ABSTRACT
Preference on the part of the women, steadily acting in any one direction, would ultimately affect the character of the tribe; for the women would generally choose not merely the handsomest men, according to their standard of taste, but those who were at the same time best able to defend and support them. Such well-en dowed pairs would commonly rear a larger number of offspring than the less favoured. (Darwin, 1871, chapter XX, p. 585.)
Ideas are like organisms in evolutionary theory. Both are typically in the process of adaptation and development. At any given point in time, ideas seem to be perfectly embedded in a tangled bank of other contemporary concepts and ideas, as well as an immediate intellectual context. If we take a longer time frame, however, we can see that ideas often develop from more primal concepts. In the process of adapting to marauding criticisms and other ideas, they are transformed from their ancestral shape. Like contemporary organisms, contem porary ideas are hardly the final word. Efforts to hold ideas constant, to retain a pristine orthodoxy, are probably doomed to failure, just as are efforts to keep organisms from changing in response to changing environments.
