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Dear Ken,

With much appreciation for your insights/thinking. I am in the middle of writing a journal article on Beauty in Evolution, and wanted to quote the first paragraph of your Jan 2008 article. If OK with you.

If so, could you furnish your last name (either here on via direct email so I can give a proper credit–

Thanks so much

Muinuddin

The quote would be:
Some naturalists in
Darwin’s time questioned the adequacy of natural selection to explain the origin of the species because it
did not seem able to account for beauty. Darwin wrote, “They believe that very many structures have
been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety.” Darwin considered their argument that
beauty had its own reason, a separate reason from the preservation of life, to be a serious problem for his
own argument that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species. The stakes in this dispute were
high. They still are. In his words, “This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”