Darwin's Love of Life

Biophiliathe love of lifeencompasses 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 Darwins 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 Darwins 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 Darwins marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a woman gifted in music and medicine who shared her husbands love of life. Harels meditative, playful, and lyrical musings draw on the tools of varied disciplinesaesthetics, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, history of science, philosophy, psychiatry, and morewhile 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.