Science

Last June, Shannon Love began a post: “I am myself an agnostic and a rabid evolutionist,” moving on to describe how those beliefs help him structure his understanding in broad ways: “I am a free-market advocate and a Chicagoboy because I believe the free market is a Darwinian process that reaches better solutions quicker and less selfishly than political systems. In short, an evolutionary viewpoint forms the foundation of my entire world view.”

I thought of that when listening to Brian Boyd last fall; he gave a talk here and the small classroom that had been set aside couldn’t hold the audience, which spilled into the next room (the door was opened, so students could still peek at him) and into the hall. His literary criticism, like Joseph Carroll‘s, is best understood in the context of Pinker’s popular The Blank Slate. We listened to interpretations sensitive and wise. He described the bond of father and son as Odysseus held Telemachus to his chest (loving his child now a man, whom he had last seen suckling at his mother’s breast), the room was quiet: all recognized the power of a father’s love and of the art that communicates it. The biological informs & empowers the aesthetic – all lead to that breathless moment when we understand.

In his “Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique,” Boyd writes with a clarity and directed passion we are grateful for in literary criticism. Introduced in an earlier post, he teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand; his American Scholar essay was linked on Denis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily.

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