Guest Book Review

An article from Catholic Review which makes some salient points about modern materialism, or, as the author calls it, neuromania and Darwinitis. I reprint the whole thing here in case the link might fail, and also to archive it. The copyright is held by the original owner.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0396.htm

 
Aping Mankind: A review
MARK ANTHONY SIGNORELLI
A devastating critique of biologism and its misrepresentation of human life.

I can recall very clearly the moment at which the spread of Darwinian ideology became a matter of concern for me. Previously, I had been acquainted with such ideology, and recognized it as but one more strain of fashionable cant, promoted by a set of persons quite obviously unfamiliar with elementary philosophical reasoning. Having attended college in the late twentieth century, I, like many of my generation, simply became accustomed to dwelling in an intellectual atmosphere poisoned by noxious dogmas, whether deconstructionist, multi-cultural, or what have you; Darwinism was evidently just such another doctrine, and so I took no great alarm at its prevalence. That changed one evening when, surfing idly across the internet, I came across the late Denis Dutton's article on "Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology" in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, an article which proposed the advantages of applying evolutionary theory to our inquiries regarding the arts and literature. This was the first time I had encountered Darwinism in such a context, and when I looked into the matter subsequently, I found that Dutton was by no means alone in his project; quite a body of literature had amassed by that point, purporting to offer evolutionary accounts of poetry, dance, and painting, among other things. Now I became alarmed, and greatly so. Literature (understood in the broad sense of learning, or letters) has been everything to me, the source of all my consolation, and all my self-understanding. To see it threatened by this dirty little creed, with its invariable tendency to degrade whatever comes under its purview, was deeply worrying to me. So I began writing against it, with that same defensive urgency that motivates a man to fight for kin and country.

This is why I felt such an immediate appreciation for Raymond Tallis' new book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, because Tallis narrates a similar history in his introduction.

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