Darwin’s Strategy for Preempting Criticism and the True Mark of Genius

“In the back-and-forth of a self-made contest, both sides have a shot.”

Two centuries later, Charles Darwin provided supreme practical proof of Pascal’s insight as he forever changed the way we think about the origin of life on Earth.

Darwin’s singular genius of presenting and defending his ideas, and what it teaches us about the art of preempting criticism, is what New Yorker contributor and essayist extraordinaire Adam Gopnik explores in a portion of the altogether magnificent Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life — a slim but in many ways enormous book, for it tackles some of the most abiding and unanswerable enormities of existence.

Darwin’s singular genius was the marriage of visionary ideas and supreme mastery of argument.

Gopnik’s account of what set Darwin apart calls to mind a lecture Michael Faraday delivered five years before the publication of The Origin, in which the trailblazing scientist called for the mental discipline of contradicting one’s own ideas — a hallmark of reason, of which Darwin’s prose made a high art.

The habit of sympathetic summary, of reporting an objection or contrary argument fully and accurately and even, if possible, with greater force than its own believers might be able to summon, remains since Darwin the touchstone, the guarantee, of what we call seriousness.

Source: Darwin’s Strategy for Preempting Criticism and the True Mark of Genius

Originally published at Cogly.