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The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature
by Reg Morrison
Cornell Univ. Press
286 pp.; $27
"The human animal," we say—but what precisely do we mean by that? The dominant answer (though not the only answer) in the West since the Greeks is that human beings are indeed animals and yet also more than animals: not just unique (isn't each animal unique?) but set apart from all the rest of the animal kingdom.
In our time that answer is increasingly contested. A case in point is photojournalist Reg Morrison's new book, with an introduction by Lynn Margulis and superbly illustrated with photo graphs and drawings. Like many popularizers of science, Morrison believes that humans would be far less likely to allow overpopulation and sanction the direct or indirect destruction of other species if they realized that they are (as Morrison puts it) "entirely typical animals" who exist in a complex and interconnected biological web.
At the same time, Morrison holds to a genetic reductionism—we are our genes—that would seem to let us off the hook and render his exhortations futile. So, for example, under the heading "The Cult Boom," he writes,
The more mystic, grandiose, and frankly unbelievable the scenario, the more attractive it is to our mystery-starved hunter-gatherer genes. In those nations where extended-family structures have virtually disappeared and genetic relatedness no longer provides a practical glue to cement communities together, any tribelike cults that dispense bizarre mystical dogma on a wholesale basis tend to prosper and proliferate.
This seeming contradiction between genetic determinism and human responsibility mars an otherwise interesting look at human evolution and the environmental concerns that humanity faces going into the new millennium.
Morrison's movement from genetics to philosophy and theology has been repeated many times in recent decades by Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and others. It always begs to be confronted with an epistemological question—precisely how do we know that humans are nothing more than the sum of their genes? The answer, of course, is that there is no strictly scientific way to know that this sort of genetic determinism is actually true. It is merely accepted as an article of faith. Morrison says it is an "obvious corollary" of evolution, but he too easily ignores or dismisses alternative interpretations of evolution that see it as the slow unfolding of God's purposes in the universe.
Many Christians share Morrison's environmental concerns. We would prefer to say, however, that the environment has been harmed because Christians and others have forgotten that we are to care for the creation. The problem, then, is not too much spirituality, but not enough.
—Matt Donnelly
Lives of the Poets
by Michael Schmidt
Alfred A. Knopf
975 pp.; $35
This book proclaims itself an homage and successor to Samuel Johnson's eighteenth-century book of the same title. It is neither. To accompany an anthology, Johnson produced fairly detailed biographical accounts of around 50 poets, coupled with thorough and in many cases brilliant critical commentary. Schmidt by contrast tries to cover the entire history of English poetry from the fourteenth century to today: this means that both his biographical and critical comments tend to be skimpy, and many of his judgments—especially about pre-twentieth-century poetry—appear to be tossed off, in the brief declarative untransitioned sentences of which he is overly fond. Those judgments are often shallow or dubious, and it sometimes seems that Schmidt hurries through the first five hundred years of his story to get to the stuff he really likes: the twentieth century takes up about half the book.
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