Today on 22c+ I bring you a fascinating extract from Dr David Loye's new book, Darwin's Second Revolution. David Loye is a former Princeton and UCLA faculty of medicine academic and psychologist. For some years now he has been writing about "Darwin's lost theory of love". This is important and intriguing research which shows that Darwin clearly was not the dry mechanist that he is often purported to be in science text books of the modern era. Instead he a a man who believed that there were overriding agencies in life and nature which were above and beyond natural selection.
The following extract centers on the final years of the life of a man who knew Darwin intimately, George Romanes. The last days of Romanes life are shown to be somewhat tragic, but deeply informative, because he left record of his personal knowledge of Darwin the man. It's definitely worth the read. For more information about Darwin's second Revolution, see www.davidloye.com.
“Why?”
Up from the yellowed pages, over the confusion and bloodshed of a whole century, long forgotten but now of urgent meaning for our time, still rises Romanes’ dying cry.
Rich, widely respected, known throughout the science of the time as Darwin’s disciple and a foremost British psychologist, George Romanes was the founder of the field he called comparative psychology. In keeping with Darwin’s own strong interest, considerable research and thought, Romanes’ goal for this new field was to probe the similarities between the minds of animals and humans.
George Romanes
Typical among Romanes’ pioneering books were Mental Evolution Among Animals, and then Mental Evolution in Man. Of special interest today, however, is a book that quickly dropped out of science and history. In keeping with the mysterious disappearance of Darwin’s own completion of theory, following publication in 1897, Romanes’ Darwin and After Darwin virtually dropped out of print until picked up and published online in its entirety first by Project Gutenberg in 2008 and then more recently by Google Books. Almost wholly ignored for a century, today it looms as a prophecy of haunting accuracy.
Why, Romanes wrote, “not only do the Neo-Darwinians strain the teachings of Darwin; they positively reverse those teachings— representing as anti-Darwinian the whole of one side of Darwin’s system ...”
Why, he asked, was one of the new Neo-Darwinians “unjustifiably throwing over his own opinions the authority of Darwin’s name.” More specifically, why “so greatly have some of the Neo-Darwinians misunderstood the teachings of Darwin, that they represent as ‘Darwinian heresy’ any suggestions in the way of factors ‘supplementary to,’ or ‘cooperative with’ natural selection.”
The great man himself, Romanes wrote with difficulty but determination as he lay there dying, “was always ready to entertain ‘additional suggestions’ regarding the causes of organic evolution—several of which, indeed, he himself supplied.” What was being done to Darwin was, for Romanes, like a knife being twisted in the fatal wound.
