"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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interactions within an ecosystem” (41). Jonathan Bate pushes the connection further:
"At one level, the unit of natural selection is the gene, but at another it is the ecosystem;
the species which destroys its ecosystem destroys itself” (2000: 229).
In opening the collection with “A Darwinian Preface”, Livingstone asks that we
imagine where we came from (through an inexorable biological process of natural
selection) and so questions humanity’s assumed position of superiority. In “Address to a
Patrician at Station 8” we are made to view ourselves against the backdrop of prehistoric
time, and in “Cells at Station 11” as dependent on the microbial function of cellular
activity. Both views preclude anthropocentricism. This deeper, organic view of ourselves
and the world is inordinately difficult to achieve, but may be the only way in which
imagination and science can be synthesised. This is what the deep ecologists would term
“an understanding from within, a kind of understanding that others reserve for fellow
men and for a narrow section of ways and forms of life” (Naess in Sessions 151-2).
In the work as a whole Livingstone’s use of evolution is only one aspect of his
scientific understanding of humankind’s biological and ecological position. In
summarising Darwinism, Stephen Jay Gould says the “bare-bones mechanics” of natural
selection are based on “three undeniable facts”: overproduction of offspring, variation,
and heritability (2002:13). The biologist, novelist and essayist, Barbara Kingsolver, gives
a simpler four-point summary of the evolutionary process:
1. Every organism produces more seeds or offspring than will actually survive to
adulthood.
2. There is variation among the seeds or offspring.
3. Traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
4. In each generation the survivors succeed – that is; they survive – because they
possess some advantage over the ones that don’t succeed, and because they
survive, they will pass that advantage on to the next generation. Over time,
therefore, the incidence of that trait will increase in the population. (95)
Kingsolver writes that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest,
most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of
natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything” (96). But, does it ‘explain
everything’? The problem of the so-called First Cause remained a mystery to Darwin
himself, who admitted in a letter to J.D. Hooker: “My theology is a simple muddle; I
cannot look at the universe as a result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of
beneficent design, or indeed design of any kind, in the details” (Darwin 1958: 162). This