The idea of Eternity
To my great surprise, teaching On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection is a fascinating process of watching students fall in love with nineteenth-century prose. It certainly helps that it really is mind-blowing that Darwin in 1859 posits a theory that relies on what we now understand as the genetic heritability of certain traits. In writing a coherent theory of adaptation that depends on small changes in organisms to better suit their environments, Darwin argues that unless we discover that there is some…