While You Were Sleeping

Tim Lewens strikes me as The Fonz of British academia. It’s hard to decide what’s cooler about this young Cambridge professor: his hair or his eloquence.

As if this weren’t enough, Lewens is also an expert on the topic du jour. Judging by the praise, his 2007 book Darwin was extremely well-received by “its intended audience” - that is to say, peers and students. In it, he discusses not only the influence Darwin had on philosophy, but also how philosophy influenced Darwin’s thinking.

Last Thursday after work, a few eager Londoners and I squeezed in on the benches of an LSE auditorium without air conditioning while Lewens made a number of interesting points about Darwin’s ideas on epistemology and ethics, as well as other domains in which natural selection is a driving force, namely culture and languages. The technicalities of these subjects hardly belong here, but if you’re interested, just follow this link to a one-hour interview with the professor.

What I can tell you, however, is what Darwin thought of women and other races, from an “evolutionary” perspective. 

While Darwin thought women were inferior to men in pretty much any area - especially creativity - for all the supposed evolutionary reasons that you can guess, he also wrote that this could be more or less fixed, with the right education, within a generation or two. Lewens facetiously noted that the master may not have been sincere, merely adopting this stance as a shield from the fury of the wealthiest, most influential of his female contemporaries.

The issue on which Darwin made no concessions was race. He saw a “gap” between the “highest of apes,” the gorilla, and the “lowest of humans,” the Aboriginal. He expected this gap to widen, but not, as you’d think, because he figured Aboriginals would “evolve” to “become as good as” white men. He simply expected them to be exterminated by natural selection, as he did every weak sub-species. Lovely.  

On homosexuality, Lewens said, Darwin remained silent. Not a word. “When it came to this,” he speculated, “I imagine he just was an awkward Victorian.”

— From London.

A colleague of mine:

I was driving my kids to school this morning. Of course, the radio station was playing Michael Jackson song after Michael Jackson song. They had never heard him or OF him, so they were like, “Mom, this is good! Who is it?” I told them. ”We’re so sorry he’s dead, his music is really lively,” they said. I got a bit emotional. They wondered why: “Well, because when I was your age, I felt the exact same way.”

How old are they? I ask.

8 and 5.

I pretend to melt. Secretly, I’m just judging her for not telling them about him before. Sorry, colleague. I can’t help it.

— From London.

“SEX is the ultimate absurdity. Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing. Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology. It’s nuts. Cloning makes far more sense.” In the New Scientist.

“… The question of how useful and widespread sex really is—the question of why it has been maintained—has troubled everyone from Richard Dawkins (“The evolution of sex…that problem of problems”) to Graham Bell (“Sex is the queen of problems in evolutionary biology.”).” In Seed Magazine.

We know. We heard you. Now stop talking, I beg of you.

— From London.