Love selects ...

It appears that now, even the Joyce scholars think they know biology. From the recent edition of The New York Review:

If we turn now to Darwinian theory itself, which purports to explain these discoveries and which is taught in most schools and colleges in the developed world, we find that it is based on, as Darwin puts it, "the unguided processes of random variation and natural selection." Take the first part: random variation. By random is meant, presumably, accidental, and clearly accidents do happen, but there is no scientific evidence to the effect that the transformations that took place in evolutionary history were always, or even typically, accidental.

The second unguided process, natural selection, is yet more curious. Let me propose, for an example, an alternative. One of the processes by means of which successful variations are selected is love, in all its varieties but in particular maternal love. An animal that is loved will survive, prosper, and reproduce. Love selects. If we take this idea to a Darwinist, however, he or she will say, no, what happens is that love is selected for: those animals that are loved will have an advantage over those that are not and, over time, will multiply, while the others, unloved, will die out. Thus, natural selection selects love. But therein lies the real scientific scandal of Darwinism: the effect is claimed to be the cause of the cause of the effect. Such an idea, when allowed, is immune to refutation.

The writer is Danis Rose "a noted, if controversial, Joyce scholar" (source), college dropout (source), and clearly a member of the Jonathan Witt School of Biology English Literature. Let's make a deal, eh? I wont intrude on Rose's territory of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and he gets the hell off my lawn. OK?