Hemingway's Iceberg and the Darwinian "War of Nature"

Abstract: Underlying Hemingway's stories is his sense of humanity's place in nature, according to Darwin's theory of natural selection, and, far more importantly, according to the theory of sexual selection that Darwin produced in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex . Like the many writers who preceded Hemingway in their own studies of Darwin, he questioned the meaning of love, but he also showed how Darwin's "war of nature" underlies his characters' efforts to deal with the two motives of life, hunger and reproduction.