    5

    gen

    erations, the creatures with the anatomical or mental advantages

    have outbred their dull-witted or blunt-pawed rivals.   Less favored

    creatures may easily find themselves extinct.

      According to the current evolutionary party line, this

    competition takes place between individuals.  The idea that it could

    occur between groups has been resoundingly dismissed.  The reason: a

    chain of arbitrary twists in the history of evolutionary theory.

    The concept of evolving life dawned long before the publication

    of Charles Darwin's theories.  In roughly 580 B.C., the Greek

    philosopher Thales of Miletus declared that life had not been created

    by the gods, but had emerged by natural means from water.8  Twenty-

    three hundred years later, enlightenment thinkers like France's George

    Buffon reinterpreted petrified oddities formerly dismissed as stone

    tongues and dragon's teeth.  The objects, the audacious naturalists said,

    were parts of fossilized creatures from a previous era.  Using the latest

    theories of geology, Buffon and his fellow iconoclasts demonstrated

    that placement of fossils in the rocky strata suggested primitive

    creatures had occupied the earth far before the supposed Biblical date

    of creation and had progressed to increasing levels of complexity as

    they'd moved from their birthplace in the seas to footholds on dry land.

    Meanwhile Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, another scholar

    who preceded Darwin by a hundred years, worked out a remarkably

    prescient theory explaining how advances from one species to another

    might occur.  Even Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, anticipated his

    younger relative by more than half a century, putting forth an

    evolutionary overview in his 1796 Zoonomia.  But it was Darwin's

    meticulous fact-gathering,9 his family connections, and his methodical

    campaign to win over the scientific community that finally reoriented

    the thinking of specialists and laymen alike. (Darwin kept a checklist of

    influential thinkers, then used his social ties to bring them on board

    one by one.)  As a result, Darwin's 1859 Origin of the Species created a

    splash so great that its propositions were even the subject of

    newspaper cartoons.

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