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I was fascinated by the discussion, in our last class, of literary criticism being close to science (as we're viewing it for this class).I spent some time with the Darwin, trying to apply that idea. It seems as though the theory is that we would take a "story" (such as that of evolution), and attack it from various angles to see if it holds up. If we were to attack it from the angle of literary criticism, we might start by trying to determine what Darwin's personal biases are, and how that affects his writing. We might go into his history as a writer and his biography as a person (as many do about Shakespeare and his sonnet) and see how we can read the theory of evolution based on his own history. As it happens, that might be difficult, seeing that his original voyage on the Beagle was apparently meant to be one of proving religious theories, rather than evolutionary theories.
I confess I had trouble using some of the things I've picked up in theory and criticism classes, such as analyzing a motif, or trying to examine evolution from the point of view of a certain group. I look forward to exploring this idea more and hopefully getting a better grasp on how criticism and science correlate.