IAN MCEWAN

I’m a big fan of author Ian McEwan. In the novel Saturday he writes a hauntingly beautiful summary of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by natural selection. It is as follows:

“Those five hundred pages deserved only one conclusion: endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness.”

and re: creationism

“…what better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities -and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.”

Those may be the most beautiful tragic and profound passages I’ve ever read.