we have a moral code that meshes with Christianity, why then are we so often non-social and why do we so blatantly disobey the dictates of Jesus Christ? “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–4). Think about it. The Great War (later called the First World War), 1914–1918, between (depending how you count) 20 and 40 million dead. The Second World War, 1939–1945, 60 to 80 million dead. The Russian Civil War, 1917–1922, 5 to 10 million dead. The Chinese Civil War, 1927–1949, 10 million dead. And so it goes. We are not yet at the pogroms, from the Turks killing Armenians, Stalin and the Kulaks, Hitler and the Jews, down to Rwanda and the killing of the Tutsis, not to mention half a million women raped as a preliminary to grotesque mutilation of genitals.

“Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts!” This famous directive by Sergeant Joe Friday – apparently never actually made in this form – is from the television series Dragnet. Unfortunately, while this may be adequate for detecting and solving crime, not so elsewhere. The idea that science is simply a matter of recording empirical experience is hopelessly inadequate and misleading. Science is about empirical experience, but it is about such experience as encountered and interpreted – and with effort and good fortune – as explained by us.

Let us return to the address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science given in 1967 (later published in Science), by medieval historian Lynn White Jr. He threw down the gauntlet. The son of a Presbyterian minister and himself a lifelong active Presbyterian, White felt nevertheless that his religion had given rise to much that needed answering. “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.” White’s thesis is relatively straightforward. Modern science and technology – and the appalling environmental consequences – are the children of the Christian faith. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s plunge right into looking at some of these environmental consequences, using as our exemplar the most pressing environmental issue of them all: global warming.

Remember: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26). It is there right at the beginning of the Old Testament; it is also in the New. We are unique and hence have a position superior to other animals. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reaffirms this. “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26).

Ask the basic question: Can a Christian be an organicist? And respond with the basic answer: Yes! There are Christians who welcome the idea of an organic Earth, at the least. Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest no less, had a theological vision of the world that made the organic thesis central. “The universe is not a vast smudge of matter, some jellylike substance extended indefinitely in space.

Evolution was both known and generally accepted very rapidly after the Origin. Darwinism, even. In the summer of 1860, Charles Dickens’ widely read weekly, All the Year Round, carried two anonymously published articles on the theme of the Origin (with a third early in the next year).

Chapter 2 places Hegel’s views on the nature of constitutions in the context of contemporary discussions of what may be termed constitutional transferability, engaging in particular with the French Revolution and the English constitution. It introduces Hegel’s conception of the constitution as an organism, his denial of the possibility of deriving constitutions ‘a priori’, and his simultaneous support for the introduction of written constitutions and legal codification. Hegel’s account of the nature of constitutions is interpreted as supporting a specific kind of constitutionalism while discrediting another. Through a constitutionalist approach to world history, Hegel sought to resolve the inherent tension between universal demands of reason and local particularity, inscribing the progress of world history with freedom and the representative system. By showing that he could draw on prevailing views in doing so, Hegel’s influential attempt to reconcile organic growth with the demands of reason, history with freedom, and community with the individual is lifted out of isolation. His identification of the representative system with subjective freedom, introduced in this chapter, forms a recurring theme throughout the book.

Chapter 3 considers the evolution of military disciplinary practices as military thought became ever more akin to a human science. It focusses on a key work in the theorisation of military discipline, Robert Jackson’s A Systematic View of the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies (1804). Drawing on his extensive experience as a surgeon in the British army, Jackson places the medicalised body at the heart of military discipline. He insists that the soldier must be viewed as a living organism, possessed of a complex and self-governing interiority that determines how tactics operate. In Jackson’s conception, the soldier appears as a self-governing figure who functions independently and at a distance from disciplinary sites, a figure who more closely resembles the modern subject than the mechanical automatons associated with Frederick the Great’s military drill practices. More than this, however, Jackson’s book reveals how Romantic aesthetics penetrated military thought. The military’s concern with the imagination of the soldier in the field was undoubtedly a ‘shock’ to poets, Clausewitz surmised, but was nonetheless central to emergent aesthetic concerns with perception and interiority that suggest an unexplored context of wartime media surrounding a Romantic poetics and its formation of subjectivity.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

On November 24, 1859, the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . In that book (Darwin 1859), he argued that all organisms, living and dead, were produced by a long, slow, natural process, from a very few original organisms. He called the process “natural selection,” later giving it the alternative name of “the survival of the fittest.” This first chapter is devoted to presenting (without critical comment) the argument of the Origin, very much with an eye to the place and role of natural selection. As a preliminary, it should be noted that the Origin, for all it is one of the landmark works in the history of science, was written in a remarkably “user-friendly” manner. It is not technical, the arguments are straightforward, the illustrative examples are relevant and easy to grasp, the mathematics is at a minimum, meaning non-existent. Do not be deceived. The Origin is also a very carefully structured piece of work (Ruse 1979a). Darwin knew exactly what he was doing when he set pen to paper.

Now we come to the elephant in the room. Darwin’s theory was incomplete. When the theory was completed, would natural selection prove to be that effective? Although he threw in a lot of assorted, presumed-relevant facts, no one, starting with Darwin, had much idea about the nature of variation – how it comes, what form it takes, how regular it is. And, without this knowledge, given that natural selection supposedly works on this variation, it is hard to make definite judgments about its effectiveness; especially since Darwin stressed that, although variation has causes, it is random in the sense of not appearing according to need. When he was not pushing the Lamarckian alternative, he was adamant that it is selection alone that is responsible for adaptation.

Turn now to those who think natural selection is vastly overrated as a cause of evolutionary change. It is at best a clean-up process after the real creative work has been done. It is little surprise that these critics come from within the organismic model, implicitly or explicitly. At the scientific level, we have encountered already the most (and properly) distinguished of them all, the American population geneticist Sewall Wright. Remember his “shifting balance theory,” where the key lay in genetic drift, as gene levels fluctuated randomly in small subpopulations, and then, when new adaptive features appeared, the subpopulations rejoined the larger group (probably the species), and through a form of group selection the new feature spread through the whole group. This is highly Spencerian – infused with a solid dose of Bergsonian vitalism – as equilibrium is disturbed and then regained at a higher level, part of an overall progressive process, presumably ending in humankind.

A little arbitrarily, but not entirely without reason, let us take 1959, the 100th anniversary of the Origin, as the date when the Darwinian paradigm finally came into its own. Natural selection and Mendelian genetics, now rapidly becoming molecular genetics, gave the explanation of the tree of life. If we continue to think in Kuhnian terms, what now of normal science? We should expect to see the subbranches of the consilience come into their own, as practitioners moved forward, theoretically, experimentally, and in nature, raising and solving their problems. And in major respects we do see exactly this.

In 1866, Thomas Hardy, raised a sincere member of the Church of England, wrote his sonnet “Hap.” It expressed the anxiety about – “fear of” is not too strong a term – the world into which natural selection has pitched us. No longer can we rely on a Good God to care for us, to suffer for us, to make possible eternal life. In the non-progressive world of Darwinian evolution, all is meaningless.

Among the many books authored by Peter Bowler, the eminent historian of evolutionary biology, three stand out: The Eclipse of Darwinism (1983); The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (1988); and Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (2013). Bluntly, he says: “there is now a substantial body of literature to convince anyone that the part of Darwin’s theory now recognized as important by biologists had comparatively little impact on late nineteenth century thought” (Bowler 1988, ix). I cannot say Bowler is entirely wrong. Indeed, in The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979), I contributed to this “body of literature,” and my book was quite openly a synthesis of the state of Darwinian play in the second half of the nineteenth century. But is this the end of the story, and if it is, why is it the end of the story? Today, as Bowler also recognizes, we accept the finding of natural selection as a major scientific achievement, up there with relativity theory. Let us pick up on this paradox.

Natural selection. I am an evolutionist, which means that, to understand the present, we must dig into the past. That holds for culture as much as for biology. So, taking my own advice, where do we end up? Or, more precisely, where do we start off? As always, when dealing with Western culture, we begin with the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. Neither of them was an evolutionist. Indeed, rather like the Buddhists, they believed that the (physical) world is eternal: no beginning, no end. But they did have much to say of great interest to our inquiry.

Time to pull back and get a little more conceptual. We need to ask some penetrating questions about the nature, the scope, the truth-value of natural selection. Finding answers, the quest begins in the past. Charles Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. The greatest British scientist of them all, Isaac Newton, was also a graduate of the University of Cambridge, and his spirit, his achievements, his reputation, infused every discussion about science, including about the life sciences. In his Principia, Newton started with his three laws of motion, together with his law of gravitational attraction, and then went on to infer, deductively, the pertinent terrestrial laws, those of Galileo, and the pertinent celestial laws, those of Copernicus affirming the heliocentric nature of the Universe and those of later thinkers, especially Kepler on planetary motion. It was a given that the ambitious young Charles Darwin would want to show Kant dead wrong. There could be a Newton of the blade of grass, and that Newton was going to be Charles Darwin.