ccumulated produce significant alterations in the prototype; these differences suppress old parts or multiply them, engender new ones, transform the combinations, vary the results, and finally produce something very different from the model itself." Robinet, Vue Philosophique (1766); De la Nature (1768)Comparing this idea with what Darwin wrote, we see that Darwin's ideas were not very original: "When many of the inhabitants of any area have become modified and improved, we can understand, on the principle of competition, and from the all-important relations. of organism to organism in the struggle for life, that any form which did not become in some degree modified and improved, would be liable to extermination . . .The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of the lesser favored forms almost inevitably follows . . .thus as I believe, a number of new species descended from one species, that is a new genus, comes to supplant an old genus . . . For all the species of the same group, however long it may have lasted, are the modified descendants from the other, and all from a common progenitor." (Origin, On the Geological succession of Organic Beings, pp.167-169, Benton, 1952)Modern theories of evolution have not advanced much at all since the time of these men, all of whom preceded Darwin by nearly a century. Stein and Rowe mention in Physical Anthropology that the contemporary of Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) had "proposed every major point that Darwin would later include inThe Origin of Species." (13)Further on the authors write, "...it was left to Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) to propose a systematic theory of evolution as an explanation of organic diversity."(14)Lamarck was a pupil of Buffon's, as were many of the other ea...
