    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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