Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and polemic combine in an appealing argument for human uniqueness.
An insightful defense of evolution that turns the arguments of creationists against them.
As Miller (Biology/Brown Univ.; Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, 2008, etc.), notes, when people are polled on whether they believe in evolution, the majority are agreeable; only when asked if humans evolved does the bottom drop out. Most religions, writes the author, “agree on one thing, which is the uniqueness of the human species and the need for a special story to explain how we came to be….By telling us that we do not have such a story, by placing our origins squarely in the ordinary genetic, environmental, and selective processes that have produced every other living thing, evolution sweeps such narratives away and leaves us searching for our birthright as thoughtful, intelligent, and hopeful creatures.” Miller disagrees with scientists who proclaim that humans are nothing special, that we are merely the product of natural laws in an indifferent universe. He also disagrees with those who claim that natural selection must be wrong because phenomena such as free will, consciousness, and culture don’t increase reproductive fitness. They are not only mistaken, writes the author, but killjoys. His universe is a kaleidoscope of dazzling evolutionary possibilities that our existence illustrates. We are “creatures like no others, with extraordinary flexibility of behavior, powers of imagination, and, above all, conscious self-awareness. That self-awareness has enabled us, alone among living things, to stand above the imperatives of survival and reproduction and seek to understand how we came to be.” Human culture, consciousness, and life itself are simply emergent properties. Our appearance was unpredictable but not random, and all organisms fill an evolutionary niche. We may be the first to fill ours, but it was there all the time.
Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and polemic combine in an appealing argument for human uniqueness.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9026-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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