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
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