Evolution as eternal return: Darwin's Library of Babel
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More than one early critic of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection found an image to voice their dissent in the work of Jonathan Swift. That the purposive arrangement of organic form could emerge from random variation and selection was equally ludicrous, in their eyes, to the practice of Swift's Lagadan Professor, who created a device to jumble words at random, and hoped to generate all the world's art and science permutationally.The subsequent history of evolutionary theory contains countless examples of evolution understood as the exhaustion of a combinatoric set, certainly not solely among its detractors. I will place this tradition alongside a literary reflection on a similar theme, Jorge Luis Borges's "The Total Library" and "The Library of Babel." The aporia of purpose and mechanism that plays out as an enduring debate among evolutionary theorists and philosophers of science can be understood as one instance in a longer history that Borges traced back to Aristotle's conflict with the atomists. By grafting evolutionary science onto this chain, I hope to suggest that Borges's literary treatment of these themes suggests an approach to their understanding that more traditionally philosophical accounts cannot reach.
Jonathan Basile is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, teaching a course at the Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. He has two forthcoming books on biodeconstruction, virology, and evolutionary theory, Virality Vitality with SUNY Press and Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution with the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series.