Name	Charles Darwin
Alt	Three quarter length studio photo showing Darwin's characteristic large forehead and bushy eyebrows with deep set eyes, pug nose and mouth set in a determined look. He is bald on top, with dark hair and long side whiskers but no beard or moustache. His jacket is dark, with very wide lapels, and his trousers are a light check pattern. His shirt has an upright wing collar, and his cravat is tucked into his waistcoat which is a light fine checked pattern.
Birth date	February 12, 1809
Birth place	Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
Death date	April 19, 1882
Death place	Down House, Downe, Kent, England
Residence	England
Citizenship	British
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	English
Fields	Naturalist
Workplaces	Geological Society of London
Alma mater	(tertiary education): University of Edinburgh (medicine) University of Cambridge (ordinary Bachelor of Arts)
Doctoral advisor
Academic advisors	John Stevens HenslowAdam Sedgwick
Doctoral students
Known for	''The Voyage of the Beagle''''On the Origin of Species''evolution by natural selection,common descent
Influences	Alexander von HumboldtJohn HerschelCharles Lyell
Influenced	Joseph Dalton HookerThomas Henry HuxleyGeorge RomanesErnst Haeckel
Awards	Royal Medal (1853)Wollaston Medal (1859)Copley Medal (1864)
Signature	Charles Darwin Signature.svg
Signature alt	"Charles Darwin", with the surname underlined by a downward curve that mimics the curve of the initial "C"
Spouse	Emma Darwin (1839-1896) }}

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.

He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book ''On the Origin of Species'', overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.

Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871, he examined human evolution and sexual selection in ''The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex'', followed by ''The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals''. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was honoured by a major ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey, where he was buried close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.

Life

Childhood and education

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809 at his family home, the Mount. He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Darwin (''née'' Wedgwood). He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his father's side, and of Josiah Wedgwood on his mother's side. Both families were largely Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, himself quietly a freethinker, had baby Charles baptised in the Anglican Church, but Charles and his siblings attended the Unitarian chapel with their mother. The eight-year-old Charles already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder.

Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. He found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his studies. He learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South American rainforest, and often sat with this "very pleasant and intelligent man".

In Darwin's second year he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group whose debates strayed into radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, and on 27 March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. One day, Grant praised Lamarck's evolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished, but had recently read the similar ideas of his grandfather Erasmus and remained indifferent. Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jameson's natural history course which covered geology including the debate between Neptunism and Plutonism. He learned classification of plants, and assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time.

This neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who shrewdly sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican parson. As Darwin was unqualified for the ''Tripos'', he joined the ''ordinary'' degree course in January 1828. He preferred riding and shooting to studying. His cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting which Darwin pursued zealously, getting some of his finds published in Stevens' ''Illustrations of British entomology''. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and met other leading naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known to these dons as "the man who walks with Henslow". When his own exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's ''Evidences of Christianity''. In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ''ordinary'' degree.

Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June. He studied Paley's ''Natural Theology'' which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He read John Herschel's new book which described the highest aim of natural philosophy as understanding such laws through inductive reasoning based on observation, and Alexander von Humboldt's ''Personal Narrative'' of scientific travels. Inspired with "a burning zeal" to contribute, Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined Adam Sedgwick's geology course, then went with him in the summer for a fortnight to map strata in Wales. After a week with student friends at Barmouth, he returned home to find a letter from Henslow proposing Darwin as a suitable (if unfinished) gentleman naturalist for a self-funded place with captain Robert FitzRoy, more as a companion than a mere collector, on which was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father objected to the planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, to agree to his son's participation.

Voyage of the ''Beagle''

Beginning on 27 December 1831, the voyage lasted almost five years and, as FitzRoy had intended, Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while the ''Beagle'' surveyed and charted coasts. He kept careful notes of his observations and theoretical speculations, and at intervals during the voyage his specimens were sent to Cambridge together with letters including a copy of his journal for his family. He had some expertise in geology, beetle collecting and dissecting marine invertebrates, but in all other areas was a novice and ably collected specimens for expert appraisal. Despite suffering badly from seasickness, Darwin wrote copious notes while on board the ship. Most of his zoology notes are about marine invertebrates, starting with plankton collected in a calm spell.

On their first stop ashore at St. Jago, Darwin found that a white band high in the volcanic rock cliffs included seashells. FitzRoy had given him the first volume of Charles Lyell's ''Principles of Geology'' which set out uniformitarian concepts of land slowly rising or falling over immense periods, and Darwin saw things Lyell's way, theorising and thinking of writing a book on geology. In Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the tropical forest, but detested the sight of slavery.

At Punta Alta in Patagonia he made a major find of fossil bones of huge extinct mammals in cliffs beside modern seashells, indicating recent extinction with no signs of change in climate or catastrophe. He identified the little known ''Megatherium'' by a tooth and its association with bony armour which had at first seemed to him like a giant version of the armour on local armadillos. The finds brought great interest when they reached England. On rides with gauchos into the interior to explore geology and collect more fossils he gained social, political and anthropological insights into both native and colonial people at a time of revolution, and learnt that two types of rhea had separate but overlapping territories. Further south he saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells as raised beaches showing a series of elevations. He read Lyell's second volume and accepted its view of "centres of creation" of species, but his discoveries and theorising challenged Lyell's ideas of smooth continuity and of extinction of species.

Three Fuegians on board, who had been seized during the first ''Beagle'' voyage and had spent a year in England, were taken back to Tierra del Fuego as missionaries. Darwin found them friendly and civilised, yet their relatives seemed "miserable, degraded savages", as different as wild from domesticated animals. To Darwin the difference showed cultural advances, not racial inferiority. Unlike his scientist friends, he now thought there was no unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. A year on, the mission had been abandoned. The Fuegian they had named Jemmy Button lived like the other natives, had a wife, and had no wish to return to England.

Darwin experienced an earthquake in Chile and saw signs that the land had just been raised, including mussel-beds stranded above high tide. High in the Andes he saw seashells, and several fossil trees that had grown on a sand beach. He theorised that as the land rose, oceanic islands sank, and coral reefs round them grew to form atolls.

On the geologically new Galápagos Islands Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "centre of creation", and found mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of tortoise shells showed which island they came from, but failed to collect them, even after eating tortoises taken on board as food. In Australia, the marsupial rat-kangaroo and the platypus seemed so unusual that Darwin thought it was almost as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the Aborigines "good-humoured & pleasant", and noted their depletion by European settlement.

The ''Beagle'' investigated how the atolls of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands had formed, and the survey supported Darwin's theorising. FitzRoy began writing the official ''Narrative'' of the ''Beagle'' voyages, and after reading Darwin's diary he proposed incorporating it into the account. Darwin's ''Journal'' was eventually rewritten as a separate third volume, on natural history.

In Cape Town Darwin and FitzRoy met John Herschel, who had recently written to Lyell praising his uniformitarianism as opening bold speculation on "that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others" as "a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process". When organising his notes as the ship sailed home, Darwin wrote that if his growing suspicions about the mockingbirds, the tortoises and the Falkland Islands Fox were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added "would" before "undermine". He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species".

Inception of Darwin's evolutionary theory

When the ''Beagle'' reached Falmouth, Cornwall, on 2 October 1836, Darwin was already a celebrity in scientific circles as in December 1835 Henslow had fostered his former pupil's reputation by giving selected naturalists a pamphlet of Darwin's geological letters. Darwin visited his home in Shrewsbury and saw relatives, then hurried to Cambridge to see Henslow, who advised on finding naturalists available to catalogue the collections and agreed to take on the botanical specimens. Darwin's father organised investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded gentleman scientist, and an excited Darwin went round the London institutions being fêted and seeking experts to describe the collections. Zoologists had a huge backlog of work, and there was a danger of specimens just being left in storage.

Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time on 29 October and soon introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist Richard Owen, who had the facilities of the Royal College of Surgeons to work on the fossil bones collected by Darwin. Owen's surprising results included other gigantic extinct ground sloths as well as the ''Megatherium'', a near complete skeleton of the unknown ''Scelidotherium'' and a hippopotamus-sized rodent-like skull named ''Toxodon'' resembling a giant capybara. The armour fragments were actually from ''Glyptodon'', a huge armadillo-like creature as Darwin had initially thought. These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America.

In mid-December Darwin took lodgings in Cambridge to organise work on his collections and rewrite his ''Journal''. He wrote his first paper, showing that the South American landmass was slowly rising, and with Lyell's enthusiastic backing read it to the Geological Society of London on 4 January 1837. On the same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the Zoological Society. The ornithologist John Gould soon announced that the Galapagos birds that Darwin had thought a mixture of blackbirds, "gros-beaks" and finches, were, in fact, twelve separate species of finches. On 17 February Darwin was elected to the Council of the Geological Society, and Lyell's presidential address presented Owen's findings on Darwin's fossils, stressing geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas.

Early in March, Darwin moved to London to be near this work, joining Lyell's social circle of scientists and experts such as Charles Babbage, who described God as a programmer of laws. Darwin stayed with his freethinking brother Erasmus, part of this Whig circle and close friend of writer Harriet Martineau who promoted Malthusianism underlying the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty. As a Unitarian she welcomed the radical implications of transmutation of species, promoted by Grant and younger surgeons influenced by Geoffroy. Transmutation was anathema to Anglicans defending social order, but reputable scientists openly discussed the subject and there was wide interest in John Herschel's letter praising Lyell's approach as a way to find a natural cause of the origin of new species.

Gould met Darwin and told him that the Galápagos mockingbirds from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and what Darwin had thought was a "wren" was also in the finch group. Darwin had not labelled the finches by island, but from the notes of others on the ''Beagle'', including FitzRoy, he allocated species to islands. The two rheas were also distinct species, and on 14 March Darwin announced how their distribution changed going southwards.

By mid-March, Darwin was speculating in his ''Red Notebook'' on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as the strange ''Macrauchenia'' which resembled a giant guanaco. His thoughts on lifespan, asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction developed in his "B" notebook around mid-July on to variation in offspring "to adapt & alter the race to ''changing'' world" explaining the Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds and rheas. He sketched branching descent, then a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", discarding Lamarck's independent lineages progressing to higher forms.

Overwork, illness, and marriage

While developing this intensive study of transmutation, Darwin became mired in more work. Still rewriting his ''Journal'', he took on editing and publishing the expert reports on his collections, and with Henslow's help obtained a Treasury grant of £1,000 to sponsor this multi-volume ''Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle'', a sum equivalent to about £}} in -2}}. He stretched the funding to include his planned books on geology, and agreed unrealistic dates with the publisher. As the Victorian era began, Darwin pressed on with writing his ''Journal'', and in August 1837 began correcting printer's proofs.

Darwin's health suffered from the pressure. On 20 September he had "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart", so his doctors urged him to "knock off all work" and live in the country for a few weeks. After visiting Shrewsbury he joined his Wedgwood relatives at Maer Hall, Staffordshire, but found them too eager for tales of his travels to give him much rest. His charming, intelligent, and cultured cousin Emma Wedgwood, nine months older than Darwin, was nursing his invalid aunt. His uncle Jos pointed out an area of ground where cinders had disappeared under loam and suggested that this might have been the work of earthworms, inspiring "a new & important theory" on their role in soil formation which Darwin presented at the Geological Society on 1 November.

William Whewell pushed Darwin to take on the duties of Secretary of the Geological Society. After initially declining the work, he accepted the post in March 1838. Despite the grind of writing and editing the ''Beagle'' reports, Darwin made remarkable progress on transmutation, taking every opportunity to question expert naturalists and, unconventionally, people with practical experience such as farmers and pigeon fanciers. Over time his research drew on information from his relatives and children, the family butler, neighbours, colonists and former shipmates. He included mankind in his speculations from the outset, and on seeing an orangutan in the zoo on 28 March 1838 noted its child-like behaviour.

The strain took a toll, and by June he was being laid up for days on end with stomach problems, headaches and heart symptoms. For the rest of his life, he was repeatedly incapacitated with episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, palpitations, trembling and other symptoms, particularly during times of stress such as attending meetings or making social visits. The cause of Darwin's illness remained unknown, and attempts at treatment had little success.

On 23 June he took a break and went "geologising" in Scotland. He visited Glen Roy in glorious weather to see the parallel "roads" cut into the hillsides at three heights. He later published his view that these were marine raised beaches, but then had to accept that they were shorelines of a proglacial lake.

Fully recuperated, he returned to Shrewsbury in July. Used to jotting down daily notes on animal breeding, he scrawled rambling thoughts about career and prospects on two scraps of paper, one with columns headed ''"Marry"'' and ''"Not Marry"''. Advantages included "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow", against points such as "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time." Having decided in favour, he discussed it with his father, then went to visit Emma on 29 July. He did not get around to proposing, but against his father's advice he mentioned his ideas on transmutation.

Continuing his research in London, Darwin's wide reading now included the sixth edition of Malthus's ''An Essay on the Principle of Population'' – }}

Malthus asserted that unless human population is kept in check, it increases in a geometric progression and soon exceeds food supply in what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. Darwin was well prepared to see at once that this also applied to de Candolle's "warring of the species" of plants and the struggle for existence among wildlife, explaining how numbers of a species kept roughly stable. As species always breed beyond available resources, favourable variations would make organisms better at surviving and passing the variations on to their offspring, while unfavourable variations would be lost. This would result in the formation of new species. On 28 September 1838 he noted this insight, describing it as a kind of wedging, forcing adapted structures into gaps in the economy of nature as weaker structures were thrust out. By mid December he saw a similarity between farmers picking the best breeding stock and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected", thinking this comparison "a beautiful part of my theory".

On 11 November, he returned to Maer and proposed to Emma, once more telling her his ideas. She accepted, then in exchanges of loving letters she showed how she valued his openness in sharing their differences, also expressing her strong Unitarian beliefs and concerns that his honest doubts might separate them in the afterlife. While he was house-hunting in London, bouts of illness continued and Emma wrote urging him to get some rest, almost prophetically remarking "So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you." He found what they called "Macaw Cottage" (because of its gaudy interiors) in Gower Street, then moved his "museum" in over Christmas. On 24 January 1839 Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

On 29 January Darwin and Emma Wedgwood were married at Maer in an Anglican ceremony arranged to suit the Unitarians, then immediately caught the train to London and their new home.

Preparing the theory of natural selection for publication

Darwin now had the framework of his theory of natural selection "by which to work", as his "prime hobby". His research included animal husbandry and extensive experiments with plants, finding evidence that species were not fixed and investigating many detailed ideas to refine and substantiate his theory. For fifteen years this work was in the background to his main occupation of writing on geology and publishing expert reports on the ''Beagle'' collections.

When FitzRoy's ''Narrative'' was published in May 1839, Darwin's ''Journal and Remarks'' was such a success as the third volume that later that year it was published on its own. Early in 1842, Darwin wrote about his ideas to Charles Lyell, who noted that his ally "denies seeing a beginning to each crop of species".

Darwin's book ''The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs'' on his theory of atoll formation was published in May 1842 after more than three years of work, and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. To escape the pressures of London, the family moved to rural Down House in September. On 11 January 1844 Darwin mentioned his theorising to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing with melodramatic humour "it is like confessing a murder". Hooker replied "There may in my opinion have been a series of productions on different spots, & also a gradual change of species. I shall be delighted to hear how you think that this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on the subject."

By July, Darwin had expanded his "sketch" into a 230-page "Essay", to be expanded with his research results if he died prematurely. In November the anonymously published sensational best-seller ''Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'' brought wide interest in transmutation. Darwin scorned its amateurish geology and zoology, but carefully reviewed his own arguments. Controversy erupted, and it continued to sell well despite contemptuous dismissal by scientists.

Darwin completed his third geological book in 1846. He now renewed a fascination and expertise in marine invertebrates, dating back to his student days with Grant, by dissecting and classifying the barnacles he had collected on the voyage, enjoying observing beautiful structures and thinking about comparisons with allied structures. In 1847, Hooker read the "Essay" and sent notes that provided Darwin with the calm critical feedback that he needed, but would not commit himself and questioned Darwin's opposition to continuing acts of creation.

In an attempt to improve his chronic ill health, Darwin went in 1849 to Dr. James Gully's Malvern spa and was surprised to find some benefit from hydrotherapy. Then in 1851 his treasured daughter Annie fell ill, reawakening his fears that his illness might be hereditary, and after a long series of crises she died.

In eight years of work on barnacles (Cirripedia), Darwin's theory helped him to find "homologies" showing that slightly changed body parts served different functions to meet new conditions, and in some genera he found minute males parasitic on hermaphrodites, showing an intermediate stage in evolution of distinct sexes. In 1853 it earned him the Royal Society's Royal Medal, and it made his reputation as a biologist. He resumed work on his theory of species in 1854, and in November realised that divergence in the character of descendants could be explained by them becoming adapted to "diversified places in the economy of nature".

Publication of the theory of natural selection

By the start of 1856, Darwin was investigating whether eggs and seeds could survive travel across seawater to spread species across oceans. Hooker increasingly doubted the traditional view that species were fixed, but their young friend Thomas Henry Huxley was firmly against evolution. Lyell was intrigued by Darwin's speculations without realising their extent. When he read a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace on the ''Introduction'' of species, he saw similarities with Darwin's thoughts and urged him to publish to establish precedence. Though Darwin saw no threat, he began work on a short paper. Finding answers to difficult questions held him up repeatedly, and he expanded his plans to a "big book on species" titled ''Natural Selection''. He continued his researches, obtaining information and specimens from naturalists worldwide including Wallace who was working in Borneo. The American botanist Asa Gray showed similar interests, and on 5 September 1857 Darwin sent Gray a detailed outline of his ideas including an abstract of ''Natural Selection''. In December, Darwin received a letter from Wallace asking if the book would examine human origins. He responded that he would avoid that subject, "so surrounded with prejudices", while encouraging Wallace's theorising and adding that "I go much further than you."

Darwin's book was only partly written when, on 18 June 1858, he received a paper from Wallace describing natural selection. Shocked that he had been "forestalled", Darwin sent it on to Lyell as requested by Wallace, and although Wallace had not asked for publication, Darwin suggested he would send it to any journal that Wallace chose. His family was in crisis with children in the village dying of scarlet fever, and he put matters in the hands of Lyell and Hooker. After some discussion, they decided on a joint presentation at the Linnean Society on 1 July of ''On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection''; however, Darwin's baby son died of the scarlet fever and he was too distraught to attend.

There was little immediate attention to this announcement of the theory; the president of the Linnean Society remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Only one review rankled enough for Darwin to recall it later; Professor Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that "all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old." Darwin struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his "big book", suffering from ill health but getting constant encouragement from his scientific friends. Lyell arranged to have it published by John Murray.

''On the Origin of Species'' proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859. In the book, Darwin set out "one long argument" of detailed observations, inferences and consideration of anticipated objections. His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history". His theory is simply stated in the introduction: }}

He put a strong case for common descent, but avoided the then controversial term "evolution", and at the end of the book concluded that: }}

Responses to publication

The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular ''Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation''. Though Darwin's illness kept him away from the public debates, he eagerly scrutinised the scientific response, commenting on press cuttings, reviews, articles, satires and caricatures, and corresponded on it with colleagues worldwide. Darwin had only said "Light will be thrown on the origin of man", but the first review claimed it made a creed of the "men from monkeys" idea from ''Vestiges''. Amongst early favourable responses, Huxley's reviews swiped at Richard Owen, leader of the scientific establishment Huxley was trying to overthrow. In April, Owen's review attacked Darwin's friends and condescendingly dismissed his ideas, angering Darwin, but Owen and others began to promote ideas of supernaturally guided evolution.

The Church of England's response was mixed. Darwin's old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". In 1860, the publication of ''Essays and Reviews'' by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin, with its ideas including higher criticism attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued that miracles broke God's laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and praised "Mr Darwin's masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature". Asa Gray discussed teleology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Gray's pamphlet on theistic evolution, ''Natural Selection is not inconsistent with Natural Theology''. The most famous confrontation was at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin's explanation and human descent from apes. Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxley's legendary retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his gifts, came to symbolise a triumph of science over religion.

Even Darwin's close friends Gray, Hooker, Huxley and Lyell still expressed various reservations but gave strong support, as did many others, particularly younger naturalists. Gray and Lyell sought reconciliation with faith, while Huxley portrayed a polarisation between religion and science. He campaigned pugnaciously against the authority of the clergy in education, aiming to overturn the dominance of clergymen and aristocratic amateurs under Owen in favour of a new generation of professional scientists. Owen's claim that brain anatomy proved humans to be a separate biological order from apes was shown to be false by Huxley in a long running dispute parodied by Kingsley as the "Great Hippocampus Question", and discredited Owen.

Darwinism became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863 Lyell's ''Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man'' popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later Huxley's ''Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature'' showed that anatomically, humans are apes, then ''The Naturalist on the River Amazons'' by Henry Walter Bates provided empirical evidence of natural selection. Lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential ''X Club'' devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas". By the end of the decade most scientists agreed that evolution occurred, but only a minority supported Darwin's view that the chief mechanism was natural selection.

The ''Origin of Species'' was translated into many languages, becoming a staple scientific text attracting thoughtful attention from all walks of life, including the "working men" who flocked to Huxley's lectures. Darwin's theory also resonated with various movements at the time and became a key fixture of popular culture. Cartoonists parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain these droll images served to popularise Darwin's theory in an unthreatening way. While ill in 1862 Darwin began growing a beard, and when he reappeared in public in 1866 caricatures of him as an ape helped to identify all forms of evolutionism with Darwinism.

''Descent of Man'', sexual selection, and botany

:''More detailed articles cover Darwin's life from Orchids to Variation, from Descent of Man to Emotions and from Insectivorous Plants to Worms''

Despite repeated bouts of illness during the last twenty-two years of his life, Darwin's work continued. Having published ''On the Origin of Species'' as an abstract of his theory, he pressed on with experiments, research, and writing of his "big book". He covered human descent from earlier animals including evolution of society and of mental abilities, as well as explaining decorative beauty in wildlife and diversifying into innovative plant studies.

Enquiries about insect pollination led in 1861 to novel studies of wild orchids, showing adaptation of their flowers to attract specific moths to each species and ensure cross fertilisation. In 1862 ''Fertilisation of Orchids'' gave his first detailed demonstration of the power of natural selection to explain complex ecological relationships, making testable predictions. As his health declined, he lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants. Admiring visitors included Ernst Haeckel, a zealous proponent of ''Darwinismus'' incorporating Lamarckism and Goethe's idealism. Wallace remained supportive, though he increasingly turned to Spiritualism.

''The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication'' of 1868 was the first part of Darwin's planned "big book", and included his unsuccessful hypothesis of pangenesis attempting to explain heredity. It sold briskly at first, despite its size, and was translated into many languages. He wrote most of a second part, on natural selection, but it remained unpublished in his lifetime.

Lyell had already popularised human prehistory, and Huxley had shown that anatomically humans are apes. With ''The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex'' published in 1871, Darwin set out evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes, and presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock's plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial characteristics, while emphasising that humans are all one species. His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book ''The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals'', one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the behaviour of animals. Both books proved very popular, and Darwin was impressed by the general assent with which his views had been received, remarking that "everybody is talking about it without being shocked." His conclusion was "that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system–with all these exalted powers–Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

His evolution-related experiments and investigations led to books on ''Insectivorous Plants, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom'', different forms of flowers on plants of the same species, and ''The Power of Movement in Plants''. In his last book he returned to ''The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms''.

Death and legacy

He died at Down House on 19 April 1882. He had expected to be buried in St Mary's churchyard at Downe, but at the request of Darwin's colleagues, after public and parliamentary petitioning, William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society) arranged for Darwin to be honoured by a major ceremonial funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

Darwin had convinced most scientists that evolution as descent with modification was correct, and he was regarded as a great scientist who had revolutionised ideas. Though few agreed with his view that "natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification", he was honoured in June 1909 by more than 400 officials and scientists from across the world who met in Cambridge to commemorate his centenary and the fiftieth anniversary of ''On the Origin of Species''. During this period, which has been called "the eclipse of Darwinism", scientists proposed various alternative evolutionary mechanisms which eventually proved untenable. The development of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s, incorporating natural selection with population genetics and Mendelian genetics, brought broad scientific consensus that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. This synthesis set the frame of reference for modern debates and refinements of the theory.

Children

The Darwins had ten children: two died in infancy, and Annie's death at the age of ten had a devastating effect on her parents. Charles was a devoted father and uncommonly attentive to his children. Whenever they fell ill, he feared that they might have inherited weaknesses from inbreeding due to the close family ties he shared with his wife and cousin, Emma Wedgwood. He examined this topic in his writings, contrasting it with the advantages of crossing amongst many organisms. Despite his fears, most of the surviving children and many of their descendants went on to have distinguished careers (see Darwin-Wedgwood family).

Of his surviving children, George, Francis and Horace became Fellows of the Royal Society, distinguished as astronomer, botanist and civil engineer, respectively. His son Leonard went on to be a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.

Religious views

Darwin's family tradition was nonconformist Unitarianism, while his father and grandfather were freethinkers, and his baptism and boarding school were Church of England. When going to Cambridge to become an Anglican clergyman, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible. He learned John Herschel's science which, like William Paley's natural theology, sought explanations in laws of nature rather than miracles and saw adaptation of species as evidence of design. On board the ''Beagle'', Darwin was quite orthodox and would quote the Bible as an authority on morality. He looked for "centres of creation" to explain distribution, and related the antlion found near kangaroos to distinct "periods of Creation".

By his return he was critical of the Bible as history, and wondered why all religions should not be equally valid. In the next few years, while intensively speculating on geology and transmutation of species, he gave much thought to religion and openly discussed this with Emma, whose beliefs also came from intensive study and questioning. The theodicy of Paley and Thomas Malthus vindicated evils such as starvation as a result of a benevolent creator's laws which had an overall good effect. To Darwin, natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design, and he could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs. He still viewed organisms as perfectly adapted, and ''On the Origin of Species'' reflects theological views. Though he thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, Darwin still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver.

Darwin remained close friends with the vicar of Downe, John Innes, and continued to play a leading part in the parish work of the church, but from around 1849 would go for a walk on Sundays while his family attended church. He considered it "absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist" and, though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he wrote that "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

The "Lady Hope Story", published in 1915, claimed that Darwin had reverted back to Christianity on his sickbed. The claims were repudiated by Darwin's children and have been dismissed as false by historians. His last words were to his family, telling Emma "I am not the least afraid of death – Remember what a good wife you have been to me – Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me", then while she rested, he repeatedly told Henrietta and Francis "It's almost worth while to be sick to be nursed by you".

Social interpretations

Darwin's fame and popularity led to his name being associated with ideas and movements which at times had only an indirect relation to his writings, and sometimes went directly against his express comments.

Eugenics

Darwin was intrigued by his half-cousin Francis Galton's argument, introduced in 1865, that statistical analysis of heredity showed that moral and mental human traits could be inherited, and principles of animal breeding could apply to humans. In ''The Descent of Man'' Darwin noted that aiding the weak to survive and have families could lose the benefits of natural selection, but cautioned that withholding such aid would endanger the instinct of sympathy, "the noblest part of our nature", and factors such as education could be more important. When Galton suggested that publishing research could encourage intermarriage within a "caste" of "those who are naturally gifted", Darwin foresaw practical difficulties, and thought it "the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race", preferring to simply publicise the importance of inheritance and leave decisions to individuals.

Galton named the field of study "eugenics" in 1883. In contrast to Darwin's cautious thoughts on voluntary improvement, negative eugenics later developed on a basis of Mendelian genetics and led to compulsory sterilisation laws which brought the field into disrepute.

Social Darwinism

Taking descriptive ideas as moral and social justification creates the ethical is-ought problem. When Thomas Malthus argued that population growth beyond resources was ordained by God to get humans to work productively and show restraint in getting families, this was used in the 1830s to justify workhouses and laissez-faire economics. Evolution was seen as having social implications, and Herbert Spencer's 1851 book ''Social Statics'' based ideas of human freedom and individual liberties on his Lamarckian evolutionary theory.

Darwin's theory of evolution was a matter of explanation. He thought it "absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another" and saw evolution as having no goal, but soon after the ''Origin'' was published in 1859, critics derided his description of a struggle for existence as a Malthusian justification for the English industrial capitalism of the time. The term ''Darwinism'' was used for the evolutionary ideas of others, including Spencer's "survival of the fittest" as free-market progress, and Ernst Haeckel's racist ideas of human development. Darwin did not share the racism common at that time: a point examined by the philosopher Antony Flew, who is at pains to distance Darwin's attitudes from those later attributed to him. Darwin was strongly against slavery, against "ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species", and against ill-treatment of native people.

Darwin's views on social and political issues reflected his time and social position. He thought men's eminence over women was the outcome of sexual selection, a view disputed by Antoinette Brown Blackwell in ''The Sexes Throughout Nature''. He valued European civilisation and saw colonisation as spreading its benefits, with the sad but inevitable effect of extermination of savage peoples who did not become civilised. Darwin's theories presented this as natural, and were cited to promote policies which went against his humanitarian principles. Writers used natural selection to argue for various, often contradictory, ideologies such as laissez-faire dog-eat dog capitalism, racism, warfare, colonialism and imperialism. However, Darwin's holistic view of nature included "dependence of one being on another"; thus pacifists, socialists, liberal social reformers and anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin stressed the value of co-operation over struggle within a species. Darwin himself insisted that social policy should not simply be guided by concepts of struggle and selection in nature.

The term "Social Darwinism" was used infrequently from around the 1890s, but became popular as a derogatory term in the 1940s when used by Richard Hofstadter to attack the laissez-faire conservatism of those like William Graham Sumner who opposed reform and socialism. Since then it has been used as a term of abuse by those opposed to what they think are the moral consequences of evolution.

Commemoration

During Darwin's lifetime, many geographical features were given his name. An expanse of water adjoining the Beagle Channel was named ''Darwin Sound'' by Robert FitzRoy after Darwin's prompt action, along with two or three of the men, saved them from being marooned on a nearby shore when a collapsing glacier caused a large wave that would have swept away their boats, and the nearby Mount Darwin in the Andes was named in celebration of Darwin's 25th birthday. When the ''Beagle'' was surveying Australia in 1839, Darwin's friend John Lort Stokes sighted a natural harbour which the ship's captain Wickham named ''Port Darwin'': a nearby settlement was renamed Darwin in 1911, and it became the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory.

More than 120 species and nine genera have been named after Darwin. In one example, the group of tanagers related to those Darwin found in the Galápagos Islands became popularly known as "Darwin's finches" in 1947, fostering inaccurate legends about their significance to his work.

Darwin's work has continued to be celebrated by numerous publications and events. The Linnean Society of London has commemorated Darwin's achievements by the award of the Darwin–Wallace Medal since 1908. Darwin Day has become an annual celebration, and in 2009 worldwide events were arranged for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of ''On the Origin of Species''.

Darwin has been commemorated in the UK, with his portrait printed on the reverse of £10 banknotes printed along with a hummingbird and the HMS ''Beagle'', issued by the Bank of England.

Works

Darwin was a prolific writer. Even without publication of his works on evolution, he would have had a considerable reputation as the author of ''The Voyage of the Beagle'', as a geologist who had published extensively on South America and had solved the puzzle of the formation of coral atolls, and as a biologist who had published the definitive work on barnacles. While ''The Origin of Species'' dominates perceptions of his work, ''The Descent of Man'' and ''The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals'' had considerable impact, and his books on plants including ''The Power of Movement in Plants'' were innovative studies of great importance, as was his final work on ''The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms''.

See also

Creation-evolution controversy

"Darwin among the Machines"

Darwin's Frog

European and American voyages of scientific exploration

Harriet (tortoise)

List of coupled cousins

List of mulitiple discoveries

Patrick Matthew

History of evolutionary thought

History of biology

Portraits of Charles Darwin

Parson-naturalist

Tinamou egg

Universal Darwinism

Notes

I. Darwin was eminent as a naturalist, geologist, biologist, and author; after working as a physician's assistant and two years as a medical student was educated as a clergyman; and was trained in taxidermy.

II. Robert FitzRoy was to become known after the voyage for biblical literalism, but at this time he had considerable interest in Lyell's ideas, and they met before the voyage when Lyell asked for observations to be made in South America. FitzRoy's diary during the ascent of the River Santa Cruz in Patagonia recorded his opinion that the plains were raised beaches, but on return, newly married to a very religious lady, he recanted these ideas.

III. See, for example, WILLA volume 4, ''Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminization of Education'' by Deborah M. De Simone: "Gilman shared many basic educational ideas with the generation of thinkers who matured during the period of "intellectual chaos" caused by Darwin's Origin of the Species. Marked by the belief that individuals can direct human and social evolution, many progressives came to view education as the panacea for advancing social progress and for solving such problems as urbanisation, poverty, or immigration."

IV. See, for example, the song "A lady fair of lineage high" from Gilbert and Sullivan's ''Princess Ida'', which describes the descent of man (but not woman!) from apes.

V. Geneticists studied human heredity as Mendelian inheritance, while eugenics movements sought to manage society, with a focus on social class in the United Kingdom, and on disability and ethnicity in the United States, leading to geneticists seeing this as impractical pseudoscience. A shift from voluntary arrangements to "negative" eugenics included compulsory sterilisation laws in the United States, copied by Nazi Germany as the basis for Nazi eugenics based on virulent racism and "racial hygiene".()

VI. Darwin did not share the then common view that other races are inferior, and said of his taxidermy tutor John Edmonstone, a freed black slave, "I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man".

Early in the ''Beagle'' voyage he nearly lost his position on the ship when he criticised FitzRoy's defence and praise of slavery. He wrote home about "how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it! I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character." Regarding Fuegians, he "could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement", but he knew and liked civilised Fuegians like Jemmy Button: "It seems yet wonderful to me, when I think over all his many good qualities, that he should have been of the same race, and doubtless partaken of the same character, with the miserable, degraded savages whom we first met here."

In the ''Descent of Man'' he mentioned the Fuegians and Edmonstone when arguing against "ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species".

He rejected the ill-treatment of native people, and for example wrote of massacres of Patagonian men, women, and children, "Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?"

Citations

References

External links

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online – Darwin Online; Darwin's publications, private papers and bibliography, supplementary works including biographies, obituaries and reviews

; public domain

Darwin Correspondence Project Full text and notes for complete correspondence to 1867, with summaries of all the rest

Works by Charles Darwin in audio format from LibriVox

Video and radio clips Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Darwin 200: Celebrating Charles Darwin's bicentenary, Natural History Museum

A Pictorial Biography of Charles Darwin

Mis-portrayal of Darwin as a Racist

Darwin's Volcano – a short video discussing Darwin and Agassiz' coral reef formation debate

'' The life and times of Charles Darwin'', an audio slideshow, The Guardian, Thursday 12 February 2009, (3 min 20 sec).

Darwin's Brave New World – A 3 part drama-documentary exploring Charles Darwin and the significant contributions of his colleagues Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace also featuring interviews with Richard Dawkins, David Suzuki, Jared Diamond

A naturalist's voyage around the world Account of the ''Beagle'' voyage using animation, in English from Centre national de la recherche scientifique

Category:Article Feedback Pilot Category:1809 births Category:1882 deaths Category:19th-century English people Category:19th-century scientists Category:Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Category:Botanists with author abbreviations Category:Burials at Westminster Abbey Category:Carcinologists Category:Circumnavigators of the globe Category:Coleopterists Category:Darwin-Wedgwood family Category:English agnostics Category:English Anglicans Category:English geologists Category:English naturalists Category:English sceptics Category:English travel writers Category:Ethologists Category:Evolutionary biologists Category:Fellows of the Leopoldina Category:Fellows of the Royal Entomological Society of London Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Fellows of the Zoological Society of London Category:Gentleman scientists Category:Human evolution theorists Category:Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Category:Old Salopians Category:People from Shrewsbury Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes Category:Recipients of the Copley Medal Category:Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) Category:Royal Medal winners Category:Wollaston Medal winners

af:Charles Darwin als:Charles Darwin ang:Charles Darwin ar:تشارلز داروين an:Charles Darwin ast:Charles Darwin az:Çarlz Darvin bn:চার্লস ডারউইন zh-min-nan:Charles Darwin be:Чарльз Роберт Дарвін be-x-old:Чарлз Дарвін bar:Charles Darwin bs:Charles Darwin br:Charles Darwin bg:Чарлз Дарвин ca:Charles Robert Darwin cs:Charles Darwin co:Charles Darwin cy:Charles Darwin da:Charles Darwin de:Charles Darwin et:Charles Darwin el:Κάρολος Δαρβίνος es:Charles Darwin eo:Charles Darwin ext:Charles Darwin eu:Charles Darwin fa:چارلز داروین hif:Charles Darwin fo:Charles Darwin fr:Charles Darwin fy:Charles Darwin ga:Charles Darwin gd:Charles Darwin gl:Charles Darwin gan:達爾文 gu:ચાર્લ્સ ડાર્વિન ko:찰스 다윈 hy:Չարլզ Դարվին hi:चार्ल्स डार्विन hr:Charles Darwin io:Charles Darwin id:Charles Darwin ia:Charles Darwin is:Charles Darwin it:Charles Darwin he:צ'ארלס דרווין jv:Charles Darwin kn:ಚಾರ್ಲ್ಸ್ ಡಾರ್ವಿನ್ pam:Charles Darwin ka:ჩარლზ დარვინი kk:Чарльз Роберт Дарвин sw:Charles Darwin ku:Charles Darwin lad:Charles Darwin la:Carolus Robertus Darwin lv:Čārlzs Darvins lb:Charles Darwin lt:Charles Darwin lij:Charles Darwin lmo:Charles Darwin hu:Charles Darwin mk:Чарлс Дарвин ml:ചാൾസ് ഡാർവിൻ mt:Charles Darwin mr:चार्ल्स डार्विन arz:تشارلز داروين ms:Charles Darwin mwl:Charles Darwin mn:Чарльз Дарвин my:ချားလ်စ်ဒါဝင် nah:Charles Darwin nl:Charles Darwin ne:चार्ल्स डार्विन ja:チャールズ・ダーウィン no:Charles Darwin nn:Charles Darwin oc:Charles Darwin uz:Charles Darwin pag:Charles Darwin pnb:چارلس ڈارون km:ឆាលែស ដាវីន pms:Charles Darwin pl:Charles Darwin pt:Charles Darwin kaa:Charles Darwin ro:Charles Darwin qu:Charles Darwin rue:Чарлз Дарвін ru:Дарвин, Чарльз sah:Чарлз Дарвин sa:चार्ल्स डार्विन sco:Charles Darwin sq:Çarls Darvin scn:Charles Darwin simple:Charles Darwin sk:Charles Darwin sl:Charles Darwin szl:Charles Darwin ckb:چارڵز داروین sr:Чарлс Дарвин sh:Charles Darwin fi:Charles Darwin sv:Charles Darwin tl:Charles Darwin ta:சார்லஸ் டார்வின் tt:Чарльз Дарвин te:చార్లెస్ డార్విన్ th:ชาลส์ ดาร์วิน tg:Чарлз Дарвин tr:Charles Darwin uk:Чарлз Дарвін ur:ڈارون ug:دارۋىن za:Charles Darwin vec:Charles Darwin vi:Charles Darwin vo:Charles Darwin fiu-vro:Darwini Charles wa:Charles Darwin vls:Charles Darwin war:Charles Darwin wo:Charles Darwin yi:טשארלס דארווין yo:Charles Darwin zh-yue:達爾文 zea:Charles Darwin bat-smg:Čarlzos Darvėns zh:查尔斯·达尔文

Name	Barack Obama
Alt	A portrait shot of Barack Obama, looking straight ahead. He has short black hair, and is wearing a dark navy blazer with a blue striped tie over a light blue collared shirt. In the background are two flags hanging from separate flagpoles: the American flag, and the flag of the Executive Office of the President.
Office	44th President of the United States
Vicepresident	Joe Biden
Term start	January 20, 2009
Predecessor	George W. Bush
Jr/sr2	United States Senate
State2	Illinois
Term start2	January 3, 2005
Term end2	November 16, 2008
Predecessor2	Peter Fitzgerald
Successor2	Roland Burris
Office3	Member of the Illinois Senate from the 13th District
Term start3	January 8, 1997
Term end3	November 4, 2004
Predecessor3	Alice Palmer
Successor3	Kwame Raoul
Birth name	Barack Hussein Obama II
Birth date	August 04, 1961
Birth place	Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Party	Democratic
Spouse	Michelle Robinson (1992–present)
Children	Malia (born 1998) Sasha (born 2001)
Residence	White House (Official)Chicago, Illinois (Private)
Alma mater	Occidental CollegeColumbia University (B.A.)Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession	Community organizerLawyerConstitutional law professorAuthor
Religion	Christianity
Signature	Barack Obama signature.svg
Signature alt	Barack Obama
Website	barackobama.com
Footnotes	}}

Barack Hussein Obama II (; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the ''Harvard Law Review''. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. In October 2009, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 and the Budget Control Act of 2011. In foreign policy, he ended the war in Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered US involvement in the 2011 Libya military intervention, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In April 2011, Obama declared his intention to seek re-election in the 2012 presidential election.

Early life and career

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry, along with Scottish, Irish, German, and Swiss. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961, separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and divorced in 1964. Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.

After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta. From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School.

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year before dying of ovarian cancer.

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind." Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear." Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind." At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as a great moral failure.

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental's disinvestment from South Africa due to its policy of apartheid. In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks. Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School

Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time. He returned in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.

In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the ''Harvard Law Review'' at the end of his first year, and president of the journal in his second year. During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. ''magna cum laude'' from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the ''Harvard Law Review'' gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as ''Dreams from My Father''.

University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney

In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book. He then taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law.

From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration drive with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, and led to ''Crain's Chicago Business'' naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be. In 1993 he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.

From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project; and of the Joyce Foundation. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.

Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002. In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.

In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority. He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained, and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations. During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms. Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the U.S. Senate.

U.S. Senate campaign

In May 2002, Obama commissioned a poll to assess his prospects in a 2004 U.S. Senate race; he created a campaign committee, began raising funds and lined up political media consultant David Axelrod by August 2002, and formally announced his candidacy in January 2003.

Obama was an early opponent of the George W. Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War, Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally, and spoke out against the war. He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.

Decisions by Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald and his Democratic predecessor Carol Moseley Braun to not participate in the election resulted in wide-open Democratic and Republican primary contests involving fifteen candidates. In the March 2004 primary election, Obama won in an unexpected landslide—which overnight made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party, started speculation about a presidential future, and led to the reissue of his memoir, ''Dreams from My Father''. In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, seen by 9.1 million viewers. His speech was well received and elevated his status within the Democratic Party.

Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004. Six weeks later, Alan Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan. In the November 2004 general election, Obama won with 70 percent of the vote.

U.S. Senator: 2005–2008

Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 3, 2005, becoming the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus. ''CQ Weekly'' characterized him as a "loyal Democrat" based on analysis of all Senate votes in 2005–2007. Obama announced on November 13, 2008, that he would resign his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period for the presidency.

Legislation

Obama cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. He introduced two initiatives bearing his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons; and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.gov, a web search engine on federal spending. On June 3, 2008, Senator Obama—along with Senators Tom Carper, Tom Coburn, and John McCain—introduced follow-up legislation: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008.

Obama sponsored legislation that would have required nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities of radioactive leaks, but the bill failed to pass in the full Senate after being heavily modified in committee. Regarding tort reform, Obama voted for the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which grants immunity from civil liability to telecommunications companies complicit with NSA warrantless wiretapping operations.

In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor. In January 2007, Obama and Senator Feingold introduced a corporate jet provision to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which was signed into law in September 2007. Obama also introduced Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections, and the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007, neither of which has been signed into law.

Later in 2007, Obama sponsored an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act adding safeguards for personality-disorder military discharges. This amendment passed the full Senate in the spring of 2008. He sponsored the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act supporting divestment of state pension funds from Iran's oil and gas industry, which has not passed committee; and co-sponsored legislation to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism. Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.

Committees

Obama held assignments on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works and Veterans' Affairs through December 2006. In January 2007, he left the Environment and Public Works committee and took additional assignments with Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He also became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. He met with Mahmoud Abbas before Abbas became President of the Palestinian National Authority, and gave a speech at the University of Nairobi condemning corruption within the Kenyan government.

Presidential campaigns

2008 presidential campaign

On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The choice of the announcement site was viewed as symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic "House Divided" speech in 1858. Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care, in a campaign that projected themes of "hope" and "change".

A large number of candidates entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The field narrowed to a duel between Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton after early contests, with the race remaining close throughout the primary process but with Obama gaining a steady lead in pledged delegates due to better long-range planning, superior fundraising, dominant organizing in caucus states, and better exploitation of delegate allocation rules. On June 7, 2008, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama.

On August 23, Obama announced his selection of Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate. Biden was selected from a field speculated to include former Indiana Governor and Senator Evan Bayh and Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Hillary Clinton called for her supporters to endorse Obama, and she and Bill Clinton gave convention speeches in his support. Obama delivered his acceptance speech, not at the center where the Democratic National Convention was held, but at Invesco Field at Mile High to a crowd of over 75,000; the speech was viewed by over 38 million people worldwide.

During both the primary process and the general election, Obama's campaign set numerous fundraising records, particularly in the quantity of small donations. On June 19, 2008, Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976.

McCain was nominated as the Republican candidate and the two engaged in three presidential debates in September and October 2008. On November 4, Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain. Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7 percent. He became the first African American to be elected president. Obama delivered his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago's Grant Park.

2012 presidential campaign

On April 4, 2011, Obama announced his re-election campaign for 2012 in a video titled "It Begins with Us" that he posted on his website and filed election papers with the Federal Election Commission.

Presidency

First days

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President, and Joe Biden as Vice President, took place on January 20, 2009. In his first few days in office Obama issued executive orders and presidential memoranda directing the U.S. military to develop plans to withdraw troops from Iraq. He ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp "as soon as practicable and no later than" January 2010, but during his first two years in office he has been unable to persuade Congress to appropriate funds required to accomplish the shutdown. Obama reduced the secrecy given to presidential records and changed procedures to promote disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. He also reversed George W. Bush's ban on federal funding to foreign establishments that allow abortions.

Domestic policy

The first bill signed into law by Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, relaxing the statute of limitations for equal-pay lawsuits. Five days later, he signed the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover an additional 4 million uninsured children. In March 2009, Obama reversed a Bush-era policy which had limited funding of embryonic stem cell research. Obama stated that he believed "sound science and moral values ... are not inconsistent" and pledged to develop "strict guidelines" on the research.

Obama appointed two women to serve on the Supreme Court in the first two years of his Presidency. Sonia Sotomayor, nominated by Obama on May 26, 2009, to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter, was confirmed on August 6, 2009, becoming the first Hispanic to be a Supreme Court Justice. Elena Kagan, nominated by Obama on May 10, 2010, to replace retiring Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, was confirmed on August 5, 2010, bringing the number of women sitting simultaneously on the Court to three, for the first time in American history.

On September 30, 2009, the Obama administration proposed new regulations on power plants, factories and oil refineries in an attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to curb global warming.

On October 8, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a measure that expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

On March 30, 2010, Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, a reconciliation bill which ends the process of the federal government giving subsidies to private banks to give out federally insured loans, increases the Pell Grant scholarship award, and makes changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

In a major space policy speech in April 2010, Obama announced a planned change in direction at NASA, the U.S. space agency. He ended plans for a return of human spaceflight to the moon and ended development of the Ares I rocket, Ares V rocket and Constellation program. He is focusing funding (which is expected to rise modestly) on Earth science projects and a new rocket type, as well as research and development for an eventual manned mission to Mars. Missions to the International Space Station are expected to continue until 2020.

On December 22, 2010, Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, a bill that provides for repeal of the Don't ask, don't tell policy of 1993 that has prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the United States Armed Forces. Repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" had been a key campaign promise that Obama had made during the 2008 presidential campaign.

On January 25, 2011, in his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama focused strongly on the themes of education and innovation, stressing the importance of innovation economics in working to make the United States more competitive globally. Among other plans and goals, Obama spoke of enacting a five-year freeze in domestic spending, eliminating tax breaks for oil companies and tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans, banning congressional earmarks, and reducing healthcare costs. Looking to the future, Obama promised that by 2015, the United States would have one million electric vehicles on the road and by 2035, clean-energy sources would be providing 80 percent of U.S. electricity.

Economic policy

thumb|right|President Barack Obama signing the [[American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009|American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law on February 17, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, with Vice President Joe Biden standing behind him]]On February 17, 2009, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $787 billion economic stimulus package aimed at helping the economy recover from the deepening worldwide recession. The act includes increased federal spending for health care, infrastructure, education, various tax breaks and incentives, and direct assistance to individuals, which is being distributed over the course of several years.

In March, Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, took further steps to manage the financial crisis, including introducing the Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets, which contains provisions for buying up to $2 trillion in depreciated real estate assets. Obama intervened in the troubled automotive industry in March 2009, renewing loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while reorganizing. Over the following months the White House set terms for both firms' bankruptcies, including the sale of Chrysler to Italian automaker Fiat and a reorganization of GM giving the U.S. government a temporary 60 percent equity stake in the company, with the Canadian government shouldering a 12 percent stake. In June 2009, dissatisfied with the pace of economic stimulus, Obama called on his cabinet to accelerate the investment. He signed into law the Car Allowance Rebate System, known colloquially as "Cash for Clunkers", that temporarily boosted the economy.

Although spending and loan guarantees from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department authorized by the Bush and Obama administrations totaled about $11.5 trillion, only $3 trillion had been spent by the end of November 2009. However, Obama and the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the 2010 budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion or 10.6 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) compared to the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion or 9.9 percent of GDP. For 2011, the administration predicted the deficit will slightly shrink to $1.34 trillion, while the 10-year deficit will increase to $8.53 trillion or 90 percent of GDP. The most recent increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion was signed into law on February 12, 2010. On August 2, 2011, after a lengthy congressional debate over whether to raise the nation's debt limit, Obama signed the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011. The legislation enforces limits on discretionary spending until 2021, establishes a procedure to increase the debt limit, creates a Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to propose further deficit reduction with a stated goal of achieving at least $1.5 trillion in budgetary savings over 10 years, and establishes automatic procedures for reducing spending by as much as $1.2 trillion if legislation originating with the new joint select committee does not achieve such savings. By passing the legislation, Congress was able to prevent an unprecedented U.S. government default on its obligations.

The unemployment rate rose in 2009, reaching a peak in October at 10.1 percent and averaging 10.0 percent in the fourth quarter. Following a decrease to 9.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010, the unemployment rate fell to 9.6 percent in the second quarter, where it remained for the rest of the year. Between February and December 2010, employment rose by 0.8 percent, which was less than the average of 1.9 percent experienced during comparable periods in the past four employment recoveries. GDP growth returned in the third quarter of 2009, expanding at a rate of 1.6 percent, followed by a 5.0 percent increase in the fourth quarter. Growth continued in 2010, posting an increase of 3.7 percent in the first quarter, with lesser gains throughout the rest of the year. In July 2010, the Federal Reserve expressed that although economic activity continued to increase, its pace had slowed, and Chairman Ben Bernanke stated that the economic outlook was "unusually uncertain." Overall, the economy expanded at a rate of 2.9 percent in 2010.

The Congressional Budget Office and a broad range of economists credit Obama's stimulus plan for economic growth. The CBO released a report stating that the stimulus bill increased employment by 1–2.1 million, while conceding that "It is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package." Although an April 2010 survey of members of the National Association for Business Economics showed an increase in job creation (over a similar January survey) for the first time in two years, 73 percent of 68 respondents believed that the stimulus bill has had no impact on employment.

Within a month of the 2010 midterm elections, Obama announced a compromise deal with the Congressional Republican leadership that included a temporary, two-year extension of the 2001 and 2003 income tax rates, a one-year payroll tax reduction, continuation of unemployment benefits, and a new rate and exemption amount for estate taxes. The compromise overcame opposition from some in both parties, and the resulting $858 billion Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress before Obama signed it on December 17, 2010.

Health care reform

Obama called for Congress to pass legislation reforming health care in the United States, a key campaign promise and a top legislative goal. He proposed an expansion of health insurance coverage to cover the uninsured, to cap premium increases, and to allow people to retain their coverage when they leave or change jobs. His proposal was to spend $900 billion over 10 years and include a government insurance plan, also known as the public option, to compete with the corporate insurance sector as a main component to lowering costs and improving quality of health care. It would also make it illegal for insurers to drop sick people or deny them coverage for pre-existing conditions, and require every American carry health coverage. The plan also includes medical spending cuts and taxes on insurance companies that offer expensive plans.

On July 14, 2009, House Democratic leaders introduced a 1,017-page plan for overhauling the U.S. health care system, which Obama wanted Congress to approve by the end of 2009. After much public debate during the Congressional summer recess of 2009, Obama delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress on September 9 where he addressed concerns over the proposals. In March 2009, Obama lifted a ban on stem cell research.

On November 7, 2009, a health care bill featuring the public option was passed in the House. On December 24, 2009, the Senate passed its own bill—without a public option—on a party-line vote of 60–39. On March 21, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed by the Senate in December was passed in the House by a vote of 219 to 212. Obama signed the bill into law on March 23, 2010.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes health-related provisions to take effect over four years, including expanding Medicaid eligibility for people making up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) starting in 2014, subsidizing insurance premiums for people making up to 400 percent of the FPL ($88,000 for family of four in 2010) so their maximum "out-of-pocket" payment for annual premiums will be from 2 to 9.5 percent of income, providing incentives for businesses to provide health care benefits, prohibiting denial of coverage and denial of claims based on pre-existing conditions, establishing health insurance exchanges, prohibiting annual coverage caps, and support for medical research. According to White House and Congressional Budget Office figures, the maximum share of income that enrollees would have to pay would vary depending on their income relative to the federal poverty level.

The costs of these provisions are offset by taxes, fees, and cost-saving measures, such as new Medicare taxes for those in high-income brackets, taxes on indoor tanning, cuts to the Medicare Advantage program in favor of traditional Medicare, and fees on medical devices and pharmaceutical companies; there is also a tax penalty for those who do not obtain health insurance, unless they are exempt due to low income or other reasons. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the net effect of both laws will be a reduction in the federal deficit by $143 billion over the first decade.

Gulf of Mexico oil spill

On April 20, 2010, an explosion destroyed an offshore drilling rig at the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, causing a major sustained oil leak. The well's operator, BP, initiated a containment and cleanup plan, and began drilling two relief wells intended to stop the flow. Obama visited the Gulf on May 2 among visits by members of his cabinet, and again on May 28 and June 4. On May 22 he announced a federal investigation and formed a bipartisan commission to recommend new safety standards, after a review by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and concurrent Congressional hearings. On May 27, he announced a 6-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling permits and leases, pending regulatory review. As multiple efforts by BP failed, some in the media and public expressed confusion and criticism over various aspects of the incident, and stated a desire for more involvement by Obama and the federal government.

Foreign policy

In February and March, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made separate overseas trips to announce a "new era" in U.S. foreign relations with Russia and Europe, using the terms "break" and "reset" to signal major changes from the policies of the preceding administration. Obama attempted to reach out to Arab leaders by granting his first interview to an Arab cable TV network, Al Arabiya.

On March 19, Obama continued his outreach to the Muslim world, releasing a New Year's video message to the people and government of Iran. This attempt at outreach was rebuffed by the Iranian leadership. In April, Obama gave a speech in Ankara, Turkey, which was well received by many Arab governments. On June 4, 2009, Obama delivered a speech at Cairo University in Egypt calling for "a new beginning" in relations between the Islamic world and the United States and promoting Middle East peace.

On June 26, 2009, in response to the Iranian government's actions towards protesters following Iran's 2009 presidential election, Obama said: "The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. We see it and we condemn it." On July 7, while in Moscow, he responded to a Vice President Biden comment on a possible Israeli military strike on Iran by saying: "We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East."

On September 24, 2009, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to preside over a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

In March 2010, Obama took a public stance against plans by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue building Jewish housing projects in predominantly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. During the same month, an agreement was reached with the administration of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new pact reducing the number of long-range nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both countries by about one-third. The New START treaty was signed by Obama and Medvedev in April 2010, and was ratified by the U.S. Senate in December 2010.

Iraq War

On February 27, 2009, Obama declared that combat operations in Iraq would end within 18 months. His remarks were made to a group of Marines preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. Obama said, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end." The Obama administration scheduled the withdrawal of combat troops to be completed by August 2010, decreasing troops levels from 142,000 while leaving a transitional force of 35,000 to 50,000 in Iraq until the end of 2011. On August 19, 2010, the last United States combat brigade exited Iraq. The plan is to transition the mission of the remaining troops from combat operations to counter-terrorism and the training, equipping, and advising of Iraqi security forces. On August 31, 2010, Obama announced that the United States combat mission in Iraq was over. On October 21, 2011 President Obama announced that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq in time to be, "home for the holidays".

War in Afghanistan

Early in his presidency, Obama moved to bolster U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan. He announced an increase to U.S. troop levels of 17,000 in February 2009 to "stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan", an area he said had not received the "strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires". He replaced the military commander in Afghanistan, General David D. McKiernan, with former Special Forces commander Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in May 2009, indicating that McChrystal's Special Forces experience would facilitate the use of counterinsurgency tactics in the war. On December 1, 2009, Obama announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 military personnel to Afghanistan. He also proposed to begin troop withdrawals 18 months from that date. McChrystal was replaced by David Petraeus in June 2010, after McChrystal's staff criticized White House personnel in a magazine article.

Israel

During the initial years of the Obama administration, the U.S. increased military cooperation with Israel, including a record number of U.S. troops participating in military exercises in the country, increased military aid, and the re-establishment of the U.S.-Israeli Joint Political Military Group and the Defense Policy Advisory Group. It was reported high-ranking defense officials from both countries had been making an unusual number of trips between the two countries, including Ehud Barak. Part of the military aid increase in 2010 was to fund Israel's missile defense shield. Before his retirement in September 2011, Adm. Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made four trips to Israel during his four-year tenure, two of them in 2010. Prior to 2007 no Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had done so for over ten years.

In 2011, Obama's Ambassador to the United Nations vetoed a resolution condemning Israeli settlements, with the U.S. the only nation on the Security Council doing so. Obama supports the two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict based on the 1967 borders with land swaps.

Libya

In March 2011, as forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi advanced on rebels across Libya, calls for a no-fly zone came from around the world, including Europe, the Arab League, and a resolution passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. In response to the unanimous passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17, Gaddafi who had previously vowed to "show no mercy" to the citizens of Benghazi—announced an immediate cessation of military activities, yet reports came in that his forces continued shelling Misrata. The next day, on Obama's orders, the U.S. military took a lead role in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government's air defense capabilities in order to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone, including the use of Tomahawk missiles, B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets. Six days later, on March 25, by unanimous vote of all of its 28 members, NATO took over leadership of the effort, dubbed Operation Unified Protector. Some Representatives questioned whether Obama had the constitutional authority to order military action in addition to questioning its cost, structure and aftermath.

|filename=050111 Osama Bin Laden Death Statement audioonly.ogg |title=President Obama announces the death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011. |description= }}

Osama bin Laden

Starting with information received in July 2010, intelligence developed by the CIA over the next several months determined what they believed to be the location of Osama bin Laden in a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburban area 35 miles from Islamabad. CIA head Leon Panetta reported this intelligence to President Obama in March 2011. Meeting with his national security advisers over the course of the next six weeks, Obama rejected a plan to bomb the compound, and authorized a "surgical raid" to be conducted by United States Navy SEALs. The operation took place on May 1, 2011, resulting in the death of bin Laden and the seizure of papers and computer drives and disks from the compound. Bin Laden's body was identified through DNA testing, and buried at sea several hours later. Within minutes of the President's announcement from Washington, DC, late in the evening on May 1, there were spontaneous celebrations around the country as crowds gathered outside the White House, and at New York City's Ground Zero and Times Square. Reaction to the announcement was positive across party lines, including from former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and from many countries around the world.

2010 midterm election

Obama called the November 2, 2010 election, where the Democratic Party lost 63 seats in, and control of, the House of Representatives, "humbling" and a "shellacking". He said that the results came because not enough Americans had felt the effects of the economic recovery.

Cultural and political image

Obama's family history, upbringing, and Ivy League education differ markedly from those of African American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in the civil rights movement. Obama is also not a descendant of American slaves. Expressing puzzlement over questions about whether he is "black enough", Obama told an August 2007 meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists that "we're still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong". Obama acknowledged his youthful image in an October 2007 campaign speech, saying: "I wouldn't be here if, time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation."

Obama is frequently referred to as an exceptional orator. During his pre-inauguration transition period and continuing into his presidency, Obama has delivered a series of weekly Internet video addresses.

According to the Gallup Organization, Obama began his presidency with a 68 percent approval rating before gradually declining for the rest of the year, and eventually bottoming out at 41 percent in August 2010, a trend similar to Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's first years in office. He experienced a small poll bounce shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden, which lasted until around June 2011, when his approval numbers dropped back to where they were prior to the operation. Polls show strong support for Obama in other countries, and before being elected President he has met with prominent foreign figures including then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italy's Democratic Party leader and then Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In a February 2009 poll conducted by Harris Interactive for France 24 and the ''International Herald Tribune'', Obama was rated as the most respected world leader, as well as the most powerful. In a similar poll conducted by Harris in May 2009, Obama was rated as the most popular world leader, as well as the one figure most people would pin their hopes on for pulling the world out of the economic downturn.

Obama won Best Spoken Word Album Grammy Awards for abridged audiobook versions of ''Dreams from My Father'' in February 2006 and for ''The Audacity of Hope'' in February 2008. His concession speech after the New Hampshire primary was set to music by independent artists as the music video "Yes We Can", which was viewed 10 million times on YouTube in its first month and received a Daytime Emmy Award. In December 2008, ''Time'' magazine named Obama as its Person of the Year for his historic candidacy and election, which it described as "the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments".

On October 9, 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Obama accepted this award in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2009, with "deep gratitude and great humility." The award drew a mixture of praise and criticism from world leaders and media figures. Obama is the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the third to become a Nobel laureate while in office.

Family and personal life

In a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "It's like a little mini-United Nations", he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." Obama has a half-sister with whom he was raised, Maya Soetoro-Ng, the daughter of his mother and her Indonesian second husband and seven half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family – six of them living. Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham, until her death on November 2, 2008, two days before his election to the Presidency. Obama also has roots in Ireland; he met with his Irish cousins in Moneygall in May 2011. In ''Dreams from My Father'', Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

Obama was known as "Barry" in his youth, but asked to be addressed with his given name during his college years. Besides his native English, Obama speaks Indonesian at the conversational level, which he learned during his four childhood years in Jakarta. He plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team.

Obama is a well known supporter of the Chicago White Sox, and threw out the first pitch at the 2005 ALCS when he was still a senator. In 2009, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the all star game while wearing a White Sox jacket. He is also primarily a Chicago Bears fan in the NFL, but in his childhood and adolesence was a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and recently rooted for them ahead of their victory in Super Bowl XLIII 12 days after Obama took office as President.

In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial requests to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born on July 4, 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), on June 10, 2001. The Obama daughters attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the private Sidwell Friends School. The Obamas have a Portuguese Water Dog named Bo, a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy.

Applying the proceeds of a book deal, the family moved in 2005 from a Hyde Park, Chicago condominium to a $1.6 million house in neighboring Kenwood, Chicago. The purchase of an adjacent lot—and sale of part of it to Obama by the wife of developer, campaign donor and friend Tony Rezko—attracted media attention because of Rezko's subsequent indictment and conviction on political corruption charges that were unrelated to Obama.

In December 2007, ''Money'' magazine estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million. Their 2009 tax return showed a household income of $5.5 million—up from about $4.2 million in 2007 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books. On his 2010 income of $1.7 million, he gave 14 percent to non-profit organizations, including $131,000 to Fisher House Foundation, a charity assisting wounded veterans' families, allowing them to reside near where the veteran is receiving medical treatments.

Obama tried to quit smoking several times, sometimes using nicotine replacement therapy, and, in early 2010, Michelle Obama said that he had successfully quit smoking.

Religious views

Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life. He wrote in ''The Audacity of Hope'' that he "was not raised in a religious household". He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists"), to be detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known". He described his father as "raised a Muslim", but a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful". Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change".

In an interview with the evangelical periodical ''Christianity Today'', Obama stated: "I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life."

On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views saying "I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."

Obama was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ, a black liberation church, in 1988, and was an active member there for two decades. Obama resigned from Trinity during the Presidential campaign after controversial statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright became public. After a prolonged effort to find a church to attend regularly in Washington, Obama announced in June 2009 that his primary place of worship would be the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David.

Notes

}}

References

Further reading

Graff, Garrett. "The Legend of Barack Obama", ''Washingtonian'', November 1, 2006. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

Koltun, Dave (2005) ''"The 2004 Illinois Senate Race: Obama Wins Open Seat and Becomes National Political "Star""'' in ''"The Road to Congress 2004"'' Editors: Sunil Ahuja (Youngstown State University) and Robert Dewhirst (Truman State University), Nova Science Publishers, Hauppauge, New York, 2005, ISBN 1-59454-360-7

Lizza, Ryan. "Above the Fray", ''GQ'', September 2007. Retrieved on October 27, 2010.

MacFarquhar, Larissa. "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?", ''New Yorker'', May 7, 2007. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

McClelland, Edward, ''Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President'', Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Zutter, Hank De. "What Makes Obama Run?", ''Chicago Reader'', December 8, 1995. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

External links

;Official

President Barack Obama ''White House official website''

BarackObama.com (official re-election campaign website)

;Other

Collected news and commentary at the ''Chicago Tribune''

Category:1961 births Category:African American academics Category:African American lawyers Category:African American memoirists Category:African American United States presidential candidates Category:African American United States Senators Category:African-American Christians Category:American civil rights lawyers Category:American legal scholars Category:American Nobel laureates Category:American people of English descent Category:American people of German descent Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American people of Kenyan descent Category:American people of Welsh descent Category:American political writers Category:Audio book narrators Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Community organizers Category:Current national leaders Category:Democratic Party Presidents of the United States Category:Democratic Party United States Senators Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Harvard Law School alumni Category:Illinois Democrats Category:Illinois lawyers Category:Illinois State Senators Category:Living people Category:Luo people Category:Nobel Peace Prize laureates Barack Category:Occidental College alumni Category:People from Honolulu, Hawaii Category:Politicians from Chicago, Illinois Category:Presidents of the United Nations Security Council Category:Punahou School alumni Category:United Church of Christ members Category:United States presidential candidates, 2008 Category:United States presidential candidates, 2012 Category:United States Senators from Illinois Category:University of Chicago Law School faculty Category:Writers from Chicago, Illinois Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles Category:American people of Swiss descent

af:Barack Obama als:Barack Obama am:ባራክ ኦባማ ang:Barack Obama ab:Барақ Обама ar:باراك أوباما an:Barack Obama arc:ܒܪܐܩ ܐܘܒܐܡܐ ast:Barack Obama gn:Barack Obama ay:Barack Obama az:Barak Obama bm:Barack Obama bn:বারাক ওবামা bjn:Barack Obama zh-min-nan:Barack Obama ba:Барак Обама be:Барак Абама be-x-old:Барак Абама bh:बराक ओबामा bcl:Barack Obama bi:Barak Obama bg:Барак Обама bar:Barack Obama bo:བ་རག་ཨོ་པྰ་མ། bs:Barack Obama br:Barack Obama ca:Barack Hussein Obama cv:Барак Обама ceb:Barack Obama cs:Barack Obama cbk-zam:Barack Obama co:Barack Obama cy:Barack Obama da:Barack Obama pdc:Barack Obama de:Barack Obama dv:ބަރަކް އޮބާމާ nv:Hastiin alą́ąjįʼ dahsidáhígíí Barack Obama dsb:Barack Obama et:Barack Obama el:Μπαράκ Ομπάμα eml:Barack Obama myv:Обамань Барак es:Barack Obama eo:Barack Obama ext:Barack Obama eu:Barack Obama fa:باراک اوباما fo:Barack Obama fr:Barack Obama fy:Barack Obama fur:Barack Obama ga:Barack Obama gv:Barack Obama gd:Barack Obama gl:Barack Obama gan:奧巴馬 hak:Barack Obama ko:버락 오바마 ha:Barack Obama haw:Barack Obama hy:Բարաք Օբամա hi:बराक ओबामा hsb:Barack Obama hr:Barack Obama io:Barack Obama ilo:Barack Obama id:Barack Obama ia:Barack Obama ie:Barack Obama os:Обама, Барак is:Barack Obama it:Barack Obama he:ברק אובמה jv:Barack Obama kl:Barack Obama kn:ಬರಾಕ್ ಒಬಾಮ pam:Barack Obama ka:ბარაკ ობამა kk:Барак Обама kw:Barack Obama rw:Barack Obama sw:Barack Obama ht:Barack Obama ku:Barack Obama ky:Барак Хусеин Обама lad:Barack Obama lo:ບາຣັກ ໂອບາມາ ltg:Baraks Obama la:Baracus Obama lv:Baraks Obama lb:Barack Obama lt:Barack Obama li:Barack Obama ln:Barack Obama jbo:byRAK.obamas lmo:Barack Obama hu:Barack Obama mk:Барак Обама mg:Barack Obama ml:ബറാക്ക് ഒബാമ mt:Barack Obama mi:Barack Obama mr:बराक ओबामा xmf:ბარაქ ობამა arz:باراك اوباما mzn:باراک اوباما ms:Barack Obama mn:Барак Обама my:ဘာရတ်အိုဘားမား nah:Barack Obama na:Barack Obama nl:Barack Obama nds-nl:Barack Obama ne:बाराक ओबामा ja:バラク・オバマ nap:Barack Obama no:Barack Obama nn:Barack Obama nrm:Barack Obama nov:Barack Obama oc:Barack Obama mhr:Обама, Барак uz:Barack Obama pa:ਬਰਾਕ ਓਬਾਮਾ pag:Barack Obama pnb:بارک اوبامہ pap:Barack Obama ps:باراک حسين اوباما km:បារ៉ាក់ អូបាម៉ា pms:Barack Obama tpi:Barack Obama nds:Barack Obama pl:Barack Obama pt:Barack Obama crh:Barak Obama ksh:Barack Obama ro:Barack Obama rm:Barack Obama qu:Barack Obama ru:Обама, Барак sah:Барак Обама se:Barack Obama sc:Barack Obama sco:Barack Obama nso:Barack Obama sq:Barack Obama scn:Barack Obama si:බරාක් ඔබාමා simple:Barack Obama sk:Barack Obama sl:Barack Obama szl:Barack Obama so:Barack Obama ckb:باراک ئۆباما srn:Barack Obama sr:Барак Обама sh:Barack Obama su:Barack Obama fi:Barack Obama sv:Barack Obama tl:Barack Obama ta:பராக் ஒபாமா roa-tara:Barack Obama tt:Baraq Husseyın Obama II te:బరాక్ ఒబామా tet:Barack Obama th:บารัก โอบามา tg:Барак Ҳусейн Обама chr:ᏆᎳᎩ ᎣᏆᎹ tr:Barack Obama tk:Barak Obama uk:Барак Обама ur:بارک اوبامہ ug:باراك ئوباما vec:Barack Obama vi:Barack Obama wa:Barack Obama vls:Barack Obama war:Barack Obama wo:Barack Obama wuu:巴拉克·奥巴马 yi:באראק אבאמא yo:Barack Obama zh-yue:奧巴馬 diq:Barack Obama zea:Barack Obama bat-smg:Barack Obama zh:贝拉克·奥巴马

name	Eugenie Scott
birth date	October 24, 1945
birth place	USA
occupation	National Center for Science Education Director
website	National Center for Science Education
awards	Public Welfare Medal (2010) }}

Eugenie Carol Scott (born October 24, 1945) is an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) since 1987. She is a leading critic of young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Biography

Academic career

Scott grew up in Wisconsin and first became interested in anthropology after reading her sister's anthropology textbook. Scott received a BS and MS from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, followed by a PhD from the University of Missouri. She joined the University of Kentucky as a physical anthropologist in 1974 and shortly thereafter attended a debate between her mentor James A. Gavan and the young earth creationist Duane Gish which piqued her interest in the creation-evolution controversy. She also taught at the University of Colorado and at California State University, Hayward. Her research work focused on medical anthropology and skeletal biology.

In 1980 Scott was at the forefront of an attempt to prevent creationism from being taught in the public schools of Lexington, Kentucky. From this grassroot effort in Kentucky and other states, the National Center for Science Education was formed in 1981. Scott was appointed the NCSE's executive director in 1987, the year in which teaching creation science in American public schools was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court in ''Edwards v. Aguillard''.

Scott and her husband, Thomas C. Sager, a lawyer, have one daughter and reside in Berkeley, California.

Academic recognition

In 1993 the University of Missouri honored Scott as a distinguished alumna. She was elected to the California Academy of Sciences in 1994. She served as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists from 2000 to 2002. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002 and was its chair. She is also a member of Sigma Xi.

Scott has received many awards from academic organizations. In 1999 she was awarded the Bruce Alberts Award by the American Society for Cell Biology. In 2001 she received the Geological Society of America's Public Service Award. She received the 2002 Public Service Award from the National Science Board for "her promotion of public understanding of the importance of science, the scientific method, and science education and the role of evolution in science education". In 2002 the American Institute of Biological Sciences awarded her the first Outstanding Service Award. Scott also received the 2002 Margaret Nicholson Distinguished Service Award from the California Science Teachers Association. The National Association of Biology Teachers gave her honorary membership in 2005. In 2006 she was awarded the Anthropology in the Media Award by the American Anthropological Association for "the successful communication of anthropology to the general public through the media". In 2007 Scott and Kenneth R. Miller were jointly awarded the Outstanding Educator’s Award by the Exploratorium Museum.

Scott has been awarded honorary degrees by McGill University in 2003, by Ohio State University in 2005 and in 2006 by Mount Holyoke College and her ''alma mater'' the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary degree by Rutgers University. In 2008 she was awarded an honorary degree by University of New Mexico.

In 2009, Scott became the first-ever recipient of the Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. She was chosen for devoting "her life to advancing public understanding of evolution." She was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.

On August 21, 2010 Dr. Scott was honored with an award recognizing her contributions in the skeptical field, from the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) during its 10th Anniversary Gala.

On October 9, 2010 Committee for Skeptical Inquiry announced Scott (and others) as a part of their policy-making Executive Council, she will also serve on ''Skeptical Inquirer'''s magazine board.

Worldview

Scott was initially brought up in Christian Science by her mother and grandmother, but later switched to a Congregational church under the influence of her sister; she describes her background as liberal Protestant. Scott is now a secular humanist and describes herself as a nontheist. In 2003, the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported that "Scott describes herself as atheist but does not discount the importance of spirituality." In 2003 she was one of the signers of the third humanist manifesto, ''Humanism and Its Aspirations''. She is also a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 2003 she was awarded the "Defense of Science Award" from the Center for Inquiry for "her tireless leadership in defending scientific evolution and educational freedom".

In 1998, Scott received the American Humanist Association's Isaac Asimov Award in Science. In her acceptance speech she explained how a statement adopted by the National Association of Biology Teachers that evolution was "unsupervised" and "impersonal" was attacked by creationists such as Phillip E. Johnson, and the initial reaction of the NABT was not to bow to pressure from creationists to change it. However, Scott agreed with theologian Huston Smith and philosopher Alvin Plantinga that "unsupervised" and "impersonal" should be dropped from the statement as they made philosophical and theological claims beyond those science could claim to make based on its principle of methodological naturalism – and the statement was altered.

NCSE is religiously neutral and has members who hold a variety of faith-based beliefs or no beliefs at all. Nevertheless, both Scott and the NCSE are criticized as being "atheistic" by creationist groups. Scott jokes that she sometimes thinks her first name is "Atheist" for the frequency with which she is referred to as "Atheist Eugenie Scott" by creationists.

Authorship

Scott is widely considered to be a leading expert on creationism (including intelligent design), and one of its strongest opponents. Her book ''Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction'' was published by Greenwood Press in 2004 and then in paperback by the University of California Press in 2005. It has a foreword by Niles Eldredge.

She also co-edited with Glenn Branch the 2006 anthology ''Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools''.

In 2006 Jon D. Miller, Scott and Shinji Okamoto had a brief article published in ''Science'' entitled "Public Acceptance of Evolution", an analysis of polling on the acceptance of evolution from the last 20 years in the United States and compare that to other countries. Turkey had the lowest acceptance of evolution in the survey, with the United States having the next-lowest, though the authors saw a positive in the higher percentage of Americans who are unsure about evolution, and therefore "reachable" for evolution.

Less seriously, she has co-authored with Glenn Branch and Nick Matzke a 2004 paper on "The Morphology of Steve" in the ''Annals of Improbable Research'' which arose from the NCSE's Project Steve.

Media appearances

David Berlinski, a fellow at the Discovery Institute, describes Scott as an opponent "who is often sent out to defend Darwin". However, Scott prefers to see herself as "Darwin's golden retriever". Scott says that her job "requires coping with science illiteracy in the American public".

Scott has been profiled in ''Scientific American'', ''The Scientist'', the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', and the ''Stanford Medical Magazine''. She has had been interviewed for Science & Theology News, CSICOP, Church & State and Point of Inquiry. She has commentary published by ''Science & Theology News'', Metanexus Institute.

She also acted as the education spokesperson for the 2001 PBS: Evolution TV series

Scott has taken part in numerous interviews on MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, debating various creationist and Intelligent design advocates. On 29 November 2004, Scott debated astrophysicist Jason Lisle of Answers in Genesis on CNN. On May 6, 2005 Scott debated Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, on ''The Big Story'' with John Gibson. The latter concerned the Kansas evolution hearings.

In 2004, the National Center for Science Education was represented by Scott on Penn and Teller's Showtime television show ''Bullshit!'', on the episode titled "Creationism", on which Dr. Scott offered philosophical views about the creationist and intelligent design movements. She noted "it would be unfair to tell students that there is a serious dispute going on among scientists whether evolution took place" because there is no such debate between scientists. She further noted that "a lot of the time the creationists... they'll search through scientific journals and try to pull out something they think demonstrates evolution doesn't work and there is a kind of interesting rationale behind it. Their theology is such that if one thing is wrong with the Bible you have to throw it all out so that's why Genesis has to be interpreted literally. They look at science the same way. If one little piece of the evolutionary puzzle doesn't fit the whole thing has to go." Scott then explained, "that's not the way science is done."

Scott serves on the National Advisory Council of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and on the National Advisory Council of Americans for Religious Liberty. In 1999 Scott was awarded the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for "for tirelessly defending the separation of church and state by ensuring that religious neutrality is maintained in the science curriculum of America's public schools", and in 2006 was one of the three judges chosen to make the awards.

Dover trial participation

In 2005, Scott and other NCSE staff served as scientific and educational consultants for the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, which originated in Dover, Pennsylvania. Judge John Jones ruled against teaching intelligent design or creationism in the public schools.

Books

Also: Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313321221

References

External links

Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education

Eugenie Scott on Teaching Evolution, Books and Ideas

Category:Articles with inconsistent citation formats Category:1945 births Category:American anthropologists Category:American humanists Category:University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee alumni Category:University of Missouri alumni Category:Living people Category:California State University, East Bay faculty Category:National Academy of Sciences laureates Category:American skeptics

bg:Юджийн Скот da:Eugenie Scott nl:Eugenie Scott ru:Скотт, Юджени fi:Eugenie Scott

Name	René Girard
Birth date	December 25, 1923
Birth place	Avignon, France
Residence	Stanford, California
Workplaces	Duke University, Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University
Alma mater	Indiana University
Known for	mimetic desire scapegoat mechanism as origin of sacrifice and foundation of human culture
Religion	Christian: Roman Catholic
Signature
Footnotes	}}

René Girard (born December 25, 1923, Avignon, France) is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of several books (see below), in which he developed the following ideas:

# mimetic desire: imitation is an aspect of behaviour that not only affects learning but also desire, and imitated desire is a cause of conflict, # the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, # the Bible reveals the two previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

René Girard's writings cover many areas. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature that uses his hypotheses and ideas in the areas of literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Life and career

was born in Avignon on December 25, 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris. The subject of his thesis was "Private life in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century" ("").

In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University on a one-year fellowship, but eventually pursued most of his career in the United States. The subject of his PhD at Indiana University was "American Opinion of France, 1940-1943". Although his research was in history, he was also assigned to teach French literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. He received his PhD in 1950 and stayed at Indiana University until 1953. He occupied positions at Duke University and Bryn Mawr College from 1953 to 1957, after which he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961. In that year, he also published his first book: '''' (''Deceit, Desire and the Novel'', 1966).

For several years, he moved back and forth between the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. The two most important books published in this period are '''' (1972; ''Violence and the Sacred'', 1977) and '''' (1978; ''Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World'', 1987).

In 1981 he became Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. During this period, he published '''' (1982), '''' (1985), ''A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare'' (1991) and '''' (1994). In 1990, a group of scholars founded the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R;) with a goal to "explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture". This organization also organizes a yearly conference devoted to topics related to mimetic theory, scapegoating, violence, and religion. René Girard is Honorary Chair of COV&R.; Cofounder and first president of the COV&R; was the Roman Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager.

In 1985, he received his first honorary degree at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands; several others followed later. On March 17, 2005, René Girard was elected to the Académie française. He continues publishing articles and books.

His work has inspired interdisciplinary research projects and experimental research such as the Mimetic Theory project sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

A more detailed biographical sketch is available in ''The Girard Reader'', edited by James G. Williams.

Girard's thought

Mimetic desire

After almost a decade of teaching French literature in the United States, Girard began to develop a new way of speaking about literary texts. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover their common structural properties after noticing that characters in great fiction evolved in a system of relationships otherwise common to the wider generality of novels. But there was a distinction to be made:

Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is.

So there did indeed exist "psychological laws" as Marcel Proust calls them. These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is the content of his first book, ''Deceit, Desire and the Novel'' (1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be", it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.

Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.

Through their characters, our own behaviour is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into sadism.

This fundamental focus on mimetic desire would be pursued by René Girard throughout the rest of his career. It is interesting to note that the stress on imitation in humans was not a popular subject when Girard developed his theories, but today there is independent support for his claims coming from empirical research in psychology and neuroscience (see below).

Violence and the Sacred

:''See also: Girard's mimetic double bind'' Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. René Girard himself says, "If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis." Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, began to study anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the victimization process, which is at the origin of archaic religion and which he sets forth in his second book ''Violence and the Sacred'' (1972).

If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, then a fourth. This process quickly snowballs. Since from the beginning the desire is aroused by the other (and not by the object) the object is soon forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. At this stage of the crisis the antagonists will no longer imitate each other's desires for an object, but each other's antagonism. They wanted to share the same object, but now they want to destroy the same enemy. So, a paroxysm of violence would tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would, mimetically, grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim would reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back. believes this to be the genesis of archaic religion, of ritual sacrifice as the repetition of the original event, of myth as an account of this event, of the taboos that forbid access to all the objects at the origin of the rivalries that degenerated into this absolutely traumatizing crisis. This religious elaboration takes place gradually over the course of the repetition of the mimetic crises whose resolution brings only a temporary peace. The elaboration of the rites and of the taboos constitutes a kind of empirical knowledge about violence.

Although explorers and anthropologists have not been able to witness events similar to these, which go back to the earliest times, indirect evidence for them abounds, such as the universality of ritual sacrifice and the innumerable myths that have been collected from the most varied peoples. If Girard's theory is true, then we will find in myths the culpability of the victim-god, depictions of the selection of the victim, and his power to beget the order that governs the group. And found these elements in numerous myths, beginning with that of Oedipus, which he analyzed in this and later books. On this question he opposes .

The phrase "scapegoat mechanism" was not coined by Girard himself; it had been used earlier by Kenneth Burke in ''Permanence and Change'' (1935) and ''A Grammar of Motives'' (1940). However, Girard took this concept from Burke and developed it much more extensively as an interpretation of human culture.

In ''Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World'' (1978), Girard develops the implications of this discovery. The victimary process is the missing link between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the humanization of primates. It allows us to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn explains the hunt which is primitively ritual, and the domestication of animals as a fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture. It shows that at the beginning of all culture is archaic religion, which Durkheim had sensed. The elaboration of the rites and taboos by proto-human or human groups would take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that we can detect: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. So we can find in archaic religion the origin of all political or cultural institutions.

According to Girard, just as the theory of Natural selection of species is the rational principle that explains the immense diversity of forms of life, the victimization process is the rational principle that explains the origin of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. The analogy with Darwin also extends to the scientific status of the theory, as each of these presents itself as a hypothesis that is not capable of being proven experimentally, given the extreme amounts of time necessary to the production of the phenomena in question, but which imposes itself by its great explanatory power.

The origin of language

According to René Girard, the origin of language is also related to scapegoating. After the first victim, after the murder of the first scapegoat, there were the first prohibitions and rituals, but these came into being before representation and language, hence before culture. And that means that "people" (perhaps not human beings) "will not start fighting again". René Girard says:

If mimetic disruption comes back, our instinct will tell us to do again what the sacred has done to save us, which is to kill the scapegoat. Therefore it would be the force of substitution of immolating another victim instead of the first. But the relationship of this process with representation is not one that can be defined in a clear-cut way. This process would be one that moves towards representation of the sacred, towards definition of the ritual as ritual and prohibition as prohibition. But this process would already begin prior the representation, you see, because it is directly produced by the experience of the misunderstood scapegoat.

According to Girard, the substitution of an immolated victim for the first, is "the very first symbolic sign created by the hominids". Girard also says this is the first time that one thing represents another thing, standing in the place of this (absent) one. This substitution is the beginning of representation and language, but also the beginning of sacrifice and ritual. The genesis of language and ritual is very slow and we must imagine that there are also kinds of rituals among the animals: "It is the originary scapegoating which prolongs itself in a process which can be infinitely long in moving from, how should I say, from instinctive ritualization, instinctive prohibition, instinctive separation of the antagonists, which you already find to a certain extent in animals, towards representation."

Unlike Eric Gans, Girard does not think that there is an original scene during which there is "a sudden shift from non-representation to representation", or a sudden shift from animality to humanity. According to the French sociologist , it is hard to understand how the process of representation (symbolicity, language...) actually occurs and he has called this a ''black box'' in 's theory.

René Girard also says:

One great characteristic of man is what they [the authors of the modern theory of evolution] call neoteny, the fact that the human infant is born premature, with an open skull, no hair and a total inability to fend for himself. To keep it alive, therefore, there must be some form of cultural protection, because in the world of mammals, such infants would not survive, they would be destroyed. Therefore there is a reason to believe that in the later stages of human evolution, culture and nature are in constant interaction. The first stages of this interaction must occur prior to language, but they must include forms of sacrifice and prohibition that create a space of non-violence around the mother and the children which make it possible to reach still higher stages of human development. You can postulate as many such stages as are needed. Thus, you can have a transition between ethology and anthropology which removes, I think, all philosophical postulates. The discontinuities would never be of such a nature as to demand some kind of sudden intellectual illumination.

Judeo-Christian scriptures

Biblical text as a science of man

In ''Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World'', René Girard discusses for the first time Christianity and the Bible. The Gospels ostensibly present themselves as a typical mythical account, with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, an event that is then commemorated by Christians through ritual sacrifice — a material re-presentation in this case — in the Eucharist. The parallel is perfect except for one detail: the truth of the innocence of the victim is proclaimed by the text and the writer. The mythical account is usually built on the lie of the guilt of the victim inasmuch as it is an account of the event seen from the viewpoint of the anonymous lynchers. This ignorance is indispensable to the efficacy of the sacrificial violence.

The evangelical "good news" clearly affirms the innocence of the victim, thus becoming, by attacking ignorance, the germ of the destruction of the sacrificial order on which rests the equilibrium of societies. Already the Old Testament shows this turning inside-out of the mythic accounts with regard to the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, ...), and the Hebrews were conscious of the uniqueness of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is with full clarity that are unveiled these "things hidden since the foundation of the world" (Matthew 13:35), the foundation of social order on murder, described in all its repulsive ugliness in the account of the Passion.

This revelation is even clearer because the text is a work on desire and violence, from the serpent setting alight the desire of Eve in paradise to the prodigious strength of the mimetism that brings about the denial of Peter during the Passion (Mark 14: 66-72; Luke 22:54-62). Girard reinterprets certain biblical expressions in light of his theories; for instance, he sees "scandal" (''skandalon'', literally, a "snare", or an "impediment placed in the way and causing one to stumble or fall") as signifying mimetic rivalry, for example Peter's denial of Jesus. No one escapes responsibility, neither the envious nor the envied: "Woe to the man through whom scandal comes" (Matthew 18:7).

Christian society

The evangelical revelation contains the truth on the violence, available for two thousand years, René Girard tells us. Has it put an end to the sacrificial order based on violence in the society that has claimed the gospel text as its own religious text? No, he replies, since in order for a truth to have an impact it must find a receptive listener, and people do not change that quickly. The gospel text has instead acted as a ferment that brings about the decomposition of the sacrificial order. While medieval Europe showed the face of a sacrificial society that still knew very well how to despise and ignore its victims, nonetheless the efficacy of sacrificial violence has never stopped decreasing, in the measure that ignorance receded. Here René Girard sees the principle of the uniqueness and of the transformations of the Western society whose destiny today is one with that of human society as a whole.

Does the retreat of the sacrificial order mean less violence? Not at all; rather, it deprives modern societies of most of the capacity of sacrificial violence to establish temporary order. The "innocence" of the time of the ignorance is no more. On the other hand, Christianity, following the example of Judaism, has desacralized the world, making possible a utilitarian relationship with nature. Increasingly threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crises on a grand scale, the contemporary world is on one hand more quickly caught up by its guilt, and on the other hand has developed such a great technical power of destruction that it is condemned to both more and more responsibility and less and less innocence. So, for example, while empathy for victims manifests progress in the moral conscience of society, it nonetheless also takes the form of a competition among victims that threatens an escalation of violence.

Reception and criticism

Older discussions of mimetic desire

René Girard often wrote that writers were the first to articulate the concept of mimetic desire. Stéphane Vinolo writes that some philosophers also expressed the concept. He quotes Baruch Spinoza in his ''Ethics'' (Part. III Prop. XXVII):

By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion. [And the "proof"] If we conceive anyone similar to ourselves as affected by any emotion, this conception will express of our body similar to that emotion.

Vinolo also quotes Thomas Hobbes's ''Leviathan'': "From this equality of ability, arose equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless cannot both enjoy, they become enemies..." Wolfgang Palaver wrote about Alexis de Tocqueville: "Two hundred years after Hobbes, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville mentioned the dangers coming along with equality, too. Like Hobbes, he refers to the increase of mimetic desire coming along with equality. And he quoted Tocqueville's ''Democracy in America'':

When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbound career seems open to his ambition and he will readily persuade himself that he is borne to no common destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality that allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes renders all the citizens less able to realize them; it circumscribes their powers on every side, while it gives freer scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not first perceive. They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position.

In this case René Girard is absolutely aware of his intellectual debt to Tocqueville. Taking the Montréal Massacre as a starting point, Palaver questions the origin of contemporary human violence:

Girard's mimetic theory helps us to explain the rise of violence in egalitarian and competitive societies. The more our pride and ambition forces us to be foremost the more likely it becomes that we will be defeated. Trying to be ahead of all the others forces us to turn them all into our rivals. We are never satisfied as long as there is anyone in front of us. Mimetic rivalry leads us to run those races which we cannot win and directs us towards insurmountable obstacles. The more we try to succeed the more we will increase the resistance against our claim. Resistance soon becomes the object of our quest itself and will lead to an idolization of violence. If only those objects are worth to fight for which we cannot get, we are easily led to the fatal conclusion that violence is the true God of the world. We seek defeat because it brings us closer to this God and we will also use violence ourselves because by imitating this God we hope we soon can become his equal. Mimetic desire has a tendency to fetishize violence and it would not be wrong to conclude that all anthropological and philosophical theories that result in an ontology of violence - like Hegel dialectics - are in fact worshiping this false God.

This explanation leads back to literature and to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ''The Brothers Karamazov'' as Girard interpreted it.

Beneficial imitation

Another source of contention is Girard's seeming to have left no role for beneficial imitation. Rebecca Adams argues that because Girard's theories fixate on violence, he creates a 'scapegoat' himself with his own theory: the scapegoat of positive mimesis. Adams proposes a reassessment of Girard's theory that includes an account of loving mimesis or, as she prefers to call it, creative mimesis. Some say there is also a good mimesis in the thought of Girard, for instance the imitation of Jesus. Another possible instance is the imitation of the "external mediation" when the model is "far" from me as, for instance, Amadis in Cervantes's ''Don Quixote''. In this last case, it is not a "good" imitation, but some "Girardians" point out the positive aspects of external mediation. Jean-Michel Oughourlian takes the example of the imitation of a politician: "The imitation can be totally peaceful and beneficial; I don't believe that I am the other, I don't want to take his place [...] This imitation can lead me to become sensitive to the social and political problems..." It is also possible to quote this sentence from a short presentation of Girard's theory: "(...) Young children imitate their teachers as closely as possible and are even encouraged to do so, but within an educational frame that maintains a certain distance between subject and model, prohibiting confusion. If many little girls want to become schoolmistress, it is later, and all is in this 'later'."

Place in the anthropological tradition

The accurate relationship of Girard's thought with both Christian faith and science is hard to explain. In '''' Girard wrote: "The authentic knowledge about violence and all its works to be found in the Gospels cannot be the result of human action alone." A few years later, Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch, reacted violently in ''Le Monde'' with an article entitled "" ("The Gospel according to Saint Girard"). De Heusch, who is an agnostic, stated that Girard's thought was not anthropology but metaphysics. In '''' (1994) René Girard wrote: "Jean-Marie Domenach thinks that I am trying to give a scientific demonstration of faith. I know that a demonstration of faith is impossible, but faith is not alone. There is also the understanding, and the great Christian tradition had always been saying that there is a deep agreement between faith and understanding. That's this agreement I am trying to define."

According to Charles K. Bellinger, Girard provides a "secular account of the origin of religion among primitive people." In '''' (2004), Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha say: "''Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World'' is a theory of the hominisation and of the origin of culture in a naturalistic framework, firstly in combining ethnology and anthropology", and Girard answers immediately without rejecting this presentation of his thought.

In 2008, Camille Tarot wrote: "Girard's Christian faith affects theology and the social sciences in different ways. François Lagarde spoke of a 'christianisation' of the social sciences. People might have expected that the theologians would denounce the 'anthropologisation' of the theology and thus a 'humanisation' of Christianity. It is astonishing that nobody has done this." In fact, Tarot is wrong: Father Valandier, the Director of the review ''Etudes'' (a journal started by Jesuits), is very critical of Girard because of this confusion between science and Christianity or between science and faith. According to Jean Greisch (with many nuances), Girard's thought is more or less a kind of Gnosis.

In an article published in September 2008 claimed that René Girard's work finds its place in the tradition of great anthropologists such as , Arthur Maurice Hocart, Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, and Robertson Smith, who all pointed out the importance of sacrifice at the origin of humanity. Girard also works in the tradition of Émile Durkheim, who pointed out the absolute link between religion and society. For Scubla, Girard gathered many elements of all these authors and combined them into an original synthesis based on the scapegoating phenomenon. Scubla states that Girard's thought is the "first radically agnostic theory of religion" and "includes all these theories into a simpler and broader system [which] overtakes the domain of religion".

René Girard is a Catholic, but the epistemological status of his theory is disputed both by atheist or agnostic people (in favour or not) and by Catholic or Christian people (in favour or not).

The Bible and myth

In ''Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World'' Girard states that he is not ashamed of Old Testament texts that mystify violence and analyzes many of the more important books of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is very important for his theory. One should also add that Girard does not disregard the non-violent aspects of non-Christian religions. His defence of Christianity has nothing to do with the idea of "non-violence". Girard stresses that Christianity does not promise peace but promises truth. According to Girard, it de-mystifies the "peace of the world". All religions, he says, even the most violent ones, are aimed toward peace. Archaic societies ritually repeat the scapegoat solution to make peace. When discussing the established historical structures of Christianity in ''Things Hidden'' though, he presents it as a struggle between the ingrained sacrificial order inherent in human culture as we know it and the repudiation of mimetic fighting and indeed of cultural endeavour presented in the New Testament. The churches and historical Christianity and their teaching, according to this reasoning, have partly disarmed the insight of the gospels for nearly two thousand years, but at the same time, by spreading the Word to the ends of the earth and undoing earlier sacrificial religions the churches have paved the way for a final wave of revelation and of the coming together of humanity.

Out of this eschatological perspective on history and on the role of the church, Girard is scathingly critical of secular humanism and liberal values, which he describes as cheap attempts to expand a cultural freedom no longer threatened by any institutions, least of all by the churches, and a dangerous over-confidence in the ability of mankind to save herself through (mimetic) effort.

One of the main sources of criticism of Girard's work comes from intellectuals who claim that his comparison of Judeo-Christian texts vis-a-vis other religions leaves something to be desired.

Psychology and neuroscience

René Girard's work is also attracting increasing interest from empirical researchers investigating human imitation (among them Andrew Meltzoff and Vittorio Gallese). Girard's views on imitation (developed decades before empirical research prompted a resurgence of interest in the matter) resonate with the most recent findings . Recently, empirical studies into the mechanism of desire have suggested some intriguing correlations with Girard's theory on the subject. For instance, clinical psychologist Scott R. Garrels wrote:

What makes Girard's insights so remarkable is that he not only discovered and developed the primordial role of psychological mimesis (...) during a time when imitation was quite out of fashion, but he did so through investigation in literature, cultural anthropology, history, and ultimately returning to religious texts for further evidence of mimetic phenomena. The parallels between Girard's insights and the only recent conclusions made by empirical researchers concerning imitation (in both development and the evolution of species) are extraordinary (...).

Economics and globalization

The mimetic theory has also been applied in the study of economics, most notably in '''' (1982) by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan. Orléan was also a contributor to the volume ''René Girard'' in ''Les cahiers de l'Herne'' (""). According to the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg:

In '''', Aglietta and Orléan follow Girard in suggesting that the basic relation of exchange can be interpreted as a conflict of 'doubles', each mediating the desire of the Other. Like Lucien Goldmann, they see a connection between Girard's theory of mimetic desire and the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. In their theory, the market takes the place of the sacred in modern life as the chief institutional mechanism stabilizing the otherwise explosive conflicts of desiring subjects.

In an interview with the ''Unesco Courier'', anthropologist and social theorist Mark Anspach (editor of the ''René Girard'' issue of ''Les Cahiers de l'Herne'') explains that Aglietta and Orléan (who were very critical about the economic rationality) argue that the classical theory of economics as a myth:

The economists' myth tells us that exchange fulfills a simple instrumental function. You live in a community that produces yams and I live in a community that raises pigs, so we [...] invent a system of equivalence between our products - money - and there you have it. But, as anthropologists have shown us, Marcel Mauss in particular, the main form of exchange in so-called 'primitive' societies is the gift, which cannot be reduced to economic rationality.

According to Anspach, the actual justification of exchange is in reality ... exchange, the desire of a relationship with other men and women. In order to reach the peaceful reciprocity on which humanity is based as against the reciprocity of what Girard calls mimetic rivalry, the latter is overtaken by the sacrifice - representing the end of the vicious circle of violence and vengeance and the beginning of gift economy: "Instead of waiting for your neighbour to come steal your yams, you offer them to him today, and it is up to him to do the same for you tomorrow. Once you have made a gift, he is obliged to make a return gift. Now you have set in motion a positive circularity." But the gift may be dangerous; it may be a so huge gift (as in potlach) that it humiliates the other: you may want, firstly, to display your prestige, to present yourself as better, richer, or stronger. The "economic rationality", however, tends to liberate the seller and the buyer of any other obligations than to give money. Reciprocal violence is eliminated by the sacrifice, obligations of vengeance by the gift, and finally the possibly dangerous gift by "economic rationality". This rationality, however, creates new victims, as for instance so many children dying of hunger every day. When a plane crashes and several hundred people are killed, there is an inquiry. But there is no inquiry about hunger: the market is guilty:

Nobody is individually responsible for a violence which is collectively accepted, just as the violence of sacrifice is collectively accepted [...] Globalization means the development of market exchange among the nations. Now, despite the existence of the United Nations, the international arena still displays one of the essential features of primitive society: the absence of State [...] I am skeptical about the idea that an expansion of international trade leads to peace. The same idea was expressed the last time a comparable level of economic integration between countries was reached, early in the last century. And then the First World War came along and dispelled the illusion.

Anspach also quotes Ahmet İnsel's estimation of the gift economy (families, non-profit organisations etcetera) as approximately three-quarters of the French GDP. He makes an interesting comparison between Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and the gods behind the ejected violence into the rituals. A similar comparison has been made by the economist John Grahl in the paper ''Money as Sovereignty: the Economics of Michel Aglietta'':

In primitive society, institutionalised by ritual and sacrifice, there is no real money because desires for being are focused not on things but directly on other persons and their conduct. In a second era the monarch or sovereign emerges as a more stable institutionalised representative of the sacred excluded/elected victim: here money has a secondary status as reflecting the monarch and his sacred prerogatives. Finally in mercantile society, with the kind of long-distance exchange relations explored by Braudel (1979), money escapes the control of the sovereign and becomes in itself the primary embodiment of wealth.

Grahl Aglietta and Orléan's interpretation of Girard presents analogies with Hobbesian politics, as sovereignty (a recognised monetary system) emerges to regulate unlimited struggle to seize wealth (accaparement). By diverting desire onto an object excluded from everyday production and consumption, the monetary order permits the embrace of a host of lesser, profane objects shielded from acute rivalry.

The analogy is clear: speculation, as uncontrolled imitative rivalry in the search for authentic wealth, is the violence which menaces modern economies; but it is this speculation itself, when it becomes the unanimous pursuit of a single asset, which gives rise to the monetary order; the latter may then be able to cool speculative passions and divert them into the production of profane, non-monetary goods.

The key difference with Hobbes is that the idea of a social covenant is seen from a Girardian point of view as a typical obfuscation of the true, violent origins of social order - peace and stability emerging from the ''bellum omnium contra omnes'' - through the coalescence of enmity onto a sacralised victim.

Literary Influence

Girard's influence extends beyond philosophy and social science, and includes the literary realm. A prominent example of a fiction writer influenced by Girard is J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Critics have noted that mimetic desire and scapegoating are recurring themes in Coetzee's novels ''Elizabeth Costello'' and ''Disgrace.'' In the latter work, the book's protagonist also gives a speech about the history of scapegoating with noticeable similarities to Girard's view of the same subject. Coetzee has also frequently cited Girard in his non-fiction essays, on subjects ranging from advertising to the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Honours and awards

Honorary degrees at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands, 1985), UFSIA in Antwerp (Belgium, 1995), the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy, 2001, honorary degree in "Arts"), the faculty of theology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), the Université de Montréal (Canada, 2004), and the University of St Andrews (UK, 2008).

The Prix Médicis essai for ''Shakespeare, les feux de l'envie'' (''A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare'', 1991)

The prix Aujourd'hui for ''Les origines de la culture'' (2004)

Guggenheim Fellow (1959 and 1966)

Election to the Académie française (2005).

Bibliography

This section only lists book-length publications that wrote or edited. For articles and interviews by René Girard, the reader can refer to the database maintained at the University of Innsbruck. Some of the books below reprint articles (''To Double Business Bound'', 1978; ''Oedipus Unbound'', 2004; ''Mimesis and Theory'',2008) or are based on articles (''A Theatre of Envy'', 1991).

1961. ''''. Paris: Grasset. Reprinted 2001: ISBN 2246040728. (English translation: ''Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. ISBN 0801818303).

1962. ''Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays''. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

1963. ''''. Paris: Plon. (English translation: ''Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky''. Crossroad Publishing Company. 1997) 1972. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 978-2246000518. (English translation: ''Violence and the Sacred''. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. ISBN 0801822181.) The reprint in the '''' series (1996; ISBN 2010089847) contains a section entitled "", which reproduces several reviews of ''''. 1976. ''''. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme. Reprint 1983, : ISBN 978-2253032984. This book contains '''' and a number of other essays published between 1963 and 1972. 1978. ''To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801836558. This book contains essays from '''' but not those on Dostoyevski. 1978. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 224661841X. (English translation: ''Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and G. Lefort''. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 1982. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2246267811. (English translation: ''The Scapegoat''. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 1985. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2246351111. (English translation: ''Job, the Victim of His People''. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)

1988. ''Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation''. Ed. by Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804715181.

1991. ''A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare''. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195053397. The French translation, '''', was published before the original English text. 1994. ''''. Paris: arléa. ISBN 2869593007.

1996. ''The Girard Reader''. Ed. by. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0824516346.

1999. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2246267919. (English translation: ''I See Satan Fall Like Lightning''. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001) 2000. ''''. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks. ISBN 8574750204. (French translation: ''''. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004. ISBN 978-2220053554. The French translation was upgraded in consultation with . English translation: ''Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture''. London: Continuum, 2008. ISBN 978-0567032522.) 2001. ''''. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ISBN 978-2220050119. 2002. ''''. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 978-2246611011. 2003. ''''. Paris: . ISBN 978-2717722635.

2004. ''Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire''. Ed. by Mark R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804747806.

2006. ''''. With . (English: ''Truth or Weak Faith. Dialogue about Christianity and Relativism''. With Gianni Vattimo. . ISBN 9788875800185 2007. . With and . ISBN 978-2708239227. 2007. ''. ISBN 978-2746503205. 2007. ''''. Paris: Grasset. (Contains '''', '''', '''' and '''', with a new general introduction). ISBN 978-2246721116. 2007. Ed. by Carnets Nord. Paris. ISBN 978-2-35536-002-2. 2008. ''''. Paris: L'Herne. ISBN 978-2851978639.

2008. ''Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005''. Ed. by Robert Doran. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804755801. This book brings together twenty essays on literature and literary theory.

2008. ''''. Paris: Carnets Nord. (Book with DVD '''', a conversation with ) ISBN 978-2355360169.

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Notes and references

Further reading

. Paris: (PUF), 1982. ISBN 2130374859. Alison, James (1998). ''The Joy of Being Wrong''. Herder & Herder. ISBN 0824516761. Anspach, Mark (Ed.; 2008). ''''. Nr. 89. Paris: L'Herne. ISBN 978-2851971524. A collection of articles by and a number of other authors.

Bailie, Gil (1995). ''Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads''. Introduction by René Girard. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0824516451.

Bellinger, Charles (2001). ''The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil''. New York: Oxford. ISBN 0195134982.

Depoortere, Frederiek (2008). ''Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, Rene Girard, and Slavoj Zizek''. London: Continuum. ISBN 0567033325.

Dumouchel, Paul (Ed.; 1988). ''Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard''. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804713383.

Fleming, Chris (2004). ''René Girard: Violence and Mimesis''. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0745629482. This is an introduction to 's work.

Girard, René, and Sandor Goodhart. ''For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth.'' East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009.

Golsan, Richard J. (1993). ''René Girard and Myth: An Introduction''. New York & London: Garland. (Reprinted by Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0415937779.)

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G. (1991). ''Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross''. Fortress Press. ISBN 0800625293. Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G. & Johnsen, William (Eds.; 2008). ''Politics & Apocalypse'' (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series). Michigan State University Press. ISBN 978-0870138119.

Heim, Mark (2006). ''Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross''. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ISBN 0802832156 .

Kirwan, Michael (2004). ''Discovering Girard''. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 0232525269. This is an introduction to 's work. (1994). ''''. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 0820422894. This book is both an introduction and a critical discussion of Girard's work, starting with Girard's early articles on and Saint-John Perse, and ending with ''A Theatre of Envy''.

Livingston, Paisley (1992). ''Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis''. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801843855.

McKenna, Andrew J. (Ed.; 1985). ''René Girard and Biblical Studies'' (Semeia 33). Scholars Press. ISBN 9995387638. McKenna, Andrew J. (1992). ''Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction''. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0252062025.

Mikolajewska, Barbara (1999). ''Desire Came upon that One in the Beginning... Creation Hymns of the Rig Veda''. 2nd edition. New Haven: The Lintons' Video Press. ISBN 0965952916.

Mikolajewska, Barbara & Linton, F. E. J. (2004). ''Good Violence Versus Bad: A Girardian Analysis of King Janamejaya's Snake Sacrifice and Allied Events''. New Haven: The Lintons' Video Press. ISBN 978-1929865291.

Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. ''The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis'', translated with an introduction by Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

(2010). ''''. Paris: . ISBN 978-2841745142.

Swartley, William M. (Ed.; 2000). ''Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies and Peacemaking''. Telford: Pandora Press. ISBN 0966502159.

Tarot, Camille (2008). ''''. Paris: La Découverte. ISBN 978-2-7071-5428-6. This book discusses eight theories of religion, namely those by , , , , , , and .

Webb, Eugene. ''Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard'' (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988)

Webb, Eugene. ''The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France'' (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993).

Wallace, Mark I. & Smith, Theophus H. (1994). ''Curing Violence : Essays on Rene Girard''. Polebridge Press. ISBN 0944344437.

''To Honor René Girard. Presented on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday by colleagues, students, friends'' (1986). Stanford French and Italian Studies 34. Saratoga, California: Anma Libri. ISBN 0915838036. This volume also contains a bibliography of Girard's writings before 1986.

External links

Bibliographies

Girard-Database: searchable database provided by the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Accessed 25 November 2008

Dietmar Regensburger: Bibliography of René Girard. The most detailed bibliography, ending in 2003. Accessed 24 November 2008

Dietmar Regensburger: Bibliography of Literature on the Mimetic Theory of René Girard. Updates appear periodically in the ''Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion''. Accessed 25 November 2008

The René Girard Bibliography. A short list of publications. Accessed 24 November 2008

Online videos of René Girard

Girard interviewed on "Uncommon Knowledge" at the Hoover Institution

l'Immortel: A video short

Interviews, articles and lectures by René Girard

In chronological order.

: "Are the Gospels Mythical?" in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', April 1996. See also "August/September Letters" in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', August/September 1996, for follow-up correspondence. Accessed 24 November 2008

Girard lecture, on Violence, Victims and Christianity (Oxford 1997) Accessed 24 November 2008

"What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale" Interview by Henri Tincq, '''', November 6, 2001. Translated by Jim Williams. Original title: "".

"Violence & the Lamb Slain". ''Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity'', December 2003. A short, accessible introduction to Girardian thought, plus an interview with Girard. Accessed 24 November 2008

Ratzinger Is Right in ''New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ)'' Volume 22, Number 3 (Summer 2005). On Pope Benedict XVI and relativism. Accessed 24 November 2008

Interviews with Girard on mimetic desire (Saturday, September 17, 2005) and on ritual, myth, and religion (Tuesday, October 4, 2005) by Robert P. Harrison on Entitled Opinions. Accessed 24 November 2008

"The ''J'Accuse'' of Rene Girard: The Audacious ideas of a great thinker" Interview with Girard by Giulio Meotti, ''Il Foglio'', March 20, 2007. (Translation by Francis R. Hittinger IV.) Accessed 24 November 2008

Reception speech of René Girard. This speech does not discuss his own work but is a eulogy of his predecessor. Accessed 24 November 2008

Robert Doran: Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11: An Interview with René Girard ''SubStance'' 115 (Volume 37, Number 1, 2008. Accessed 24 November 2008

Centre Pompidou: Traces du sacré: René Girard, le sens de l'histoire. Excerpts from a conversation with Benoît Chantre (see ''''). Accessed 24 November 2008

Cynthia Haven, René Girard: Stanford's provocative ''immortel'' is a one-man institution, Stanford Report, 11 June 2008.

Cynthia Haven, René Girard: Stanford's provocative ''immortel'' is a one-man institution, Stanford Report, 11 June 2008.

Grant Kaplan, An Interview with René Girard, in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', November 6, 2008.

Cynthia Haven, "Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only In Defeat": An Interview with René Girard, in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', July 16, 2009.

René Girard, "On War and Apocalypse" in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', Aug/Sept 2v009.

The Scapegoat: René Girard's Anthropology of Violence and Religion: Interview with Girard on CBC's interview program Ideas , Feb 2011

Organizations inspired by mimetic theory

Colloquium on Violence & Religion

, founded in 2006.

Imitatio, founded in 2008. Accessed 24 November 2008

Imitation, Mimetic Theory, and Religious & Cultural Evolution - A Templeton Advanced Research Project, a two-year project.

The Raven Foundation. This foundation "seeks to promote healing, hope, reconciliation and peace by offering insight into the dynamics of conflict and violence".

Theology and Peace, founded in 2008. "An emerging movement seeking the transformation of theological practice through the application of mimetic theory".

Preaching Peace founded in 2002 as a website exploring the Christian lectionary from a mimetic theoretical perspective, 2007 organized as a non-profit in Pennsylvania committed to "Educating the church in Jesus' vision of peace."

Other resources

Dietmar Regensburger: Link Collection on René Girard & the Mimetic Theory. Accessed 25 November 2008

Colloquium on Violence and Religion, Annual Conference 2004: Nature, Human Nature, and the Mimetic Theory. Some of the conference papers are available here. Accessed 24 November 2008

Paul Nuechterlein: Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: Understanding the Bible Anew Through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard Accessed 24 November 2008

Philippe Cottet: On René Girard. Available in French and English. Accessed 24 November 2008

Mark Gordon: Was Christ Just Another ‘Scapegoat’? May 3, 2006. Accessed 24 November 2008

Thomas A. Michael: How To Scapegoat the Leader. A Refresher Course (for those who do not need it). An introduction to Girard. Accessed 24 November 2008

Joseph Bottum: "Girard among the Girardians" in ''First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life'', March 1996. A review of ''Violence Unveiled'' by Gil Bailie, ''The Sacred Game'' by Cesareo Bandera, ''The Gospel and the Sacred'' by Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, and ''The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred'' by James G. Williams. Accessed 24 November 2008

Paolo Diego Bubbio: "Mimetic Theory and Hermeneutics" in ''Colloquy'' 9 (2005). Accessed 24 November 2008

University of St Andrews, UK: Honorary degrees - June 2008. Accessed 26 November 2008

Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast: “Reading Walter Wink's and Rene Girard's Religious Critiques of Violence as Communication Ethics.” National Communication Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 20–23, 1997. A short and clear explanation of the thought of Girard (principally) among other similar thoughts about people, violence and society.

"Scapegoats and Sacrifices: Rene Girard". Australian Broadcasting Commission - Philosopher's Zone. Accessed 24 November 2008

Trevor Merrill: "On War: Apocalypse and Conversion: Review Article on 's '''' and 's ''''" in ''Lingua Romana: a journal of French, Italian and Romanian culture'' Volume 6, number 1 / fall 2007. Accessed 24 November 2008 The website Preaching Peace contains a number of articles related to , for example:

* Per Bjørnar Grande: Girard's Christology (no date).

* Per Bjørnar Grande: Comparing Plato's Understanding of Mimesis to Girard's (no date).

* Matthew Pattillo: Violence, Anarchy and Scripture: Jacques Ellul and René Girard. Originally published in ''Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture'' Vol 11, Spring 2004.Accessed 12 February 2009

Category:1923 births Category:Living people Category:American philosophers Category:Converts to Christianity Category:French Roman Catholics Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism Category:French philosophers Category:Stanford University faculty Category:Duke University faculty Category:Members of the Académie française Category:French literary critics Category:Mythographers Category:French Christian pacifists Category:Christian philosophers Category:Roman Catholic philosophers Category:Indiana University alumni Category:People from Avignon Category:American people of French descent Category:Hermeneutics Category:Prix Médicis essai winners

cs:René Girard de:René Girard es:René Girard fr:René Girard hr:René Girard id:René Girard it:René Girard la:Renatus Girard nl:René Girard ja:ルネ・ジラール pl:René Girard pt:René Girard ro:René Girard ru:Жирар, Рене fi:René Girard sv:René Girard

name	Mark Steel
birth date	July 04, 1960
birth place	Swanley, Kent, United Kingdom
medium	Stand-up, Television, Books, Radio
nationality	British
active	1983-present
genre	Political satire
subject	Politics
influences	Paul Merton
influenced	Seann Walsh, Alan Davies
notable work	''The Mark Steel Lectures''''The Mark Steel Revolution'' ''The Mark Steel Solution'' ''Mark Steel's in Town''
website	http://www.marksteelinfo.com/
footnotes	}}

Mark Steel (born 4 July 1960) is a British socialist columnist, author and comedian. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party from his late teens until 2007.

Early life

Steel grew up in Swanley, Kent. He was expelled from Swanley Comprehensive School for attending a cricket course at the age of 15, and went on to work in a garage. From there he went on to make his first public performance as a poet.

In the late 1970s his father suffered a mental breakdown and was placed into care at Stonehouse Hospital. The shabby conditions of the home reinforced Steel's political beliefs.

Career

Steel has given varying accounts of his early life: he became bored with constantly being asked how he had started in comedy and took to telling the questioner the first thing that came into his head. He is often described as having worked as a television repair man but confesses that he has no technical ability whatsoever. He worked the comedy circuit for several years, and then in 1992 presented a satirical radio show ''The Mark Steel Solution'' on BBC Radio 5, consisting of half-hour monologues which offered solutions to social problems. It ran to four series. ''It's Not a Runner Bean'', a comic autobiography, was published in 1996, and this led to a column in ''The Guardian''.

Steel wrote a column for ''The Guardian'' between 1996 and 1999. He was sacked by that newspaper, according to him because ''The Guardian'' wanted to "realign towards Tony Blair" - though ''The Guardian'' denies this. In 2000 he started writing a weekly column for ''The Independent'', which appears in the Wednesday Opinion Column.

He has written and performed several radio and television series for the BBC, and authored several books, as detailed below.

In 2005 he toured the UK, where he discussed the French revolution from a comic view point.

Personal life

Steel lives in Clapham, London. He is a supporter of Crystal Palace F.C. and Kent County Cricket Club and enjoys watching both play on occasion. He was interviewed by Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special during the South Africa series, giving an interview on his love of cricket.

He has a son (Elliot) and a daughter (Eloise) from a relationship, but he and his partner separated in 2006.

Politics

During the Thatcher years, when he was in his 20s, Steel developed his left-wing political views. His anger and depression at society's injustices were vented by political protests, punk rock and poetry.

Seeing the Soviet Union as "shit", and state capitalist rather than truly socialist, Steel joined the Socialist Workers Party rather than the Communist Party. He attended marches, strikes and demonstrations, and was present at the death of Blair Peach. In the early '80s he also persuaded his mother to allow striking steelworkers to spend a night in the Steel residence. His political activism continued throughout the decade, from the miners' strike through to the Poll Tax Riots. During this time he moved into a squat with his old friend Mick Hannan, before taking up residence in a flat.

In 2000 Steel took part in the London Assembly elections on behalf of the London Socialist Alliance (part of the Socialist Alliance) in the Croydon and Sutton constituency; he received 1,823 votes (1.5 per cent of the vote).

In 2007 he left the SWP and justified his decision in his book ''Whats Going On?'' In the book he wrote that he left the party because whilst the membership base had become smaller and smaller, the members that remained became increasingly delusional over the size and relevance of the organisation. He also condemned how at a time when there was broad public support for socialist ideals, increasingly bitter and futile in-fighting on the left made political success untenable. Alex Callinicos, International Secretary of the SWP, reviewed the book in the ''Socialist Review'', arguing that it "evinces a kind of grandiose ignorance" and that "the only principle one can detect here is that the SWP is always in the wrong". Literary critic Nicholas Lezard praised the book in ''The Guardian'', particularly for its discussion of the break-up of Steel's relationship, which "gives it a poignancy and depth which at its outset one might not have expected".

Steel is a Palestinian human rights activist, having been a member of the British-based ENOUGH! coalition that seeks to end the "Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank."

Radio and television

Radio

''The Mark Steel Solution'' (1992, 1994–1996) BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 4, repeated BBC 7

''The Mark Steel Revolution'' (1998) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7 Australia - Radio National 17.30 2009-01-13 to 2009-01-16 and 2009-01-19 to 2009-01-23

''The Mark Steel Lectures'' (1999–2002) BBC Radio 4, (2007) repeated BBC 7

''Dedicated Troublemaker'' (2004) BBC Radio 4

''Mark Steel's in Town'' (2009–2010) BBC Radio 4

He has also contributed to or appeared on the following shows:

''The Good Human Guide'' BBC Radio 2(1985). Contributing writer.

''Extra Time'' BBC Radio 5. Presenter. Sports programme.

''Late Edition'' BBC Radio 4 (1995). Regular panellist on this satirical talk show.

''The News Quiz'' BBC Radio 4 several occasions from the late 1990s onwards. Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.

''Loose Ends'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Midweek'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Excess Baggage'' BBC Radio 4. Interviewee.

''Test Match Special'' BBC Radio 4. Lunchtime interviewee, 1 August 2008 - England vs South Africa, 3rd test, Edgbaston.

''I've Never Seen Star Wars'' BBC Radio 4 (2008). Interviewee

''Heresy'' BBC Radio 4 (2009).

Television

''The Mark Steel Lectures'' BBC Four (2003, 2004, 2006). Writer and Presenter. Television version of his radio programme of the same title. Produced in association with The Open University.

He also appeared in the following shows:

''Red Dwarf'' BBC Two (1989). Playing 'Ski-man' in episode "Timeslides" (non-speaking part).

''Loose Talk'' (1994). Guest.

''The Late Jonathan Ross'' (1996). Guest.

''Does China Exist''. (1997).

''If I Ruled the World'' BBC Two (1998). Guest panellist.

''Lamarr's Attacks'' BBC Two (2000). Guest.

''Never Mind the Buzzcocks'' BBC Two (2000, 2001). Guest panellist on the satirical music based panel game.

''Have I Got News for You'' BBC One (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). Guest panellist on this satirical news based panel game.

''Question Time'' BBC One (2003, 2005). Guest panellist on discussion show.

''QI'' BBC Two, BBC Four (2004, 2005, 2006). Guest panellist.

''Mock the Week'', BBC Two (2005, 2006). Guest panellist.

''Room 101'' BBC Two, (2006). Guest

Bibliography

Printed

*''Vive La Revolution'' (2003) ISBN 0-7432-0805-6, (2004) ISBN 0-7432-0806-4 History of the French Revolution.

*''Reasons To Be Cheerful'' (2001) ISBN 0-7432-0803-X, (2002) ISBN 0-7432-0804-8 Autobiography concentrating on political activism.

*''It's Not A Runner Bean'' (1996) ISBN 1-899344-12-8, (2004) ISBN 1-904316-43-3 Autobiography concentrating on his comedy career.

*''What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion'' (2008) ISBN 1-847372-81-9 Autobiography charting changes to his own personal life and the politics of the left.

Audiobooks

*''Reasons to Be Cheerful: From Punk to New Labour Through the Eyes of a Dedicated Troublemaker'' (2001) cassette ISBN 0-7435-0062-8

See also

List of newspaper columnists

References

External links

Mark Steel's official website

Off the Kerb Comedy Agency

Mark Steel's article archive at ''The Independent''

Open University site dedicated to the television version of ''The Mark Steel Lectures''.

Chortle profile.

Information about ''It’s Not A Runner Bean'' (including extract).

Interview with Jared Wilson for LeftLion.

Interview with ''The Third Estate''.

Interview with ''Socialist Review''.

BBC Comedy Guide - Mark Steel Lectures Includes a clip of one of the shows

Reviews of his book ''Reasons to be Cheerful''.

Audio Files

*The Russian Revolution: Was It A Coup? - Lecture at Marxism 1999 (MP3)

*Karl Marx - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)

*The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2002 (MP3)

*Viva La Revolution A Stand Up History Of The French Revolution - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2003 (MP3)

*Albert Einstein - Part 2 - Lecture at Marxism 2005 (MP3)

*Large selection of audio (mp3) and video (mp4) files available at www.marksteelinfo.com/audiovideo/

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:British republicans Category:English atheists Category:English columnists Category:English comedians Category:British Trotskyists Category:People from Swanley Category:Socialist Workers Party (UK) members Category:English socialists