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He ruminated in his “D” notebook about “the warring of the species as inference from Malthus.” The geometric population increase of animals, as of humans, is prevented by such Malthusian checks, he wrote. He imagined it all freshly. Take the birds of Europe. They are well known to naturalists and their populations are (or were in his time, anyway) relatively stable. Every year, each species suffers a steady rate of death from hawk predation, from cold, from other causes, roughly maintaining its net population level against the rate of increase from fledglings. Food supply remains limited, nesting space remains limited, but breeding, laying, and hatching continue to push against those limits. Everything is interconnected and uneasily balanced. If the hawks decrease in number, the bird populations they prey upon will be affected, somehow. With new clarity Darwin saw predation, competition, excess reproduction, death—and their consequences. “One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges,” he wrote, and that it’s trying to “force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the oeconomy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.” The final result of all this wedging, Darwin added, “must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to change.” In shorthand scrawl, he had his big idea. Years later he would articulate the details and call it “natural selection.”
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
Aggressive industrialists were convinced that in confronting organizers they were battling the devil himself. They didn’t mean to lose. As the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee was to discover in December 1934, over 2,500 American employers employed strikebreaking companies, the largest of which were Pearl Bergoff Services and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Bergoff was a multimillion-dollar heavy; the Pinkertons, favored by Detroit’s automobile industry, earned nearly two million dollars between 1933 and 1936. Each of them maintained a small standing army which was ready to move into struck jobs carrying machine pistols, gas guns, and clubs. Both also infiltrated workmen’s ranks as undercover agents. When a senator asked Herman L. Weckler, vice president of the Chrysler Corporation, why he hired spies, he replied, “We must do it to obtain the information we need in dealing with our employees.” Thousands of men were literally working at gunpoint; the Pittsburgh Coal Company, for example, kept machine guns trained on employees in its coal pits. A congressional committee asked why. Chairman Richard B. Mellon answered, “You cannot run the mines without them.” Under these circumstances, the eagerness of workers to organize was really a measure of their desperation. The frightened miners, the sweated garment workers in Manhattan, the dime-an-hour laborers at Briggs Manufacturing in Detroit, and the nickel-an-hour clerks in Detroit knew that nothing else worked. State laws had been tried. In Pennsylvania employers systematically checked off 33 cents a week from the pay of each child to indemnify themselves for $100 fines imposed upon them for working the children ninety hours a week. The average steelworker’s clothes caught fire at least once each week. Rather than invest in safety devices, the Pittsburgh mills lost over 20,000 workers a year maimed by industrial accidents.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
I love the summation of Odysseus' trials that comprises the body of the invocation. It's Joseph Campbell's hero's journey in a nutshell, as concise a synopsis of the story of Everyman as it gets. There's the initial crime (which we all inevitably commit), which ejects the hero from his homebound complacency and propels him upon his wanderings, the yearning for redemption, the untiring campaign to get "home," meaning back to God's grace, back to himself.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
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