Home     Links to a Better World      Contact         
H.M.S. Beagle at full sail

  New free book!

Darwin's

Pre-publication Readers' Comments

 

Here’s what leading scientists, educators, and activists say about Darwin’s Unfolding Revolution.

“. .. everyone concerned with our understanding of evolution on this planet owes Loye a deep debt of gratitude."

“. . . the most exciting,  most revealing book on Darwin I have ever read.”

“ . . .Once in a decade or more a special book comes along, of urgent importance to the intellectual discourse of the time: Darwin, Freud, Jantsch, Lovelock.

David Loye's Darwin's Unfolding Revolution is this special.”

“. . .one of the major books of the early Twenty-First Century."

“ . . nothing less than revolutionary"... MORE

Your Stake in the

Second Darwinian

Revolution

 

In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote only twice of “survival of the fittest”

– but 95 times about love ,

92 times about moral sensitivity,

and 200 times about mind and brain!

Behind these four simple statistics lies the story of the what happened to us during the 20th century and the difference that can be ours in the 21st.

It is the story of how the first Darwinian revolution liberated us from the top-down control of the wrong kind of religion in the 19th century

— but in the 20th century re-enslaved us with the new top-down control of the wrong kind of science...MORE

 
 

GalileoAbraham LincolnVincent Van Gogh
Walt WhitmanRachel Carson

Galileo, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson — our history  is filled with a familiar tale.  It is the story of the progressive leaders and innovators of our species and the resistance to every step in human advancement by those with a strong vested interest in regression and the status quo.

Still almost wholly unknown even today, this is what happened to  the greatest scientist of modern times.

It is what happened to every attempt  by Charles Darwin to write or tell of the progressive
completion or "top half" for his theory of human evolution — and the difference it could have made, and still can make, in our lives.

Darwin's Face

 

This is how the story of

Darwin's Unfolding Revolution

begins....

 

PROLOGUE
THE TRUTH ABOUT DARWIN--AND US

After 100,000 years of edging our way forward since our emergence on this planet, the global ramifications of the Bush presidency in the United States at the outset of the 21st century has raised two very large questions for our species:

Is human evolution moving backward?

And to what extent has the wrong kind of science been a cause?

H.M.S. Beagle

What would Darwin say were he living today?

H.M.S. Beagle

What would he think, for example, on finding out that the rain forests of Brazil, about which he rhapsodized in The Voyage of the Beagle -- seemingly eternal in their wonder then, with their central function as “the lungs of the planet” widely known today-- were being clear cut to run cattle to provide hamburgers for the mushrooming of quasi-lethal fast food outlets all over the face of this earth?

H.M.S. Beagle

What else should we tell him of what presently seems to check or drive us backward in human evolution?

H.M.S. Beagle

Environmental devastation would generally head the list of global threats to the wellbeing of our species.

Next, many would list the devastation of war --or the unchecked and continuing use of violence to resolve disputes or extend one's power.

Widening of the gap between rich and poor in countries and between nations.

Many experts would say we're checked or being driven backward by the continuing valuing of the stereotypical violence-oriented male or “macho” values and the devaluing of the more peaceful “feminine” values.

Despite new optimism, many would also insist on the threat first raised by Malthus of over-population, or the “population bomb.”

Above all for many would be the threat of terrorism and the fearful perpetual presence of nuclear overkill -- both the products of the unholy mix of 20th century science, religion, and politics at its worst.

H.M.S. Beagle

So the mournful eyes widen and the face embedded within the magnificent beard drops in dismay. But what do you suppose Darwin would say if he was told that to a newly alarming degree he was personally responsible for this mess?

What do you think he would say if he was told that over 100 years these roadblocks to the better world were rolled in place by the mindset of “survival of the fittest” and “selfishness above all” that his theory of evolution had popularized?

H.M.S. Beagle

If he was told that for over a century, via all fields of science, all levels of schools, and the ever more rampant new power of the media, the Darwinian idea that “survival of the fittest” was the essential driver for all levels of evolution was locked in place throughout America, Europe, and Western culture more generally.

H.M.S. Beagle

That thereby heralded as the champions of progress by scholars, as well as by themselves, a loose global alliance of regressive economic and political interests and oligarchies had gradually circled the earth?

That by the end of the 20th century this alliance was so powerful it could seize the leadership of the richest and militarily most powerful, thereby hypothetically “fittest” nation on this earth, i.e., the United States?

H.M.S. Beagle

And what would Darwin say if he was told that now -- whether voted in or out of office, behind scenes remaining in power and blinded by greed to the consequences -- this alliance was the implacable super-driver of industrial, governmental, religious, and scientific policies that were steadily increasing all of these threats to global well-being, and indeed threatened the very survival of our species.

What would he say?

H.M.S. Beagle

Darwin was a mild and genial man whose rage seldom flared. But when it did it was said to be like the lightning bolt and rolling thunder of a storm at sea.

You may gauge for yourselves the explosion by knowing something of the degree to which we have been-- in plain, old, down-to-earth American terms-- snookered and bamboozled for over a century.

For what Darwin actually believed -- and, as we are to see in this book, wrote out at length -- has been twisted by a century of economic, political, and scientific “business as usual” to lock in the exact opposite of his original intention.

H.M.S. Beagle

Today the focus is mainly on Darwin's Origin of Species. But in the 828 page sequel in which he tells us he will now deal with human evolution, The Descent of Man, Darwin writes only twice of “survival of the fittest,” but 95 times of love.

He writes of selfishness 12 times, but 92 times of moral sensitivity.

Of competition 9 times, but 24 times of mutuality and mutual aid.

And of what so often everywhere today seems to be missing in global political, economic, and religious leadership -- that is, of mind and brain -- he writes 200 times.

What lies behind these word counts?

H.M.S. Beagle

 

Go behind them and you find this mind-boggling fact. While most of his scientific successors still remain bogged down in what has become the status quo and regressive science of where Darwin was 150 years ago, the man himself -- as in this book we are to see--actually went on in Descent to leap 100 years and more into the future to write of where the most advanced, i.e., progressive, science is today.

What eventually comes across, however, is beyond mind-boggling.

It is the awesome, lumbering , howling, and dumbfounding possibility that we've lost a century and endangered the future of our species because Darwin's voice was cut off and silenced at the mid point.

H.M.S. Beagle

Long before I put in the long years to become a psychologist, systems scientist and evolution theorist myself, I was a journalist and investigative reporter.

I was, in fact, one of the earliest handful of television newsmen who set out after World War II inspired by the tradition of getting at the “story behind the story” being established by the great Edward R. Murrow.

I was there during the swaggering years of Senator Joe McCarthy, whose expose in a television special by Murrow was the boldest and most effective in ending McCarthy's reign of terror.

On a much smaller scale, I did the kind of “on the road” feature Charles Kuralt later became famous for.

One of the main things a good journalist learns early on is to question the word of authority.

No matter who says it, double-check it. Nose around behind the scenes for what others are saying. Put it all together and come up with the real story.

H.M.S. Beagle

This book is about what I found out about the real Darwin.

It is about the rest of the “fully human” theory of evolution he set out to construct almost wholly lost to us now for over 100 years.

It is about how this “top half” for his theory was buried, the cataclysmic consequences of this loss, and -- rising out of the smothering clasp of status quo science and against the drag of regressive science --it is about the hopeful new progressive science that corroborates and advances the enduring majesty of Darwin's full original vision.

Beyond the neoDarwinism that has imprisoned our species for a century, it is about postDarwinian or holoDarwinian theory and story and greater mind.

H.M.S. Beagle

It is also, most crucially and urgently, about how by understanding, telling, teaching, and living by this new saga of who we really are, and where we can and should be going, we can ring out the old century of being checked or moving backward.

It is about how, through Darwin's unfolding revolution, we can gain the world we should have reached 100 years ago.

It is about how we can ring in the centuries of, at the very least, much better news.

H.M.S. Beagle

The Secret Meeting in Budapest

The fall of the Berlin Wall that signaled the end of the Cold War in 1989 opened a window in time foreshadowing the “might have been” world of the rest of Darwin and how I came to find it.

With that lifting of the doomsday prospect from our lives, you may recall, came much talk of the “peace dividend” that was to transform our world. It was to do this by . . . MORE.

 

H.M.S. Beagle H.M.S. Beagle H.M.S. Beagle

 

Shortly we will publish Darwin's Unfolding Revolution in its entirety for reading online and free PDF download. 

Its author is evolutionary systems scientist David Loye, a co-founder of The General Evolution Research Group and author of the award-winning American psychohistory The Healing of a Nation.

He is also the author of The Leadership Passion, The Knowable Future, The Sphinx and the Rainbow, and An Arrow Through Chaos.

He is the editor of The Evolutionary Outrider: The Impact of the Human Agent on Evolution, and The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution

For more information  about his life,  books, and scientific background, see Loye's Page.


H.M.S. Beagle H.M.S. Beagle H.M.S. Beagle

 

Here's the rest of our menu for reading and free PDF downloads for Darwin's Unfolding Revolution. . .

H.M.S. Beagle
Title page, Contents, and Prologue
H.M.S. Beagle Pre-publication readers' comments by leading scientists, educators and activists.
H.M.S. Beagle Your Stake in the Second Darwinian Revolution

 

back to top