Stephen Greenblatt Quote
Progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to find the story line in a tangled bush. Evolutionary theory is not threatened by the disappearance of the main highway. On the contrary, from the beginning Darwin insisted on the randomness of mutations, followed by the editing of natural selection, that lead to the emergence of new species. Still, it is disquieting to look around and see a wilderness of discontinuous and crisscrossing tracks. David Pilbeam once published a book called The Ascent of Man. It is not at all clear that he would do so today. Nonetheless, most of us, including evolutionary biologists, continue to search for and construct stories
Progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to find the story line in a tangled bush. Evolutionary theory is not threatened by the disappearance of the main highway. On the contrary, from the beginning Darwin insisted on the randomness of mutations, followed by the editing of natural selection, that lead to the emergence of new species. Still, it is disquieting to look around and see a wilderness of discontinuous and crisscrossing tracks. David Pilbeam once published a book called The Ascent of Man. It is not at all clear that he would do so today. Nonetheless, most of us, including evolutionary biologists, continue to search for and construct stories
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About Stephen Greenblatt
Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.