Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson

Here are the Sonatas by Johannes Brahms.

Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul  Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I never thought I'd read a book about Darwin, but I'm glad I did. This was a good biography, although not exhaustive.

Johnson describes Darwin's family background, his devotion to his wife who was a committed Christian, as well as his reluctance in telling her he was not a believer. It turns out her love was unconditional and he needn't have worried.

Several interesting points. First Darwin's travels to the Galapagos island, his observations of plant life and small animal life, how there seemed to be a gradation in life form from simple to complex and his conclusion that the simpler forms must have developed into the more complex.

While he does not cite anything he actually observed, such as life forms in transition from one to the other, he jumps to this conclusion. He does not explain why, if this were so, why the simpler forms still existed. He must have concluded that only some of the simpler forms evolved while others remained. Or perhaps that there were even simpler life forms invisible to the eye. Ironically, his book "Origins" does not address the origin of all life form.

His theory of evolution involves the process of natural selection. Weaker life forms are destroyed by stronger life forms, thereby directing the development of genes into stronger, more adaptable life. Darwin saw natural selection as cruel and savage and also absolutely necessary for evolution.

Furthermore, Darwin did not stop with animal life. He concluded that this was the process by which man survives. He based this observation on the "savage" life style of the primitive tribes he encountered and also the brutal methods used by European colonialists on less developed people groups. He concluded that since they were less developed in technology, culture and morals they must also be simpler and less evolved and therefore, the process of natural selection, the stronger destroying the weak was inevitable.

Darwin was against birth control and the advancement of medicine because he believed it interfered with this natural process.

The author takes an interesting, if inconsistent stance. While he agrees with Darwin's theory of the evolution of animal life, he draws the line at man's inhumanity to man, but why? Isn't that the logical conclusion of such a theory?

Hitler, Nietzsche and Mao Zedong thought so. So did Pol Pot.

"Pol Pot, introduced by his professor Jean-Paul Sartre to the idea of evolution to higher forms, translated the theory in terms of Cambodia into an urban-rural struggle in which one fourth of the population died.

In the twentieth century, it is likely that over 100 million people were killed or starved to death as a result of totalitarian regimes infected with varieties of social Darwinism.

But then Darwin himself had always insisted on the high percentage of destruction involved in breeding, whether of seeds, embryos, births, of even mature birds, mammals and species in general.

Nature, he believed, is always profuse, in death as well as life, and if he had been asked to reflect on the human toll of 'struggle' in the twentieth century, he would certainly have pointed out that the world population nevertheless dramatically increased throughout the period." (pg. 158, Chapter 7)

I have to quote an enlightening passage on pg. 132:

"It is curious that, although sterilization has been practiced on a large scale all over the world, especially in Scandinavia, no investigation has been made to discover whether national dysgenic programs have had any statistically discernible effect on societies. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Estonia all passed laws, and Sweden actually sterilized 65,000 people....Except for Canada, the British Empire rejected sterilization, thanks largely to a vigorous campaign conducted by G.K. Chesterton...he was helped by Aldous Huxley in 1932 (who wrote) Brave New World, which pictured a 'dark Utopia' in which science was used in innumerable ways to create a hygienically perfect but docile and submissive population."

Johnson continues on pg. 133 to describe George Eliot's concern that,

"Darwinian natural selection was a dangerous form of determinism, which would extinguish free will and the human instinct for freedom. It was also a sally against the bright utopia preached by H.G. Wells, in which science was king. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and many other socialist intellectuals favored both eugenics and dysgenics and would have condemned to sterilization or even death all the mentally unfit if they could have brought to power a government to their taste."

Good old Chesterton. I always knew I loved that guy.

As a Christian, I believe God designed us perfectly, with the fall of man entered corruption both physically and mentally and I think that anyone who could justify murdering even one person regardless of the health, mental abilities or in utero believes so because their minds are depraved and only reinforces my belief in the veracity of Scripture "The heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can discern it?" Jeremiah 17:9

Next on my list is Origins. I'm eager to read it now.



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And when, as a joke, I showed how I got blue paint in my hair to friends, they all complimented me on my hair streaks.