As a final footnote to life’s little joke, I remind readers that one other prominent (or at least parochially beloved) mammalian lineage has an equal… - Stephen Jay Gould

As arrogant as I may be in general, I am not sufficiently doltish or vainglorious to imagine that I can meaningfully address the deep philosophical questions embedded within this general inquiry of our intellectual ages — that is, fruitful modes of analysis for the history of human thought. I shall therefore take refuge in an escape route that has traditionally been granted to scientists: the liberty to act as a practical philistine. Instead of suggesting a principled and general solution, I shall ask whether I can specify an operational way to define “Darwinism” (and other intellectual entities) in a manner specific enough to win shared agreement and understanding among readers, but broad enough to avoid the doctrinal quarrels about membership and allegiance that always seem to arise when we define intellectual commitments as pledges of fealty to lists of dogmata (not to mention initiation rites, secret handshakes and membership cards — in short, the intellectual paraphernalia that led Karl Marx to make his famous comment to a French journalist: “je ne suis pas marxiste”).

Jastrow and a few other astronomers have tried to find God in the universe by reading the big bang as the cosmological equivalent of Genesis. I confess that I have found it hard to take this argument seriously.

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)