You gotta read Darwin’s, ‘On the Origin of Species’ – the actual one – is fucking amazing. Far too many lately arseholes have jumped all over his brilliant bits; making a lot of pernickety noise, to diminish the excellence of the original.
  Never read writings post-1969 about stuff that happened pre-1969 – is my master motto. As the only literature on Arthur Rimbaud you need address was produced by Enid Starkie in the 1930s; everything since is personal piffle. There has been no Rimbaud-related information discovered since she published her last book about him – no documents, letters or shorthand diaries – just the wag witterings of arriviste imposters who, while admirably enthusiastic, have failed to add one iota of insight. Should also apply to the teachings of the Ancients: THAT’S ALL THERE IS! Must’ve been more but we’re never gonna know. How many jumped-up BBC bellends do we need to see prancing pontificating around the Aegean – working the Oracle? Go and read Plato… if you want to comprehend the human condition… and its subject status in the Megacosmos.
  Another fine feature of the 'Origin' is how cleanly Darwin writes: modernistic, journalistic; concise, coherent, easily absorbed; open, populist, even punk. Seems a common attribute in every great work of erudition – as drafted by Herren Marx or Freud; Misters Bentham, Bacon, Locke – you don’t even know you’re changing your mind until it’s too late; they’re inside your head. John Locke wrote: ‘Things ascend upwards in degrees of perfection.’ Outlining a theory of evolution… in 1690?
  A perennial poser; turned Darwin all defensive – was the cold chronology of evolutionary process. How we always underestimate the time determinant. It’s virtually impossible for humble human beings, who live for a measly eighty-odd years, to perceive multi-millions as a bitsy blip – in the overall scheme. To truly understand that divergent lines of species’ types detach at the beginning of their pained progressions, not on branches halfway through – although, was often a finishing factor. The reason a hippo looks different to a dolphin, despite their sharing an exact ancestor, is that the changing started 50 million years ago. Not last week.
  But the Darwin detail that really gets my goat is the idiotic, although often deliberate, misinterpretation of his founding phrase: ‘survival of the fittest’. Darwin even emphasises in his text of a better description: survival of the best adapted. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. His point; that any organism unable to adjust to changes in its habitat will become extinct. There is no reference to physical superiority, no kill or be killed; he nowhere discusses dog-eat-dog, intra-capitalist, cruel competition to accumulate property or recognition – it’s all about the pilchard with the bump on its nose being able to find the fattest worms, and its offspring after it.
  Which gets more compelling, and was challenged at the time by Hugo and Marx among divers others, on the cardinal question: where did the first bump actually come from? Who or what made THAT selection? Had Darwin stumped. Until his dying day.