After Darwin

"Why Darwin now? In the past two centuries the world has seen radical change. With cultural and technological revolution came catastrophic alterations to the earth itself, from the wholesale destabilization of the climate system to the devastation of environments that once awed Darwin. To live in the wreckage of the Anthropocene -- as Anna Tsing and her collaborators so eloquently put it -- is to live among the "ghosts" of broken environments, and amid the "monsters" created by our entanglement with other forms of life (A. Tsing et al. 2017). What can Darwin tell us about the problems that haunt the world now? Even biology, the science most changed by Darwin's discoveries, has been dramatically altered since his time by the DNA revolution and the revelations of the microbial world. Speaking at Darwin College, Cambridge, on the sesquicentennial of the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, the philosopher John Duprâe gave a succinct answer to this question: we should admit that Darwin "was a scientist" not a soothsayer; "we should not expect him to tell us 150 years later what we should think today.... Darwin is part of history, not [the] present" (Duprâe 2009)"--