A Brilliant Attack

By sheer chance, I was reading Chris Turner’s scathing new book, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada, at the same time as Gillian Beer’s 30-year-old scholarly tome, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

It occurred to me that the unerring surgical excision of the Canadian government’s mandate and inclination and ability to perform science that Turner catalogues is as quantum a shift, in its own modest way, as the ideas that Charles Darwin explored in On the Origin of Species, the 1859 book that explained the theory of evolution to a heartily dismayed readership.

Then, in Darwin’s Victorian era, the firmly held belief was that God had fashioned all the creatures on the planet in one fell swoop, and only six thousand years ago. It was called the fixity of the species, and it meant that God had invented every plant or animal...