ABSTRACT
Intimations of a mathematician and logician Lewis Carroll's views about Darwinism can be found in sundry places in his writings, in his serious essays, in his academic and political satires, and in his children's literature. Carroll's parodic treatment of Darwinian evolution is best found in the Alice books, especially Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Darwin's ideas are critiqued obliquely but comprehensively. Carroll's transformation of the baby to a pig is not gothic but comic, but the underlying issue in both metamorphoses is Darwinian: whether humans are linked by common ancestry to all life forms, including the simplest or most grotesque, and whether that linkage is consequential for human nature. Darwin had held that 'as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection'. Many of Darwin's opponents saw this idea as a wish made into a doctrine.
