All that is necessary to make him extend his
present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall
convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for
golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic
speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as
biology. Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may
be worth turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would
be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written
Back to Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.
Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles. Darwin
could not read Shakespear. Some who can read both, like to learn the
history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current confusion
of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical
ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two.
For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict
between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not
altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that
which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the
genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously
looking.
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