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List of contents
Introduction: The Two Sides of Darwin
Part One The Charles Darwin We Think We All Know
1 A Primer of Evolution’s Complexities
2 What Time Selected from Darwin: The Standard View
Part Two Charles Darwin and the Static Worldview
3 The Tree That Hides the Forest: Charles Darwin’s “Tree of Life”
4 Divergence: A Geometry That Shatters Creative Time and Novelty
5 A Cyclical World in Equilibrium
6 Natural Selection: The Core of Darwin’s Theory?
Part Three Charles Darwin Viewed in Piecemeal Fashion
7 When So-Called New Ideas Hide Old Ones
Conclusion: Back to the Future
Index
About the author
Richard G. Delisle is Associate Professor in Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, Canada.James Tierney is Senior Lector and Director of Yale English Language Programs at Yale University, USA.
Summary
Widely seen as evolution’s founding figure, Charles Darwin is taken by many evolutionists to be the first to propose a truly modern theory of evolution. Darwin’s greatness, however, has obscured the man and his work, at times even to the point of distortion.
Accessibly written, this book presents a more nuanced picture and invites us to discover some neglected ambiguities and contradictions in Darwin’s masterwork. Delisle and Tierney show Darwin to be a man who struggled to reconcile the received wisdom of an unchanging natural world with his new ideas about evolution. Arguing that Darwin was unable to break free entirely from his contemporaries’ more traditional outlook, they show his theory to be a fascinating compromise between old and new.
Rediscovering this other Darwin – and this other side of On the Origin of Species – helps shed new light on the immensity of the task that lay before 19th century scholars, as well as their ultimate achievements.
Additional text
A much-needed deconstruction of the ‘Darwin Legend’, that is, the seemingly irresistible temptation of many modern readers to read their own ideas back into On the Origin of Species, and to make Darwin an ahistorical icon, or the father figure of an even more ahistorical ‘Darwinism’.
