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6

Twenty seven years earlier, Darwin's evolutionary thinking had

been thrown into high gear when a book called An Essay On The

Principle of Population brought the young naturalist's attention to the

hyperactive output of the replicatory system.  The essay was the work

of Robert Malthus, a pessimistic English clergyman who'd proposed in

1798 that food supplies increase at a sluggish arithmetic rate, while

population explodes in a geometric progression, making mass death

through starvation inevitable.  Population excess of this magnitude,

Darwin concluded, would create competition for survival.  And the

creatures best-suited to get the most out of a hostile environment

would be the contestants who survived.

Hence nature would prune her flock like the breeders of sheep

near the Kentish country home where Darwin did most of his writing.

These careful squires selected for reproduction only the animals that

were the hardiest and produced the most wool.  A culling of this sort

performed by nature, if continued over eons of time, would produce

radical changes in a species.  Because of the similarities between the

methods of gentleman farmers and the less tender mechanisms of

competition in the wild, Darwin dubbed the results of the battle for

survival "natural selection."

Darwin saw competition occurring at several levels--among

them, between individuals, and between groups.  When discussing

ants, he acknowledged that evolution could easily induce individuals

to sacrifice their self interest to that of the larger social unit.10  In his

later writings, he proposed that a similar process occurs among human

beings.11

In the 1930s, a new school of "population geneticists" led by men

like J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright cranked out mathematical

theories which gave evolutionists the sense that they were making the

climb from Darwin's mere observation and speculation to the high

scientific ground normally occupied primarily by those most envied

practitioners of the discipline, physicists.  The popularity of Haldane

and Wright's algebraic hypotheses grew despite a substantial flaw:

they were not strongly supported by empirical evidence.  Equally

6

Twenty seven years earlier, Darwin's evolutionary thinking had

been thrown into high gear when a book called An Essay On The

Principle of Population brought the young naturalist's attention to the

hyperactive output of the replicatory system.  The essay was the work

of Robert Malthus, a pessimistic English clergyman who'd proposed in

1798 that food supplies increase at a sluggish arithmetic rate, while

population explodes in a geometric progression, making mass death

through starvation inevitable.  Population excess of this magnitude,

Darwin concluded, would create competition for survival.  And the

creatures best-suited to get the most out of a hostile environment

would be the contestants who survived.

Hence nature would prune her flock like the breeders of sheep

near the Kentish country home where Darwin did most of his writing.

These careful squires selected for reproduction only the animals that

were the hardiest and produced the most wool.  A culling of this sort

performed by nature, if continued over eons of time, would produce

radical changes in a species.  Because of the similarities between the

methods of gentleman farmers and the less tender mechanisms of

competition in the wild, Darwin dubbed the results of the battle for

survival "natural selection."

Darwin saw competition occurring at several levels--among

them, between individuals, and between groups.  When discussing

ants, he acknowledged that evolution could easily induce individuals

to sacrifice their self interest to that of the larger social unit.10  In his

later writings, he proposed that a similar process occurs among human

beings.11

In the 1930s, a new school of "population geneticists" led by men

like J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright cranked out mathematical

theories which gave evolutionists the sense that they were making the

climb from Darwin's mere observation and speculation to the high

scientific ground normally occupied primarily by those most envied

practitioners of the discipline, physicists.  The popularity of Haldane

and Wright's algebraic hypotheses grew despite a substantial flaw:

they were not strongly supported by empirical evidence.  Equally