This book-length issue of Ecotone celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species. Ecotone was founded with the idea of breaking out of the pen of the purely literary and wandering freely between disciplines. This applies particularly to this special issue on evolution, and we could have no better model and centerpiece than Darwin, who, as well as studying ornithology, geography, history, and a dozen other fields, was also a hell of a writer—amiable, straightforward, and as clear as he could be given that he was trying to explain something fairly technical and entirely new. In Origin, Darwin makes his case not as a scientist would today, but by proceeding, for all his research, almost anecdotally. He also employs what you might call the Columbo technique, coming to his conclusions sideways and deferentially, like that shambling TV detective. “Oh, I’m sorry. I know you’re not the murderer,” he mumbles as he apologizes and genials his way toward unpleasant conclusions about our origins, nudging human beings where they don’t want to be nudged. It doesn’t hurt that when he needs to he can draw on his seven-year study of barnacles and drop a mean crustacean reference. Or that he can reference fantails or short-faced tumblers or pouters from his decades-long study of pigeons.

This fall, in the spirit of breaking across disciplines, I taught a course called “When Thoreau Met Darwin.” The two men may seem strange bedfellows at first, but there is more overlap than you might think. Of course they never actually met, but their great books, Walden and The Origin of Species, were published within five years of each other, in 1854 and 1859, respectively. And while it is unlikely that Darwin ever read a sentence of Walden, Thoreau read The Voyage of the Beagle with keen interest. Then in 1860, two years before he died at forty-four, Thoreau got his hands on Darwin’s Origin. It was long a cliché of Thoreau’s life that his last years were wooden ones, his transcendental fervor having died out, but Robert D. Richardson, one of our contributors to this issue and the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, has helped overturn this misinterpretation. In fact, reading Darwin sparked Thoreau to a massive study of the leafing of Concord’s trees and the blossoming and fruiting of plants, a comprehensive phenological chronicling of his hometown that promised a new beginning in Thoreau’s writing, a movement away from the more personal focus of Walden and toward a wider, biocentric view of nature. It was a movement that mirrored Darwin’s ideas, ideas that pushed Homo sapiens away from center stage and made humans just another player in the world’s drama.

Like Darwin, Thoreau was immensely curious. Richardson writes of Thoreau’s inspired reaction to reading Origin: “That his interests were still expanding, his wonder still green, his capacity for observation, expression, and connection still growing is the most impressive evidence that his spirits this January were still on the wing.” But while Thoreau wrote constantly, he shied away from the professionalism that the title of writer implied (and implies even more now). Writing was part of a larger project called living. “The mind is a burrowing organ,” he writes. His was a lifelong experiment in burrowing, working his way down through the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe.” And what was he mining for? An answer to a fairly simple question, I think: how to live on earth.

For his part, Darwin was perhaps history’s greatest connector, his interests extending from barnacles to pigeons to how “the presence of feline animals in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!” For many years Darwin was, like Thoreau, a reporter to “a journal, of no very wide circulation.” This last quote is Thoreau’s punning reference to the fact that he was the only one who read most of what he wrote. And while Thoreau had his journals to report to, Darwin had his private notebooks, which for twenty years kept the secret of natural selection to themselves while the world waited. It was there he pieced together the great puzzle, a puzzle that would forever change how human beings thought of themselves.

In these attenuated, overspecialized times it’s not just refreshing, but bracing, to encounter minds that won’t keep still. Would a groundbreaking work of science be taken seriously today if it were written in lay terms by a scientific generalist? On the other hand, how often do we think of literary writers as actually having anything “real” to offer the world’s discourse, or, more pointedly, having anything to say about the question of how we should be in this world?

With this issue, we are trying, in our own small way, to emulate the diversity we admire in these two men. For this reason we are proud to publish writers like Richardson, whom I mentioned above and who has written biographies of Thoreau and Emerson, among others, and Jeff Lockwood, who, when not studying insects, writes fine essays like “(Un)Natural selection: A Toxic Tale of Flies and People,” and Reg Saner, who, as well as writing landmark essays, is completing his own book on evolution and has done time on the front lines debating members of the intelligent design gang. We also offer the words and drawings of Suzanne Stryk, whose sketches and paintings perfectly capture the thrill of evolution and connect us to creatures now long gone. As for showing the way that wild diversity can be contained within one human life, it would be hard to best John Jeremiah Sullivan’s electric sketch of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. And we felt the collection would be incomplete without reprinting an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, who captures perfectly this idea of breaching the walls that separate disciplines, and who wrote, in the spirit of Keats’s “negative capability,” that for his part he would “rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers.”

In this same spirit we also offer fictional accounts of Sasquatch’s romantic efforts, Darwin’s figment shadow, and microbial sex. We wanted to take it one step further, though, and consider the idea of survival. “Survival of the fittest” was not Darwin’s phrase; he preferred “descent with modification” and “natural selection.” It was his young rival Alfred Russel Wallace who said, “In every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior remain—that is, the fittest would survive,” and the economist Herbert Spencer whose broader application of the phrase “survival of the fittest” began the process of corrupting public understanding of the idea. But survival is the essence of Darwinism and we honor that with tales from a cadre of short story masters: Ron Rash’s “Burning Bright,” an account of a community’s efforts to outlast forest fires and a widow’s bargain to shelter her new love; Ben Fountain’s “Impasse Tempête,” a last encounter between old friends in one of Haiti’s bidonvilles; Brock Clarke’s “Our Pointy Boots,” a raw homecoming for soldiers who have survived Iraq having committed heinous acts. We also offer you the primal poesy of Robert Wrigley: bears and hailstorms. And legendary poet David Wagoner wonders when we first thought of chairs while Bob Hicok pens the shortest biography of Darwin ever written.

One thing that reading The Origin of Species and Walden back-to-back does is to serve as a healthy reminder that so-called civilized man is part of the animal world. Darwin’s way of reminding us is more overt, if more polite. Um, excuse me. Did you notice this little remnant of a tail we all have, and how it just so happens that these bones suggest that we might have common ancestors? Gould, in the first essay of his first collection, Ever Since Darwin, quotes what he calls a “remarkable epigram” from one of Darwin’s notebooks: “Plato says in Phaedo that our ‘imaginary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, and are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.” Read monkeys! Of course Darwin was never so direct in his great book, only hinting that this whole evolution thing might actually apply to humans. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” is about as far as he would go.

Thoreau, with little patience for evidence early in his career, is more brash. He points to the effluvia of what we call society and shows how we, by considering ourselves above the natural world, have diluted and perverted our natural strengths. As an essayist, Thoreau begins with Montaigne’s central assertion of humility that we are “just another animal” and that on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our asses. He reminds us that, at core, our main challenges on earth remain the getting of food and fuel and fire, something many of us are now remembering as such things become scarce. And in these times it might also pay to remember the basic law of Thoreauvian math: Doing with less trumps wanting more.

What does it mean to say, through science or art, that we are just another animal? Different things to different people. Some see it as sacrilege, others as a way to justify our aggressive or territorial impulses. Maybe a better use of this information is in moving toward a greater humility, and an ability to see beyond our own merely anthropocentric needs. After all, DNA puts the lie to our myth of specialness. If it is trite to say that we are brothers and sisters with other members of the animal world, all united, then it is also simply and biologically true. But an acceptance of our own animal nature is just a starting place, and from that base base we can build upward. Our reaction needn’t be, “Hey, we’re animals, don’t expect much of us.” For along with humility, we can also feel some deserved confidence, since the animals we happen to be have developed not just enormous brains and opposable thumbs and complex languages, but an inherent and dazzling ability to be flexible, to adapt almost from minute to minute. Gould goes so far as to crown flexibility our defining trait, saying that it “may be the most important determinant of human consciousness.” We change, therefore we are.

What thrills me here is the yolking of the base to the sublime, the animal to the intellectual. It’s easy for our thinking to grow thin and brittle when we philosophize, to forget that we are creatures who shit and fuck and die. On the other hand, the animals we are are capable of developing theories of evolution and of writing great books about living in the woods. For me the acknowledgment that we are just another animal is no less than the foundation of what it means to be human. Some say this is a reductionist view of man, that it stamps out spirit and hope and beauty. I don’t think so. Evolution does not deny the miracle. Evolution is the miracle.

I will let Thoreau and Darwin have the last word. What follows are the final four sentences of Walden and the last line of Origin:

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.