Richard Dawkins [9.22.09]   RICHARD DAWKINS, elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society in May, 2001, is a writer known for his
popularization of Darwinian ideas as well as for original
thinking on evolutionary theory.   Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio
Page   UNLIKE his evolutionist grandfather Erasmus, whose
scientific verse was (somewhat surprisingly, I have to say)
admired by Wordsworth and Coleridge,  Charles Darwin was not
known as a poet, but he produced a lyrical crescendo in the last
paragraph of On the Origin of Species.   There’s a lot packed
into this famous peroration, and I want to sign off by taking it
line by line.  ‘From the war of nature, from famine and death’
Clear-headed as ever, Darwin recognized the moral paradox at the
heart of his great theory. He didn’t mince words – but he
offered the mitigating reflection that nature has no evil
intentions. Things simply follow from ‘laws acting all around
us’, to quote an earlier sentence from the same paragraph. He
had said something similar at the end of