What are you reading? The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe (Chicago University Press, 2002) by Robert Richards, the US’s leading historian of biology. He aims to rehabilitate the German Naturphilosophes: Friedrich Schelling was the first to use the word evolution in its modern sense; Goethe counted the metre of his verse on the vertebrae of his mistress’s back; and “Darwin was a romantic”. It is fascinating if unpersuasive, Leroi says. And he is finding Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale (Weidenfeld) a “slog through the history of life in reverse”. Fiction? When W. G. Sebald died in 2001, “I had…
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