Theories of evolution, of one sort or other, go all the way back to Empedocles. The history of the theory of evolution includes Lamarck, Cuvier, and Erasmus Darwin. At its simplest, any theory of evolution is simply arguing that the variety of creatures that exist in the natural world are not separate creations, but are part of an extended family - that fish and birds and insects are distant cousins, sharing ancestors from whom they have since diverged.

Lamarck's proposed explanation for this divergence was that as the creatures strove to move and feed and mate, characteristics acquired during the lifetime of a parent would be passed on to its offspring. The blacksmith's son inherited the muscles of his toiling father. The process of evolution was directed by the creatures themselves.

Darwin's explanation was quite different. As the creatures reproduced and multiplied, they produced slight variants. Some of these variants were more successful than others, and the successful variants survived to reproduce, while the less successful did not. The process of evolution was one of random variation and selection of the favourable variants.

But Darwin's vision of the process of evolution was also dramatic. As the creatures multiplied in numbers, and food became harder to find, a struggle for existence ensued, in which the creatures competed with each other, and exterminated each other in a war of nature. The natural world, according to Darwin, was locked in perpetual war.

What a struggle between the several knds of trees must there have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect - between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey - all striving to increase...
(Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species. Ch.3)

If turf which has long been mown ... be let to grow, the more vigorous plants gradually kill the less vigorous, though fully grown plants..
(Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species. Ch.3)

One consequence of the Darwinian vision of evolution was the banishing of any sort of altruism. After all, if the creatures were perpetually engaged in wars of mutual extermination, there could hardly be friendship or cooperation among them. Such happy ideas are dismissed as unrealistic "sentimentality". Darwinists explain apparent examples of altruism as concealed selfishness: mothers care for their children not out of maternal affection, but instead because they want to ensure the continuity of their own genes.

Terms such as "murder", "extermination", "slavery", abound in the Origin of Species. And since human life is also taken to be caught up in this struggle for existence, it follows that humans are themselves inevitably engaged in genocidal war. Nor was this something from which Darwin himself flinched:

The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turks hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking at the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.
(Darwin. Letter to W. Graham. 3 July 1881)

While Darwin's ideas were lapsing in England, they were being taken up enthusiastically in Germany by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and the quasi-religious Social Darwinist Monist League. Auschwitz and Treblinka would indeed be found at no very distant date.

Darwin was simply one of the contributors to the theory of evolution, and yet the theory of evolution has since become identified with Darwin's variant conception. The result, given the appalling history of this idea, is that

A sanitary cordon is erected at the frontier between the physical and social sciences, at which biological and evolutionary explanations are turned back, stamped "Fascist", "Racist"...
(Mary Midgley. Evolution as A Religion. Methuen 1985)

The simplest course would have been for advocates of theories of evolution to have marginalised Darwin long ago, and relegated him to a minor role in the development of evolutionary theory, along with Lamarck, Cuvier, and others. But instead of doing this, they have consistently acted to give Darwin a central position. When Mendel's pea-breeding genetic experiments were rediscovered in 1902, they formed the foundation of modern genetic theory. But the resultant new theory of evolution was not called Mendelism, but neo-Darwinism. Mendel's work on the mechanics of heredity was used to inject new life into senescent Darwinian theory.

The apotheosis of Darwin still continues apace, as his adherents vie with each other to heap superlatives on him. Thus:

I think that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the most powerful idea ever to occur to the human mind.
(Richard Dawkins. Darwin: The Legacy. BBC TV 29 Mar 1998)

If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton or Einstein and everyone else.
(Daniel C. Dennett. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster 1995)

Assertions of this sort have the ring of personal religious credo rather than sober historical assessment. The theory of natural selection is the unremarkable idea that some variant plants and animals survive better than others. To elevate a self-taught Victorian gentleman naturalist, who had no understanding of genetics or mathematics, to the status of the greatest thinker in human history simply beggars belief. And if this can somehow be swallowed, then why not grant equal status to Alfred Wallace or Robert Malthus? After all, it was Wallace who first sketched out the theory of natural selection in a letter to Darwin. And it was Malthus' Essay on Population that contained almost the entirety of the theory of natural selection, and which both Darwin and Wallace acknowledged as their primary inspiration.

Strip away from Darwin all that was developed or articulated by other people, and one must throw out the theory of evolution (Lamarck, and a hundred others), the theory of natural selection (Wallace), the laws of genetics (Mendel), the Struggle for Existence (Malthus, Lyell), the Survival of the Fittest (Spencer), and so on. All that remains in the end is Darwin's unique and dramatic vision of an all-embracing war of nature, an exterminatory, competitive fight for survival. It is a lurid vision of the process of evolution which has taken on a life of its own, and is still current, 150 years after the publication of Origin.

This vision of the process of evolution is a work of art, not science. Darwin brilliantly dramatised the process of evolution. But this dramatisation has now become an obstruction to the acceptance and development of the theory of evolution. Theories of natural selection do not actually require ideas of competition, war, and extermination. Idle Theory is a theory of natural selection, but it is not Darwinism. In Idle Theory, as the creatures multiply and their food resources dwindle, they simply work longer to find food, rather than become locked in deadly competition. Darwin's glamorous conflict is replaced by prosaic toil.

Some day, Darwin's advocates must make up their minds whether they wish to advance the theory of natural selection, or Darwin's dramatic version of it. It's one or the other, not both.