Charles Darwin

Shaw treats Darwin less as a man than as a cultural force: the thinker whose theory of natural selection swept through a British public that had ignored his grandfather Erasmus's subtler philosophy of will. Darwin's advantage, in Shaw's telling, was concreteness — pigeon fanciers, gardeners, and farm laborers already understood selection from without, so his doctrine of accident and survival needed no metaphysics to land. He matters to the book's opening argument because Shaw must first explain how evolution became a popular creed before he can push past it toward the Life Force and Creative Evolution.