sharia’s challenge to Australian equality

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STEVIE MODERN

A recent case before the ACT Supreme Court has again drawn attention to the treatment of women in Sharia law, renewing calls among rights activists against its acceptance within Australia’s legal system.

In March, the daughter of Ms Mariem Omari, a devout Muslim, contested an inheritance worth only half of the financial share given to each of her brothers.

Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Hafez Kaseem, through his spokesman Mr Keysar Prad, said the division of assets in favour of males, like the Omari case, reflected Muslim men’s responsibility under Sharia to support their wives.

AFIC called for provisions of the Islamic code to be formally included into family law, part of its submission last year to a Federal Government inquiry into multiculturalism.

Mr Prad said secular law failed to reflect their faith and urged inclusion of Sharia law for Muslims where it applies to marriage, divorce, contracts and custody in Australia.

“We should be allowed to resolve our issues in-house,” Mr Prad said.

“We’re a well-established religion and all we’re asking for is to be a self-regulatory mechanism.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali addresses the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, April 2012. Photo courtesy of Bruce Woolley

Ex-Muslim, author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, visiting Australia in April, has warned against any government recognition of Sharia, and said women’s unequal legal protection also placed them in extreme danger.

A statement by the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation said Sharia encouraged forced marriage because contracts were signed between a groom and a bride’s father and granted child custody to the father in all divorce cases.

Last year, The Australian reported four separate cases of forced marriage that reached the Family Court involving immigrant families. One case involved a girl bride just 13 years of age.

Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon responded in recent months by introducing criminal punishments for those forcing women into arranged marriages.

Sharia laws have widespread informal use within Muslim communities, but Mr Prad acknowledged tight-knit faith communities exerted pressure on disputing parties – especially married parties – to consent to Sharia mediation, rather than to settle disputes in Australian courts.

“You’d expect both to consent,” he said.

“If a contract is by both, an obligation is to both, and a marriage is a solemn contract to satisfy the will of God.

“Secular law encroaches on all of that.”

Mr Prad denied suggestions Sharia law, that stated evidence given to a court by a woman was worth half of a man’s, meant unequal legal protection.

“In any money dispute, it’s expected as written in the Koran, for evidence to be given by two women for every one man,” he said.

“This is physiological.

“Women have pains and mood swings as a result of their menstrual cycle and can’t be expected the burden of clear heads on financial matters.”

He said fathers should also receive custody of children in most divorce cases.

“Mothers should not be placed in the position of supporting children and having a career.”

Director for the Centre for Muslim States and Societies Samina Yasmeen said both Muslims and non-Muslims were confused by cultural practices claimed to be part of its laws.

Open-minded Muslims feared to speak against Sharia’s more ‘orthodox’ interpretations, Professor Yasmeen said.

“There’s too much focus on imams as a main source of identity for Muslims in Australia.”

Sharia could be interpreted with equal respect for human rights, she said, but framing its codes into Australian law would only enforce its literal, more rigid meanings.

Professor Yasmeen said AFIC’s proposals to the Federal government inquiry represented a narrow interpretation of Sharia, but that most Muslim Australians also held a literal view of its codes.

“Muslim organisations in Australia are not unanimous, but if brought into the Australian legal system it will go to the extreme, enforcing patriarchal practices with a religious colour.

“If people knowingly move to a secular country, they should live within it. If we make too many concessions, we are in danger of losing the secular freedom of the law.” ♦

should Australia have a Bill of Rights?

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 Australia does not have a Bill of Rights, a comprehensive statement setting out the basic rights and freedoms of all its people.

“A Statute of Liberty”, says celebrated human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson at a recent festival,

…is an idea I wish to celebrate and whose time has come in every advanced democracy in the world.

Geoffrey Robertson QC is Australia’s foremost proponent of a Bill Of Rights. Photo by lewishamdreamer

Australia’s Constitution inherits and retains traditions from British common law, preserving a separation of powers between parliament, its monarch and judiciary. This reflects Australia’s former role as a British colony, he says. Unlike the US, Australia’s constitution does not vest individual rights in personhood.

Some guaranteed rights, like limited rights to a trial and prevention of an official State religion, are explicit but few. They are examples designed to ensure civil liberty as a whole, but do not reflect civil liberties as they apply to individuals: you, me, citizens of Australia.

Parliament has signed many international human rights treaties but these are non-binding. As High Court Justice Kirby has said,

Australia’s constitutional arrangements are peculiar and now virtually unique among common law countries. 

New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada have adopted a Bill of Rights. Even Britain adopted the EU Convention- whole-  into its domestic law.

Parliament is virtually unrestricted from passing laws that constrain many rights and freedoms that Australians have come to feel are proper and generally specified in other free societies.

Courts in Australia have interpreted implied rights from some of the terms in its Constitution. There is an implied – not guaranteed – right to vote. Robertson argues that thanks to more recent High Court decisions, there is at least an implied freedom to discuss political matters, though nothing that equates to the protections of the US first amendment. Australia’s free speech protection is upheld only against the difficult standard, a level of speech “necessary to maintain the system of representative and responsible government”.

Critics have long argued that judges are ‘unelected’ and that parliament is the peoples’ representative body. Bills of Rights have been put to parliament before however, and been dismissed. Rights cannot be the prerogative of any one body to endow, but of all bodies to recognise. It is a court’s proper role, Robertson instead states, to interpret laws as they apply to individual cases.

It should shock many that the Constitution does not guarantee equal legal protection. This omission is as antiquated as it was deliberate: many of the constitutional framers rejected proposals that might put an end to existing ’colonial laws that limited the employment of Asian workers’. The Constitution also permits to this day specific laws with respect to “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.“

This racial inequality was encouraged by Edmund Barton, later Australia’s first prime minister. In 1898 Barton argued that equal protection clauses, which he disfavoured, would limit the government’s power. In his words, the power was necessary “to regulate the affairs of the people of coloured and inferior races who are in the Commonwealth.”

Geoffrey Robertson, Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights

It is a power incompatible with modern democratic values.

As Geoffrey Robertson’s book Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights says, the government has actually defended this position in recent times. It has made use of this adverse provision in overturning many human rights and heritage protections. In Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) for example, the High Court determined it could not have prevented the forcible racial assimilation policies by the government last century.

Only in the absence of a Bill of Rights, could a moral injustice such as racially discriminatory laws be overlooked in favour of a legal precedent. Such are the limits of common law.

The state of Victoria (2006) and Capital Territory (2004) have bills of rights, which have improved policy making and created a dialogue between courts and parliament. They should be encouraged and copied in other states. To prevent them from being encroached or overturned, there should be a federal bill for Australians as a whole.

Such a bill would recognise rights in personhood, protect against individual rights abuses, and improve Australia’s record in acting on its treaty promises to the international community, says Robertson.

A Bill of Rights would define Australia as a modern nation of individuals, and recognise the distinguishing national character of a people born, and entitled, to live freely ♦

Geoffrey Robertson introduces The Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights in this Radio National excerpt. The book is available from Vintage Books and ABC stores. [Pictures sourced from Flickr Creative Commons]

the macho paradox: jackson katz

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Jackson Katz, Anti-sexist activist, Speaker, Author Filmaker. Photo from Jackson Katz website

Think you’re an innocent bystander? Think again. According to renowned anti-sexist campaigner Jackson Katz, sexism and violence fuels the ‘tough guys’ image that culture projects on men in all cultures. This tough guise leads men to assert themselves on women and weaker males in order to be ‘masculine’.

The dangers of ‘masculinity’ in this form to society should not be underestimated. As Katz notes,

In the US alone, over 85% of people who commit murder are men…90% of people who commit violent physical assault are men, 95% of serious domestic violence is perpetrated by males, and it’s been estimated that nearly 1 in 4 men will use violence against a partner in their lifetime.

Violence is only the most extreme outgrowth of a pervasive culture that projects the aggressive physical dominance of the male, Katz’ research suggests. Learnt early in development by boys through family and community, the ‘tough guise’ of the male is over-represented in all major media forms.

Katz, author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help served as the Secretary of the US Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence from 2000-03.  Through co-founding the Mentors in Violence Prevention Program (MVP) Katz has become the leading internationally recognised educator in preventing gender violence, especially through his work addressing sporting and religious groups as well as the military. He is also a regular columnist for online news site The Huffington Post.

Katz, J. (2006) The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

The title of his book however, points not only to the perpetrators and victims of violence. The key innovation of Katz’s approach to addressing male violence is in using what he refers to as the ‘bystander approach’. Katz’s lectures, films and book aims to empower you as a bystander to take part in preventing sexism and violence.

This approach gives cause for re-examining the role many of us unwittingly play; tolerating the sexist joke, standing mute in the diminishing of women, not seeking to help defend a male abused because they aren’t perceived as ‘masculine’.  It is also a practical guide to action, a role all can play in becoming  modern activists.

Most believe that in order to intervene in a potentially violent situation, you have to choose between doing nothing, or in physically intervening at personal risk. 

Positively, there are multiple points between these poles: Jackson Katz lists 10 important steps we, and particularly male peers- a powerful influence- can take. They are freely available at jacksonkatz.com and form an important modern resource for helping end culturally sanctioned abuses. Among them; the invocation to NOT be silent when abuse appears likely or indicated, and address the issue either by talking with the abuser or someone empowered to talk with him.

A bystander can also gently and privately ask the victim if there is a way to help.

The culture of males’ physical dominance against women can also be more easily addressed: Katz asks us to no longer fund sexism by purchasing sexist media (some mens’ magazines for example). Defend others against sexism, such as homophobia or discrimination. By “raising the cost” of prejudice and violence, Katz says, we make it that much harder for physical dominance to enforce its culture in your society.

Men need to read [Katz's] book. Not only because it will make the world safer for women, but because it will free men to be their true selves.

Eve Ensler, Author, ‘The Vagina Monologues ‘

Katz’s modern bystander approach equips the sidelined as empowered activists in the protection of others. Katz’s ‘macho paradox’ could reshape masculinity; an ability to lead others, and a positive response to greater gender equality ♦

The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help (2006) is available from Source Books. The short film Tough Guise (approx. 7 mins) explains the connection between popular culture and male aggression. Jackson Katz’s 10 steps ‘What Men Can Do’ can be found here.

song of myself: american essay

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The Best American Essays 2011 

Edwidge Danticat, Ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co

The Best American Essay Series takes the reader beneath the skin of personal experience. Its the 26th edition this year, a collection of long form journalism pieces sourced from among best American journalists, thinkers and authors.

Annually, a prominent writer is awarded the task of selecting the years’ shortlisted essays. This format, according to the values and premises of each editor, shows a startling variety of forms and subject possible to essays, presenting an array of the ideas from diverse fields.

Edwidge Danticat is editor of The Best American Essays 2011.

Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat follows from last year’s editor, the late journalist and author Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens championed essays by scientists and other specialist writers, focussing his selection on the importance of Science being able to communicate its breakthrough benefits to a wider audience.

Danticat, author of another collection of essays Create Dangerously, is a National Book Critics Circle award-winner for her autobiography, Brother, I am Dying. Sensitive to the challenges of writing from the self, Danticat’s selection is poignant, written almost entirely from journalists’ and authors’ first-hand observation; eyewitness accounts of self experience that meet the challenge of illustrating a wider issue. Danticat writes,

Such is the power of the stories we dare tell others about ourselves. They do inform, instruct and inspire. They might even entertain, but they can also strip us totally bare, reducing (or expanding) the essence of everything we are into words.

The 2011 essay selection speaks of the potential personal stories, as good stories do, to bring readers to greater understanding and empathy. The strengths of this technique lie in giving readers direct experience of rare, unusual or painful events. For many, these events would otherwise remain distant and remote. Mischa Berlinski‘s essay brings us right into Haiti’s harrowing earthquake;

The horizon swayed at an angle…the visual effect was precisely that of the grainy videos that would be shown later on television, as of somebody shaking a camera sharply. It was tremendously loud- like huge stones grinding…

Scene from Port Au Prince after the 2011 Earthquake, Haiti

Hitchens is also a contributor to this year’s edition. His ‘Topic of Cancer’ is deservedly acclaimed here for fearless self reporting during his own cancer-ridden decline. First written for Vanity Fair, ‘Topic of Cancer’ began a series of articles by Hitchens; with his body rapidly approaching its Mortality, his writing gains its Immortality.

‘Lucky Girl’ from Bridget Potter takes readers to Brooklyn, 1962; to friends to beg for illegally bought contraception; to finding oneself unmarried and pregnant; to begging with doctors to be pronounced ‘neurotic’ and so be allowed an abortion; to compulsory expulsion from school; to sharing the decision of 80% of single pregnant women who opted for illegal abortions that year over adoption; to trying to find a back-alley doctor within the remaining few ‘safe’ weeks for operation;  to trying to find money and fleeing to Puerto Rico and risking ones’ own life.

Sneaking into an empty office at work and locking the door, I picked up the phone. The overseas operator found the number and placed the call. The connection was crackly, and the man who answered neither confirmed nor denied that they would help.

The wider statistics of Potter’s experience are shared here, but the writing is acute enough that its today’s political implications do not need to be directly addressed. Through the eyes of ‘Lucky Girl’ readers can imagine from a personal perspective the nightmare scenario that is still blithely considered in political discourse, devoid of the empathy Potter’s ‘Lucky Girl’ demands readers.

Personal experiences, masterfully told as here, help populate and pierce the screen of observation, bringing us into the sharply defined pixels of a larger narrative. Danticat’s selection of story essays demonstrate that senses really can be common, as can our humanity ♦

imodernreview critiques The Best American Essays 2010 in this previous article. 

eames: the architect and the painter

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They gave shape to the American 20th century.

It began with a plywood chair. After successive failures at pushing materials to their limits, Charles and Ray Eames began a stint producing leg splints from their small home apartment during WWII. Using their very own gerry-rigged machine (made from a few heating coils and a bicycle pump) they eventually produced a successful new lightweight chair by moulding ply. They were not to know how successful they would become.

Under the motto “the best, for the most, from the least” they had created the icon of the modern postwar chair. Beautiful yet comfortable to use, adopting functional materials molded in two directions, Eames’ chairs would be able to negate the need for expensive upholstery. Today over 50 Charles and Ray Eames designs have remained in production, many synonymous with the modern design age.

LCW Chair, 1945. By Charles and Ray Eames

The Eames’ creativity would spread in bursts to countless areas, from furniture, to film projects, exhibitions, architecture, and painting. Their story is retold in an inspiring new biopic, filmed with a matching graphic and musical creativity from documentary film-makers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey.

As its trailer shows, EAMES: the architect and the painter, narrated by actor James Franco, explores the lives and work of an extraordinarily talented and eccentric couple.

Modern design was born from a marriage of Art and Industry. The Eames office was born from the marriage of Ray Kaiser, a painter who rarely painted, and Charles Eames, an architecture school drop-out who never got his license.

As the couple’s fame grew, their design studio Studio 901, Los Angeles, drew in four decades of talented artists and designers, working to the vision of their married bosses. TIME referred to one of their chair designs as “the greatest of the 20th century”.

“Never delegate understanding,” Charles Eames had said. Their practise consisted of solving design problems through measurement of the human body and by constant experiment.

Eames Stamps. Photo by brandon shigeta

Much of the colour, artistry and aesthetic sensibility of their work has later been credited to Ray Eames. In the sexual politics of the 1950′s and ’60′s, it was unusual for a married couple to share in business decision making. Eames: the architect and the painter highlights their modern example of the productive career-focussed team. Their very image together formed “perhaps their best work of design”, the couple featuring in shared appearances on television and in magazines. While much of the critical attention was focussed on Charles, he could also generously defer to his wife Ray. “Anything I can do, she can do better.”

Eames Home and Studio, 203 Nth Chautauqua Blvd (Pacific Palisades) Los Angeles Photo by brandon shigeta

Working from an initial design by architect Eero Saarinen, Ray and Charles Eames designed their modernist home and studio. With material shortages during WWII, they had hit upon the idea of a modern architecture made entirely from pre-fabricated factory materials. Far from austere, the home became a famous architectural symbol of open plan freedom and postwar sophistication.

Today, Sam Grawe, Editor in Chief at Dwell Magazine, cannot recall a magazine issue not featuring Eames furniture.

I think you see that optimism of the American spirit in their designs, a blue-print for how we could live our lives… Every designer owes them some amount of debt.

Lounge Chair 670 and Ottoman 671. By Charles and Ray Eames

In their works’ quality and dedicated measurement in problem solving, the film demonstrates Eames’ particular sensibilities of Modernism, the drive that animated their work and personal story. Eames’ furniture and artworks are much copied and reproduced, with originals fetching high prices at auction. Despite this deserved appreciation their legacy is perhaps best paid tribute by looking as they did, to the next stage of design, with optimism ♦

EAMES: the architect and the painter, is available on DVD from Bread and Butter Films.

thinking BIG: bjarke ingels

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A waste treatment plant you can ski down? Bjarke Ingels enjoys thinking big. Principal architect of Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), his projects have begun steadily appearing in major architecture journals, gaining critical attention and fame by daring to confront sustainability as not just a goal to be accommodated, but celebrated. By rigorously adopting the mechanics of energy, water, and environmental physics, design sustainability is used as a driver in BIG’s projects to free-flowing and muscular forms that sustain, shelter, educate and inspire.

Bjarke Ingels, Principal of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) Photo by Pedro Botton

Ingels, speaking at a recent conference refers to this philosophy as “hedonistic sustainability“;

Architecture seems entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. We believe…[in a] fertile overlap between the two. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.

Ingels’ solutions should inspire a new active role for policy makers and designers to rethink what it means to create sustainability.

Waste Recycling Plant, Copenhagen, Bjarke Ingels Group

The problem of designing a waste-recycling plant large enough to encompass Copenhagen’s present and future needs presented more than a problem of designing a 2- dimensional facade; The Amager Bakke plant is to be the largest building in Copenhagen, located in a central district. The solution lay in addressing yet another, seemingly unrelated problem- Copenhagen’s landscape is flat, and despite heavy snowfalls, an inconvenient distance from popular ski facilities in Sweden. Instead, BIG designed the treatment plant with social participation in mind. In providing energy from the city’s waste, a more multi-use public amenity would be created. The plant’s mass would be concealed as a ‘mountain’ and its roof would form 3 giant ski slopes.

Using energy from waste, humidifiers would pump snow to the roof. The ‘pollution’ (excess but largely non toxic smoke emitted from the plant) would be compressed into puffed light-displayed ‘smoke rings’, adding to a sense of play while visually representing 0.1 tonne of carbon in each ring. Commended by TIME as one of ’50 Best Inventions’ it is, says Ingels, “the ultimate artistic expression of hedonistic sustainability,”

You take the symbol of the problem- the pollution, the chimney- and turn it into something playful…This is not only economically and ecologically sustainable, but also SOCIALLY sustainable because it turns a power plant into a park, and flat land into a manmade mountain for skiing.

In another of Ingels’ projects, as this stunning animation shows, BIG faced different challenges within the strict geometric confines of New York City’s high real estate values, building codes, and city blocks. As in his other projects however, Ingels addresses challenges creatively to form unique and appealing design solutions.  BIG’s residential tower design for West 57th St, a 600 home apartment complex due to begin construction this year, is deliberately low-rise along its waterfront-facing perimeter. This form maximises available sunlight and preserves views for inhabitants of the rear adjoining complex also owned by the client developer.


West 57th St Residential Tower, NYC Bjarke Ingels Group

Rather than a lightwell invisible to the street, the building rises dramatically skywards- 400 feet- to its opposite corner. The dynamic pyramid-like form produced reveals the courtyard feature in the roof-face. Apartments are given individual expression by orienting each toward views from their distinct vantage points. The result is an exciting passive solar design which preserves amenity to adjoining structures while maximising available land space, sunlight, and distribution of available views. With its free form use of space the design will challenge the staid block-formations of a dense urban fabric to striking visual effect. The complex is due to be completed by 2015.

Sustainability is not about how much of our living standards we are prepared to sacrifice…it can’t be a moral problem or a political dilemna. It’s a design challenge.

Through ‘hedonistic sustainability’ the Bjarke Ingels Group presents a model for introducing design challenges as engines of innovation in modern architecture. Not only do these projects make economic and ecological considerations central, they create a place for joy aswell.

That is BIG thinking ♦

BIGamy, which details the thinking behind BIG and Bjarke Ingels’ design process is a forthcoming book published by the Graham Foundation. Yes is More!, BIG’s 400pg archi-comic is availaible for download from iTunes.

genesis and the genius

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This series is about perhaps the most powerful idea ever to occur to  a human mind. The idea is Evolution-by-Natural-Selection, and the genius who thought of it was Charles Darwin.

Richard Dawkins

The Genius of Charles Darwin, Channel 4 series presented by Richard Dawkins

Incredible though it may seem, with the weight of evidence accumulated since Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species over 150 years ago, 4 out of every 10 British people still believe a god created every species as you see them today. It is with this daunting task of re-education that popular biologist Richard Dawkins presents a modern and exciting first hand look into Charles Darwin’s discovery in the Channel 4, 3-part TV series The Genius of Charles Darwin. 

Richard Dawkins, Presenter. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and author of 'The Selfish Gene' and most most recently, 'The Magic of Reality'.

Author of The Selfish Gene, which built on Darwin’s theory with more recent discoveries and proof of genetic evolution, Dawkins is a uniquely credible source of certainty. More than a theory, “Evolution is a fact.” The viewer is transported with Dawkins as he travels around the world, from the modern English classroom, to the Galapagos and Kenya, in search of the same clues and evidence by which Darwin discovered Evolution.


Galapagos marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) Photo by Laura Nunes.

It is, in Dawkins words, “nothing less than a complete explanation of the complexity and diversity of human life”.

The series offers fascinating insight into Darwin’s personal life, the genius’ personal struggles and reluctance to spread a knowledge that would undo centuries of belief in a supernatural order. Born in 1809, science could not as yet supply the proof we have today, the genetic coding of our species’ ancestors and relations. By naked observation however, Darwin’s five year round-the-world voyage yielded  samples of hundreds of species, where tiny differences among sub-species in neighbouring islands yielded huge heretical questions. Lifeforms were not fixed, but changed over Time and circumstance. On the Origin of Species was the result of 20 years research, combining the best scientific opinion from geologists such as Charles Lyle, and the study of fossils dating species’ development over millions of years.

Dawkins takes us through the historic collections of Darwin’s studies. A ‘pigeon fancier’ Darwin could observe first-hand how characteristics in the species could be bred out or encouraged, demonstrating the ‘plasticity’ of a species over generations. Similarly, chance cycles of variation occurred in Nature over an extended period, and favoured those most successful in reproducing.

In Kenya, Richard Dawkin’s birthplace, Dawkins shows that there is “nothing orderly about the relations between predator and prey”. Nature leads animals in a generational “arms race” to greater speed and physical weaponry in the pursuit of finite resources. As Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species,

Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing the world every variation and even the slightest, neglecting that which is bad and preserving all that is good, silently and insensibly working. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of Time has marked the lapse of Ages.

 

In 1859, the possibility another biologist named Wallace might ‘scoop’ his discovery finally encouraged Darwin to publish his findings and its explosive implications. Still timidly afraid of presenting the mountain of evidence gathered, observed and deliberated before him, the book was finally released to the public, selling out in its first two days of release. 152 years later, it has never again been out of print.

The genius of Charles Darwin, his personal struggles and domestic losses, are presented against a viewer backdrop of Darwin’s own home and grounds, lending elegant and historic setting to Darwin’s step by step development as biologist and author. Dawkin’s own genius has been to present the soundness of this at once complex and “elegantly simple” solution to the origin and diversity of Lifeforms inductively. That is, we are lead through each stage to observe as Darwin did, the sameness and variety by which variation led from prehistory to the present.

Popularly conceived as a dry theory devoid of moral import, Dawkins’ feat of genius is to present to the layperson the grandeur of the evolutionary world view. We humans are the result of a long line of millions of the most successful pairings of gene and generation, developing brains that can examine our self origin like no other species can. We are a ‘nervous system’ for a planet at last waking up. Over 150 years old, evolution represents the most modern and genius of ideas. Whats more, as Dawkins shows, its true ♦

[Charles Darwin's complete works are now available online. imodernreview has previously reviewed Richard Dawkin's editorship of The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing in a new 'turing test'. The TV series The Genius of Charles Darwin is available to order on DVD]