A theoretically inventive account of evolution that lacks a detailed, well-researched argument.
A radical reconsideration of evolution that emphasizes human intentionality.
Although evolution is accepted as scientific fact, there’s still considerable debate about the details. Debut authors Bob Zhang and Dongxun Zhang, a doctor of acupuncture, offer a new interpretation that posits a more directly participatory role for organisms as active catalysts, as well as subjects, of evolution. The study begins with a concise primer on evolutionary theory, which tends to focus on “external factors”—a living organism’s environment. However, the authors assert that there are also internal factors—a living being’s intentional activity—that can have just as much impact, if not more. Living organisms collect, organize, and store information on the basis of their interactions with the surrounding ecosystem, the authors say, and their internal systems can essentially remodel themselves with the decisions the organisms make. Zhang and Zhang posit that “the DNA that will be encoded in an organism’s offspring, can change on the basis of the organism’s intentions, although, of course, we do not know the details of how this is done or to what extent.” In effect, the authors are revising Charles Darwin’s views on the basis of implications contained within his own theory, as his important account of life’s natural-selection “struggle” presupposes some element of active agency and design. Part of this book is an exploration of the practical consequences of “intended evolution,” especially with respect to health and fitness. The authors candidly confess, however, that this book is only a general outline of their theory, and it doesn’t provide much in the way of mechanical detail or scientific evidence. This can be frustrating because its central concept of intentionality is left underdetermined, as it includes both single-cell organisms and human beings. Even at the level of human choice, the book lacks a searching analysis of the different modalities of intention. Still, there’s plenty of engaging philosophical provocation, and it presents a new understanding of consciousness, self-awareness, and death. But a general vagueness permeates the whole study, and the authors’ acknowledgement of it doesn’t entirely forgive it.
A theoretically inventive account of evolution that lacks a detailed, well-researched argument.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63299-018-1
Page Count: 210
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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