Darwinists and Divinity

Walking around Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg during a rolling interview I was conducting with him some 20 years ago, we paused at a traffic light long enough for him to seize upon both the incarceration of his mother in a mental asylum and the point that as human beings we were all living in “these meat bodies.”

The latter observation was unremarkable coming, as it did, from a committed Buddhist. But issuing from a poet, and a pre-eminent one, gave the existential crisis embodied in it added zing, a definitive affirmation that no intellectual or spiritual attainment constitutes escape from our housing within a decaying animal corpus.

The spectacle par excellence of the fleshy layer of our existential conundrum has been turning up in recent years in science museums over three continents as Body Worlds, German anatomist Gunther von Hagens’s exhibitions of human cadavers set in ambulatory postures and exposed from hairline to bone...