Abstract
W HY ALL THE FUSS about Darwinism? The answer lies in a double ambiguity of the word. First, the term Darwinism has been applied to two different ideas: natural selection and evolution. Second, the time reference is either to the past or the future. What is most important? What should we focus on? In the prologue to Nature and Man's Fate I made a remark that upset some of my colleagues: doesn't much matter whether you think man was created out of dust 6000 years ago or came from the apes a million years earlier; whether the story of Noah's Ark is true, or dinosaurs once lived. Believe what you will of evolution in the past: but you had jolly well better believe it will take place in the future if you hope to make political decisions that will give your descendents a reasonable chance to exist. It is now more than a decade since I wrote those words; and I have had occasion to reconsider them. They still express my personal view of what is most important; but I also see now (as I did not then) grounds for thinking that it does matter what man's origin was. I will presently explain why. But first I will try to explain why I think Darwinians should be more concerned with the future than with the past and why they should be more interested in natural selection than in evolution.
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