Individual organisms inherit features that tend to increase their descendants: they are
Posted in General on 28. Sep, 2010
Individual organisms inherit features that tend to increase their descendants: they are “designed” by adaptation. No internal force produces adaptation; everything happens by selection. There is no divine designer either, yet adaptation by selection is an ideal creator-substitute.
When hardline adaptationists look at a greenfinch, they see design in everything the bird is and does, “a reason for everything”. Others, led by Stephen Jay Gould, say some characteristics have no adaptive value, and therefore did not come about through selection They are by-products of change Evolution is untidy, random. A Reason for Everything focuses on the fortunes of “Darwin’s dangerous idea”: adaptation by natural selection.
It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for so little purpose.”Beauty and purpose: their relationship in living organisms is this book’s key question. Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms and rich colours. One night on the Atlantic in the 1830s, when he still believed in the Almighty, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary, “I have worked all day at the produce of my plankton net. This is not raw-head-and-bloody-bones so much as a gentle period comedy of supernatural manners.Charles Shaar Murray’s ‘Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop’ is published by Faber Buy any book reviewed on this site at – postage and packing are free in the UK.
Soon, his fame spreads far and wide, bringing him into contact with London high society, with which he remains less than comfortable despite the lionisation of his talents.He is persuaded to accept as his apprentice a young prot?, Jonathan Strange, who is everything Norrell is not: handsome, personable, at ease and committed to experience and experiment as the road to wisdom, whereas his mentor is dogmatically insistent on the primacy of books. Much to their consternation, Norrell is the real thing: he can perform genuine magical feats. Set in the opening decades of the 19th century, it’s the tale of how the two titular magicians, among other adventures, win the Napoleonic Wars through occult means.As the story opens in 1806, theoretical magic retains its dedicated following among hobbyists of the educated classes, but practical magic is considered to have died out until the prickly, reclusive Mr Norrell – he remains “mister” throughout most of the story, though he is eventually outed as a Gilbert – comes to the attention of the “gentleman magicians” of York.Reluctantly, he is persuaded to suspend his endless studies of magical texts in his legendarily extensive library to appear before their society. Former cyberpunk visionary Neal Stephenson reinvents the Age of Enlightenment with an ecstatically unholy glee, and magic – of both the stage-illusionist and “genuine” occult varieties – is firmly in the ascendent. JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and co attract both young and adult readers, as mainstream thriller-smiths such as Jeffery Deaver don the top hat and tails, alongside the odd literary novelist.Susanna Clarke’s debut novel, long-listed for the Man Booker prize, is already causing a stir among devotees of both alternative history and fantasy. BLOOMSBURY £17.99 (782pp) £16.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
According to the latest data from the genre-fiction trendometer, “science and the future” are still down, while “magic and history” remain most definitely up. This should come as no surprise: we’re already in a science-fiction nightmare for which even the invention of the iPod provides but small consolation, and the most ardent dystopia-philes seem reluctant to invest cash in reading about another one.
Meanwhile, movie-makers bring back King Arthur and refight the sieges of Troy and the Alamo, while Captain Jack Sparrow rules the waves.