Angry students called this professor ‘disgusting.’ He’s still an optimist.

More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin grappled with a classic question about the nature of nature and the existence of God.

“There seems to me too much misery in the world,” wrote the naturalist, whose book “On the Origin of Species” was just beginning to send a jolt through 19th-century scientists and theologians both. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

As a version of the “problem of evil,” Darwin’s observations posed a different kind of question for those working within the religious traditions of “theodicy,” suggests Nicholas Christakis, an evolutionary sociologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Usually seeing misery as a matter of free choice, theologians tried to reconcile a good and all-powerful God with evil.

The questions of his own work are actually kind of similar, says Professor Christakis, whose new book, “Blueprint: The

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