Unending Struggle

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, is one of the great intellectual achievements of western civilization. The ideas on which it was based—the natural development of today’s organisms from forms far more primitive, perhaps ultimately from inorganic materials—had been around from the 18th century, and indeed one finds hints back in the days of the ancient Greeks. But it was Darwin who firmly established that Genesis was wrong: we are not the miraculous creation of a good God all within a week, and that our ancestors were monkeys—not, one hastens to say, monkeys of a kind extant today, but certainly more primitive primates. It was also Darwin who supplied the mechanism we hold primary today: a struggle for existence (more precisely a struggle for reproduction) leading to a natural winnowing of organisms, with some (the fitter) succeeding and some (the less fit) failing. All of this given enough...