Ngaire Naffine: Law's Meaning of Life (Hart Publishing, 2009) @hartpublishing

 

ICYMI:

Ngaire Naffine, Law's Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person (Hart Publishing, 2009) (Legal Theory Today). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The perennial question posed by the philosophically-inclined lawyer is 'What is law?' or perhaps 'What is the nature of law?' This book poses an associated, but no less fundamental, question about law which has received much less attention in the legal literature. It is: 'Who is law for?' Whenever people go to law, they are judged for their suitability as legal persons. They are given or refused rights and duties on the basis of ideas about who matters. These ideas are basic to legal-decision making; they form the intellectual and moral underpinning of legal thought. They help to determine whether law is essentially for rational human beings or whether it also speaks to and for human infants, adults with impaired reasoning, the comotose, foetuses and even animals. Are these the right kind of beings to enter legal relationships and so become legal persons. Are they, for example, sufficiently rational, or sacred or simply human? Is law meant for them? This book reveals and evaluates the type of thinking that goes into these fundamental legal and metaphysical determinations about who should be capable of bearing legal rights and duties. It identifies and analyses four influential ways of thinking about law's person, each with its own metaphysical suppositions. One approach derives from rationalist philosophy, a second from religion, a third from evolutionary biology while the fourth is strictly legalistic and so endeavours to eschew metaphysics altogether. The book offers a clear, coherent and critical account of these complex moral and intellectual processes entailed in the making of legal persons.

Charles Darwin's Grandfather and Epigenetics

Andrew Ellington's essay in The Scientist on Erasmus Darwin's influence. Says Dr. Ellington, a chemistry prof at the University of Texas, Austin, "Erasmus believed that environmental influences, in particular the “Imagination” of the parents, greatly influenced the phenotype of the child. How very pre-Victorian (and post-). Erasmus anticipated Charles in many ways, but surprising results in the field of epigenetics—heritable (and reversible) changes in gene expression—suggest that he may have been very far ahead of his time indeed."

Discussing the current paradigm shift in theories of how evolution works, Dr. Ellington notes, "We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design. Dribs and drabs of this are already appearing on the Interwebs, but it may soon come to a school board near you. Second, the notion that environmental tags are embedded in our genome within a human time frame has got to be one of the best things to happen to tort law in a long time. DNA typing has led to the conviction of the guilty and the freeing of the innocent. Epigenetic typing may now lead to expert testimony regarding the presymptomatic impact of environmental disasters on susceptible populations. This may seem fanciful, but where there are moneyed interests (on either side), the science will inevitably follow."

Singing About Species

Charles Darwin has his own minstrel. The Scientist's Victoria Stern writes about Philadelphia entertainer Brett Keyser, who sings about Mr. Darwin's accomplishments, both on the street and in a one-man show called "Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man." Read more here (subscription; free).

Meanwhile, former child star and current creation science activist Kirk Cameron is engaged in a new project: handing out copies of The Origin of Species on college campuses, but he and his colleagues don't exactly want university students to come to Darwin. These copies of Mr. Darwin's seminal work have a new introduction that seeks to show why it's flawed. According to recent media reports,

The 50 page introduction that Cameron helped pen includes passages that link Darwins work with Nazi eugenics and overall mysogyny.

"You can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin's ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms," Cameron told People. "If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.

But Mr. Cameron may not be getting through. Said one student, "I don't think they are accomplishing what they set out to do. All these people are getting a free 'Origin of Species.' If they read the book they'll see through (the introduction)...". Read more here in a Christian Science Monitor article.