Student Talk / Annie Dillard; What are peoples' opinions on her? [10]

I find myself disagreeing with most of the comments here. She's certainly not soft in the head; in fact, she values clear-thinking above most other things. Her book For the Time Being points to all the information about the largeness and cruelty in the world that threaten to make our minds spin, but steadfastly looks at it anyway and comes away with important knowledge about how to live. (And for the record, she has been religious from her first book on.)

The writing is the exact opposite of fluffy. She painstakingly works through ideas, using both reason, poetic language, narrative, and images. The ideas can be difficult, but they can also be transformative for the reader.

If others are interested, her most commonly anthologized essays are "Total Eclipse," "An Expedition to the Pole," and "Living Like Weasels."

Lastly, and this is what motivated me to register on this site, I wanted to correct the reading given of "Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos." Dillard is not attacking Darwinism. She feels sorry that fundamentalist Christians "feel they have to make a choice between the Bible and modern science." She does criticize social Darwinists (those who use Darwinian principles to "sanction ruthless and corrupt business practices"). Not only does she not reject evolution, but it informs the way she understands the world, as shown in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, For the Time Being, and the essay under discussion.

Student Talk / Annie Dillard; What are peoples' opinions on her? [10]

Dillard takes evolution as a given, a fact of life, as shown by her references to it throughout that essay. She says point-blank of the animals on Galapagos, "Most exist nowhere else on earth. These reptiles and insects, small mammals and birds, evolved unmolested on the various islands on which they were cast into unique species." Of the shearwater fly, she says "it has evolved two nice behaviors which serve to bring into its nest alive." When she flicks off the flies that bite her, she refers to this action as giving their "evolutionary ball an offsides shove."

The paragraph you cited isn't describing her own thoughts, but the inability of Western and Russian scientists to reconcile their thoughts on evolution. That is why she says, "So much for scientists." The "many" for whom neo-Darwinism "lacks [...] sheer plausibility" are the descendants of Lamarck's ideas. They want to "append [...] a very modified neo-Lamarckism to Darwinism [to] solve many problems--and create new ones." She doesn't show herself to be on their side, as she mentions that this view holds ideas for which it lacks any proof.

She does say that "neo-Darwinism seriously lacks [...] a description of the actual mechanism of mutation in the chromosomal nucleotides." The scientists still have work to do, as they always will in every field. But that doesn't mean she doesn't accept that evolution is a basic principle of life.