This
is true enough in the sense that, as we saw, natural selection is
not an action of nature on the "fit," but on the unfit or less
fit. But this does not in the least lessen the importance of
natural selection. If there were not in nature this body of
destructive agencies, to which we apply the name natural
selection, there would be little--we cannot say no--evolution.
But the rising carnivores, the falls of temperature, etc., that
we have studied, have had so real, if indirect, an influence on
the development of life that we need not dwell on this.
Another school, or several schools, while admitting the action of
natural selection, maintain that earlier evolutionists have made
nature much too red in tooth and claw. Dr. Russel Wallace from
one motive, and Prince Krapotkin from another, have insisted that
the triumphs of war have been exaggerated, and the triumphs of
peace, or of social co-operation, far too little appreciated. It
will be found that such writers usually base their theory on life
as we find it in nature to-day, where the social principle is
highly developed in many groups of animals. This is most
misleading, since social co-operation among animals, as an
instrument of progress, is (geologically speaking) quite a recent
phenomenon.
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