There is beauty in the evolutionary process. Is it because it is like an art process?— Continuity and Discontinuity, for example, are made one in evolution as in a great drama, painting, poem.
>> Part 1 • Tonight I speak of Charles Robert Darwin, and the fight in himself between a large life, a life of grandeur of thought, and the temptation to live in a small and conventional way without the turmoil that he knew his large, developing ideas about the evolution of species were bound to create. Darwin won that fight in a big way, and because he did, he contributed greatly to knowledge.
>> Part 2 • When The Origin of Species was published it was 1859...[t]he storm of objection from the academic world and the conservative clergy was horrific. There was a "savage onslaught" against Origin at the Philosophical Society of Cambridge (note, pp. 247-8, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, ed.), where his letters from the Beagle had once been read and admired (p. 31). His former professor and friend Sedgwick's "comments were scathing" (p. 342). The press and reviewers, as might be expected, were largely hideous; the one big exception was the London Times which asked Thomas Huxley, Darwin's good friend and defender, to write a review of Origin. And this was an honest piece of work, an eloquent piece of work, in the biggest newspaper of England.
....The objection to evolution, wrote Eli Siegel with saving humor, was: "Man felt he was superior to all other living beings, and Darwin, that rude Victorian, said that he was related to other beings, some of whom never went to Oxford" [TRO 397, 12 November 1980].
