The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin
Human Nature and the Third-Cause Axiom
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Darwin stands as one of the highest among our major scientific icons for his extraordinary legacy, though a significant part of the latter has not yet received proper recognition. First, his relationship with Lamarckism needs to be more positively revisited and, secondly, he should receive more credit for having sustained an attitude all future scientists should follow, an attitude of independence and not compromising towards dominant social groups. Nevertheless, such an attitude does not have to be one where all ties are removed or an expression reduced to a staggered refusal, since there is a strong difference between being independent and being a recluse.
Darwin’s Lamarckism and his different attitude can be properly understood only if the third aspect of his now misunderstood legacy is spelled out. In the closing pages of The Origin of Species he writes: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (1859, p.759) Do we have there the exact point on which Darwin and Darwinism have parted from each other?
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About the Book
Scientist Charles Darwin discretely opened the possibility of a purely animalistic origin for the human species. He repeatedly insisted that the differences between humans and others were a question of degree only. Sciences were, however, taken in the opposite direction, where these differences cannot have been generated by the natural processes of biological evolution.
In The Animal in the Secret World of Darwin, author Michel Bergeron discuses the effects on the sciences caused by the presence of questions on humanity only answerable with religious beliefs. His investigation suggests that significant elements of perceived humanity have remained sufficiently narrowly defined to continue to agree with religious beliefs over the entire period starting with the scientific revolution centuries ago and reaching the present. Instead, he questions, could we be the simple animal who can only live on the belief not to be a simple animal?
To alleviate these biases on the sciences of life, Bergeron advocates a different synthesis between Darwinism and Lamarckism. He further asks: How can sciences pretend to a cosmology neutral in term of religious influence since all of its complex mathematical developments were made under the constraint that we can link the present directly to the Big Bang?
About the Author
MICHEL BERGERON is a scientist who moved away from his field of Economics to revisit the most basic foundation of his own humanity. He delivers here the result of his fifteen years quest for substantially different sciences, through a different perception of humanity.