaginatively involved in differences to make war in their name.

The book is for the most part a record of Levine's responses to the Darwiniana of scientists, historians, and philosophers, interspersed with close readings of Darwin's own work. Levine's main concerns are to show that the Darwinian perspective is not as uniformly disenchanting or illiberal as it is sometimes presented to be, and that one can honor Darwin's insights without forgetting that he was very much the product of his unenlightened times. On the latter theme, Levine wonders whether Darwin's "implication in the very texture of his culture" should in certain respects be understood not as a handicap but rather as "a helpful and creative condition of his work" (9). In the book's best chapter, Levine confronts the cultural predicament of Darwin's "other" theory, that of sexual selection. Darwin's ideas about women were conventionally Victorian, not least his conviction that women were less intelligent than men. And yet sexual selection theory profoundly subverted convention in assigning a directive role to female intelligence. Levine argues that the theory subverted precisely because it was conventional, depending as it did on Darwin's unselfconscious projection into animal minds of his own unselfconscious attraction to, in Darwin's phrase, a "pretty woman." The case for Levine's engagé attitude to reading Darwin is nowhere more persuasive than in the remarks that conclude this discussion:

Sexual selection is an amazingly inventive and productive idea. Following Darwin's mode of argument, it is hard to think about (or feel) the world as bereft of feeling and value. Even if it is sexuality that does it, the biological world is invested with the beautiful and works by means of choice. The act of imaginative sympathy by which Darwin manages to construct his theory of sexual selection is itself thrilling, both historically, as it runs against the culture's deep hostility to the idea of female choice, and aesthetically, as it finds precisely in the beautiful an explanation for the way things are. Intention comes back into the world, even if later thinkers try to lay over it the mindless model of an algorithm and it is intention driven by a strong feeling for the "pretty."

(200)

In a book so reflective about the interpretation of Darwin, Levine might have said more about his own "implication in the texture of his culture," in particular the intellectual culture that educated his tastes. The start of his career coincided with the Darwin anniversary celebrations of 1959, amid great anxiety about bridging the gap between the "two cultures" of art and science. One book from this period was especially...