ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
The potent wish in the productive hour Calls to its aid Imagination’s power, O’er embryon throngs with mystic charm presides, And sex from sex the nascent world divides… —Erasmus Darwin,“The Temple of Nature,” Canto II
I was first introduced to Charles Darwin’s flamboyant grandfather when I was an undergraduate searching through Michigan State’s wonderful Special Collections. In between bothering the curators for archived copies of Howard the Duck, I read Erasmus’s prose and poetry, and was treated to a great mind grappling with ideas that presaged one of the truly great ideas of modern times, the theory of evolution. As the passage above hints, Erasmus believed that environmental influences, in particular the “Imagination” of the parents, greatly influenced the phenotype of the child.
How very ...
