Man’s method of improving plants and animals--artificial selection--interferes with the work of natural selection. For one thing, man makes a radical change in the environment of every plant and animal he domesticates; for another, man selects for other purposes than the one Nature has in view--that is, if it can be said that Nature has a purpose. From the same parent stock man breeds one strain of cattle for beef, another for milk and butter; one variety of the horse for the saddle and another for draft purposes. Nature adapts the species to the environment--never the environment to the species--sacrificing those individuals that do not measure up to her standard. She seems to care only for the species, not for the individuals, or only for those individuals that give promise of a better species. This secret wrung from Nature (natural selection as a factor in progressive development) is man’s most precious truth, for it is the key to his further progress. To summarize: organisms tend to increase at a great rate; this intensifies the struggle for existence; organisms vary; in the struggle for existence the vast majority die early, leaving those that vary in the favorable direction to live and reproduce; this means change, progress. This is natural selection. There is also De Vries’ “Mutations theory” which some scientists believe to have been an important factor in evolution. It is the theory that at times a species may progress by “jumps”--that is, that occasionally individuals come into existence that vary extremely from the mass, and that they may become the parents of a new species. It is on account of the relative value attached by some scientists to this theory and to natural selection that they disagree, and not in regard to whether or not evolution is a fact. NATURAL SELECTION IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION The law of natural selection, or of the survival of the fittest, is not confined to plant and animal life. Its sway is universal. Every thing that is born, spawned, hatched, sprouted, conceived, invented, or founded is tested by this law, and if found inefficient, unfit, is weeded out, leaving the fittest, the best, the truest to survive. On the mental plane the law of the survival of the fittest is often restricted in its operation, and the struggle unnecessarily prolonged, because of the intolerance of those of the older, dominant belief. The world lags because they refuse to permit the new idea to meet the old on equal terms before the only court having jurisdiction over truth and error--the court of Reason.