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...