The name Mad Dream Productions comes from a bit of Darwin arcana. I am an evolutionist, which means that the writing and thought of Charles Darwin occupies a large patch of my intellectual life.
Darwin struggled with the issue of heritable adaptation: are adaptations acquired during an organism's lifetime passed to its offspring? Darwin's dilemma here was that heritable adaptation was an important part of the evolutionary speculations of Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin wanted to distinguish his ideas from Lamarck's, yet he could not escape the need for some form of heritable adaptation.
This was the origin of Darwin's abortive theory of heritable adaptation, which he called pangenesis.
In a letter Darwin wrote to Asa Grey, his most prominent defender in America, Darwin wrote:
"The Chap.on what I call Pangenesis will be called a mad dream, & I shall be pretty well satisfied if you think it a dream worth publishing; but at the bottom of my own mind I think it contains a great truth."
Darwin's theory of pangenesis went down in flames, however, and played a large part in the later "eclipse of Darwinism", largely because critics saw pangenesis as a form of Lamarckism, which made it unacceptable to the rising science of genetics.
As we are coming to know more about how genetic information translates into adaptive function, Darwin's "mad dream" is taking on new life.
I write about this in my 2017 book, Purpose and Desire (HarperOne).
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