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Darwin's Love of Life: A Singular Case of Biophilia
"Biophilia-the love of life-encompasses the drive to survive, a sense of kinship with all life-forms, and an instinct for beauty. In this unconventional book, Kay Harel uses biophilia as a lens to explore Charles Darwin's life and thought in deeply original ways. In a set of interrelated essays, she considers how the love of life enabled him to see otherwise unseen evolutionary truths. Harel traces the influence of biophilia on Darwin's views of dogs, facts, thought, emotion, and beauty, informed by little-known material from his private notebooks. She argues that much of what Darwin described, envisioned, and felt was biophilia in action. Closing the book is a profile of Darwin's marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a woman gifted in music and medicine who shared her husband's love of life. Harel's meditative, playful, and lyrical musings draw on the tools of varied disciplines-aesthetics, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, history of science, philosophy, psychiatry, and more-while remaining unbounded by any particular one. Taking unexpected paths to recast a figure we thought we knew, this book offers readers a different Darwin: a man full of love, joy, awe, humility, curiosity, and a zest for living"--
192 pages, Hardcover
Published October 25, 2022
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December 31, 2022“Biology is full of contradictions.”
Darwin’s Love of Life is a self-proclaimed thought experiment that aims to describe Darwin’s life framed by his love of of it. The key word is biophilia — a love of life — which acts as a guiding principle for the book and an overarching theme of Darwin’s life. Harel explains that Darwin loved hypothesizing and synthesizing facts and explanations for behaviour. Darwin’s love of hypothesis feels echoed in this book as Harel attempts to match Darwin’s life and career to the principles of biophilia. Each chapter positions an aspect of Darwin’s life — dogs, family, plants, to name a few — through the lens of biophilia. Sometimes having such a strict theme made parts feel monotone, though I felt like the book broke open when the focus was on his family. Harel balances explanation, quotes, and examples well and her prose is very easy to read. Harel is clearly as passionate as Darwin was and her positivity and joy came through the book which reminded me of a quote about Darwin she included, “he had tendency to give himself up to the enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of being ludicrous."
Darwin’s Love of Life is a self-proclaimed thought experiment that aims to describe Darwin’s life framed by his love of of it. The key word is biophilia — a love of life — which acts as a guiding principle for the book and an overarching theme of Darwin’s life. Harel explains that Darwin loved hypothesizing and synthesizing facts and explanations for behaviour. Darwin’s love of hypothesis feels echoed in this book as Harel attempts to match Darwin’s life and career to the principles of biophilia. Each chapter positions an aspect of Darwin’s life — dogs, family, plants, to name a few — through the lens of biophilia. Sometimes having such a strict theme made parts feel monotone, though I felt like the book broke open when the focus was on his family. Harel balances explanation, quotes, and examples well and her prose is very easy to read. Harel is clearly as passionate as Darwin was and her positivity and joy came through the book which reminded me of a quote about Darwin she included, “he had tendency to give himself up to the enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of being ludicrous."
October 23, 2022
Kay Harel informs us about the elucidation of the great novelist Henry James after the latter visited Charles Darwin at his house at Down House. According to James, “Darwin is the sweetest, simplest, gentlest old Englishman you ever saw…He said nothing wonderful and was wonderful in no way but in not being so.” The man who deemed it apposite to share his snuff with a monkey and shared his living space in various points in time with twenty-one dogs (in addition to an extraordinary collection of botanical species), was the epitome of compassion and care in dealing with sentient beings. One of the greatest (if not the greatest) evolutionary biologist of all time was also an uncompromising believer in the concept of ‘biophilia’.
Literally translating to “love of life,” the term biophilia embraces the idea that that man’s fascination and communion with nature stems from an involuntary, innate and biologically driven need to interact with other forms of life such as animals and plants. Commonly acknowledged to have been pioneered by the well recognised psychologist Erich Fromm, the notion of biophilia was popularized by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson who proposed that humans’ attraction to nature is genetically predetermined and the result of evolution.
In her book “Darwin’s Love of Life’, Ms. Harel, multiple graduate degree holder in Science Journalism and English, portrays the embrace of biophilia by not just Darwin, but also his entire family that included his wife Emma and seven children. In attempting such an endeavour, Harel takes recourse to rare material contained within the private notebooks of Darwin. Thus, the connection of biophilia as gleaned from Darwin’s views of dogs, plants, insects and life in general.
Darwin’s love of and for dogs was uncannily similar to the one harboured by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Prone to engaging in an endearing game of hide and seek with his dogs, ‘just for the sake of it’, Darwin was convinced that “dogs laughed for joy.” Darwin was also a clairvoyant when it came to predicting the existence of species in addition to discerning their evolution. For example, in 1862 this genius predicted the existence of a moth sporting a 12-inch tongue. The basis for this seemingly bizarre and irrational proclamation was a Madagascan star orchid that possessed a twelve-inch nectary – a dangling hollow tube with nectar pooled at its base. Darwin himself acknowledged the skepticism that hounded him in the wake of his prediction. “This belief of mine has been ridiculed by some entomologists” wrote Darwin. However, this magnificent analyzer of the animal kingdom had the last laugh. In 1903, Karl Jordan and Lord Walter Rothschild discovered a new sphinx moth which boasted a proboscis of the like predicted by Darwin, and helpfully illustrated by Alfred Russell Wallace.
Darwin was also a firm and wholehearted believer of mysteries. Not willing to be shackled by the strait jacket of facts, Darwin was a man who shunned and quelled blinkered vision. As Harel explains in this approach, he was more akin to the mercurial and singularly brilliant Quantum Physicist Weiner Heisenberg. The proponent of the now world famous “Uncertainty Principle” was avowed in his conviction that measurement was the enemy of outcome. An approach that was besotted with the practice of measurement, one which laid all emphasis on certainty alone, was doomed to fail because the very act of measurement my turn out to be an anathema in so far as the very purpose of the experiment is concerned. This is because the process of measuring may have the undesirable impact and effect of altering the physical behaviour of what is being measured. Darwin exhorted his readers in almost all his works to spread the breadth of their imagination and the depth of their suppositions. Harel asserts that Darwin employed an inner techne (a philosophical usage referring to the act of making or the process of doing. This is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root “Teks-” meaning “to weave,” also “to fabricate”), “to see and build: intuition, emotion, and a sense of the limits of the rational.”
This techne was what egged Darwin on to propose that dogs could dream and that plants were conscious. His incredulous imagination even enabled him to trick a plant by passing his little finger like the beak of a bird giving an impression of entering the little base for nectar. This act caused two other petals to open up, thereby exposing the pollen.
Darwin’s endearing legacy now finds firm roots in innumerable studies that have the notion of biophilia at heart such as, biocultural theory, biopoetics, biosemiology, neuro and psycho aesthetics. selectionism, semiobiology, socio biology and psychobiology etc. All of these myriad disciplines have one common thread weaving through them and binding them – a firm recognition that nature’s supremacy over and for humanity is a tremendously influential factor in so far as human beings’ mental health, travels, and personal and professional dwellings are concerned.
Kay Harel leaves her reader harbouring no doubt whatsoever in this regard.
(Darwin’s Love of Life: A Singular Case of Biophilia by Kay Harel is published by Columbia University Press and will be available on sale from the 25th of October 2022)
Thank You Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!
Literally translating to “love of life,” the term biophilia embraces the idea that that man’s fascination and communion with nature stems from an involuntary, innate and biologically driven need to interact with other forms of life such as animals and plants. Commonly acknowledged to have been pioneered by the well recognised psychologist Erich Fromm, the notion of biophilia was popularized by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson who proposed that humans’ attraction to nature is genetically predetermined and the result of evolution.
In her book “Darwin’s Love of Life’, Ms. Harel, multiple graduate degree holder in Science Journalism and English, portrays the embrace of biophilia by not just Darwin, but also his entire family that included his wife Emma and seven children. In attempting such an endeavour, Harel takes recourse to rare material contained within the private notebooks of Darwin. Thus, the connection of biophilia as gleaned from Darwin’s views of dogs, plants, insects and life in general.
Darwin’s love of and for dogs was uncannily similar to the one harboured by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Prone to engaging in an endearing game of hide and seek with his dogs, ‘just for the sake of it’, Darwin was convinced that “dogs laughed for joy.” Darwin was also a clairvoyant when it came to predicting the existence of species in addition to discerning their evolution. For example, in 1862 this genius predicted the existence of a moth sporting a 12-inch tongue. The basis for this seemingly bizarre and irrational proclamation was a Madagascan star orchid that possessed a twelve-inch nectary – a dangling hollow tube with nectar pooled at its base. Darwin himself acknowledged the skepticism that hounded him in the wake of his prediction. “This belief of mine has been ridiculed by some entomologists” wrote Darwin. However, this magnificent analyzer of the animal kingdom had the last laugh. In 1903, Karl Jordan and Lord Walter Rothschild discovered a new sphinx moth which boasted a proboscis of the like predicted by Darwin, and helpfully illustrated by Alfred Russell Wallace.
Darwin was also a firm and wholehearted believer of mysteries. Not willing to be shackled by the strait jacket of facts, Darwin was a man who shunned and quelled blinkered vision. As Harel explains in this approach, he was more akin to the mercurial and singularly brilliant Quantum Physicist Weiner Heisenberg. The proponent of the now world famous “Uncertainty Principle” was avowed in his conviction that measurement was the enemy of outcome. An approach that was besotted with the practice of measurement, one which laid all emphasis on certainty alone, was doomed to fail because the very act of measurement my turn out to be an anathema in so far as the very purpose of the experiment is concerned. This is because the process of measuring may have the undesirable impact and effect of altering the physical behaviour of what is being measured. Darwin exhorted his readers in almost all his works to spread the breadth of their imagination and the depth of their suppositions. Harel asserts that Darwin employed an inner techne (a philosophical usage referring to the act of making or the process of doing. This is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root “Teks-” meaning “to weave,” also “to fabricate”), “to see and build: intuition, emotion, and a sense of the limits of the rational.”
This techne was what egged Darwin on to propose that dogs could dream and that plants were conscious. His incredulous imagination even enabled him to trick a plant by passing his little finger like the beak of a bird giving an impression of entering the little base for nectar. This act caused two other petals to open up, thereby exposing the pollen.
Darwin’s endearing legacy now finds firm roots in innumerable studies that have the notion of biophilia at heart such as, biocultural theory, biopoetics, biosemiology, neuro and psycho aesthetics. selectionism, semiobiology, socio biology and psychobiology etc. All of these myriad disciplines have one common thread weaving through them and binding them – a firm recognition that nature’s supremacy over and for humanity is a tremendously influential factor in so far as human beings’ mental health, travels, and personal and professional dwellings are concerned.
Kay Harel leaves her reader harbouring no doubt whatsoever in this regard.
(Darwin’s Love of Life: A Singular Case of Biophilia by Kay Harel is published by Columbia University Press and will be available on sale from the 25th of October 2022)
Thank You Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!
February 18, 2025
1/10 stars
I gave this book a fair shot, and read through over 25% of the drivel before I just couldn't continue to intentionally punish myself any further.
Had this been an academic thesis presented to me for evaluation, I would have forced the author to rewrite everything from the very first sentence. The nebulous main concept, that Darwin was a biophile, is not strong enough for more than one very short article, and even then the research into the history of the idea and its actual pertinence to Darwin's life would have to have been tripled to bear even a modicum of meaning. The first essay basically boils down to the author clutching one rather vague definition of biophilia and trying to prove beyond all doubt that Darwin fulfills all elements of it, point by belaboured point. Biophilia turns up in every other sentence throughout the parts I have read as if the author is herself unsure of the foundations of the frankly underwhelming thesis. It's a case of "I look and I see" that has nothing to do with factual writing. I have slogged through the first two essays and called it quits when I realized that the main thesis of the essay about dogs was Darwin's aptness with dogs and his own "doggedness" in pursuing facts which is compared, yes, you are right, to that of dogs. The fact that the author repeatedly describes some things as "Möbius" as if not realizing it is a name of the Möbius strip's modern era discoverer and not an adjective brings into question whether this book has been edited at all.
I am surprised this has been published, and by Columbia University Press at that.
Not recommended.
I have received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. My thanks
I gave this book a fair shot, and read through over 25% of the drivel before I just couldn't continue to intentionally punish myself any further.
Had this been an academic thesis presented to me for evaluation, I would have forced the author to rewrite everything from the very first sentence. The nebulous main concept, that Darwin was a biophile, is not strong enough for more than one very short article, and even then the research into the history of the idea and its actual pertinence to Darwin's life would have to have been tripled to bear even a modicum of meaning. The first essay basically boils down to the author clutching one rather vague definition of biophilia and trying to prove beyond all doubt that Darwin fulfills all elements of it, point by belaboured point. Biophilia turns up in every other sentence throughout the parts I have read as if the author is herself unsure of the foundations of the frankly underwhelming thesis. It's a case of "I look and I see" that has nothing to do with factual writing. I have slogged through the first two essays and called it quits when I realized that the main thesis of the essay about dogs was Darwin's aptness with dogs and his own "doggedness" in pursuing facts which is compared, yes, you are right, to that of dogs. The fact that the author repeatedly describes some things as "Möbius" as if not realizing it is a name of the Möbius strip's modern era discoverer and not an adjective brings into question whether this book has been edited at all.
I am surprised this has been published, and by Columbia University Press at that.
Not recommended.
I have received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. My thanks
June 2, 2022
Darwin's Love of Life by Kay Harel is so much more than just a look at Darwin's life and thought, it is actually a fun read.
I have to admit that I didn't expect to enjoy reading this book as much as I did. I expected to get a lot out of it, maybe new insights on Darwin, definitely a new perspective. But to actually enjoy the act of reading it surprised me a bit.
In part it was the writing, I found it both personal and informative. The many quotes from notebooks and correspondence were woven into nice narratives, each chapter being a self-contained essay. By the way, even with the essays being independent the collection still held together as a complete text rather than what I usually think of as a collection.
I think what really made the book special for me was the various ways I have now come to understand the word and idea of biophilia. I found myself, when not reading, thinking about other people and situations with an eye toward the idea of loving life, loving nature, loving interconnectedness. While I probably considered the idea in ways Harel might question, that isn't really the point. The book gave me what it promised, a look at Darwin's life and thought, then also gave me a desire to better understand and apply a concept I was only vaguely familiar with: biophilia.
I would certainly recommend this to those who enjoy trying to better understand the thinkers of the past, and especially those interested in Darwin. I would also suggest that readers interested in how to view the world a lot more compassionately and as something a bit less hierarchical will find a lot here to digest.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
I have to admit that I didn't expect to enjoy reading this book as much as I did. I expected to get a lot out of it, maybe new insights on Darwin, definitely a new perspective. But to actually enjoy the act of reading it surprised me a bit.
In part it was the writing, I found it both personal and informative. The many quotes from notebooks and correspondence were woven into nice narratives, each chapter being a self-contained essay. By the way, even with the essays being independent the collection still held together as a complete text rather than what I usually think of as a collection.
I think what really made the book special for me was the various ways I have now come to understand the word and idea of biophilia. I found myself, when not reading, thinking about other people and situations with an eye toward the idea of loving life, loving nature, loving interconnectedness. While I probably considered the idea in ways Harel might question, that isn't really the point. The book gave me what it promised, a look at Darwin's life and thought, then also gave me a desire to better understand and apply a concept I was only vaguely familiar with: biophilia.
I would certainly recommend this to those who enjoy trying to better understand the thinkers of the past, and especially those interested in Darwin. I would also suggest that readers interested in how to view the world a lot more compassionately and as something a bit less hierarchical will find a lot here to digest.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
August 2, 2022
I received a free copy by publisher via NetGalley.
As a biologist-to-be I declare I live my very own singular case of biophilia, as Darwin and his family did.
This book should be mandatory for all biologist to read, as is the Origin of species. Understanding the love of life, the love for nature, the love for everything that exists and understanding how it exists is biophilia.
I rated 4 stars because I don't usually read essays, this was a great experience.
As a biologist-to-be I declare I live my very own singular case of biophilia, as Darwin and his family did.
This book should be mandatory for all biologist to read, as is the Origin of species. Understanding the love of life, the love for nature, the love for everything that exists and understanding how it exists is biophilia.
I rated 4 stars because I don't usually read essays, this was a great experience.
October 30, 2022
I went into this book thinking that it would be educational but certainly not fun and a bit of a heavy tome but not at all. Although I did learn a lot of was an enjoyable fun read, especially the quotes and excerpts. It is rather an uplifting book.
February 27, 2023
A rambling, incoherent book in which the word “biophilia” appears all too often (like every second or third sentence). But. Also contains some inspiring and endearing portraits of Darwin. Especially his love for dogs.
January 8, 2025
Darwin’s Love of Life offers fine insight into Darwin’s personal and professional life, however offers little clarity into biophilia. It seems that every positive quality she saw in Darwin was assigned the term. If I didn’t love Darwin so much I’m not sure if I would have finished it.
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