Oliver Sacks on the Record

“In my preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, I quoted G.K. Chesterton’s attack on science as a cold, impersonal, Sherlock Holmesian business, whereas his fictional detective, Father Brown, proceeds by a sort of uncanny empathy. I think as a writer, one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses—the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms,” neurologist and author Oliver Sacks tells science writer Steve Silberman, who launched his new blog NeuroTribes with the phenomenally interesting interview. 

“I’m genuinely bewildered by people who tout creationism and so forth,” Sacks says. “It was understandable that Gosse should do so in his book, Omphalos, which was published in 1857, a couple of years before Darwin’s book. Gosse was a very good and passionate naturalist, but also a devout literalist, and this tortured book was his attempt to, as he put it, “untie the geological knot” and reconcile the Bible and the fossil record. But I can’t see how after Darwin, any beliefs like this can be maintained. The sheer, endless beauty and depth of evolutionary theory is far beyond the dullness of a divine Creation.”