FORWARD

"Whatever the controversies that surround him, Charles Darwin was certainly the most important natural scientist of the past century; he may become the most important social scientist of the next. His great insight--that humans are animals and that their behavior, like that of all animals, is shaped by evolution--is now making its way into social theory. In economics, linguistics, anthropology and psychology, scholars are attempting to see how our evolved nature, interacting with particular environments, generates the ways we trade and speak, live with others and with ourselves [stress added]." The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1999, page A24.

I will obviously present evidence in The Gift Of Charles Darwin: An Individual For All Times that the ideas and information Darwin presented are timeless and research is an on-going process. No one alive today was present at his death, but I should like to speculate that had Darwin been asked the question while he was dying: "Darwin, have you made peace with God?" perhaps he would have chosen to respond with the words attributed to Thoreau (1817-1862) on his deathbed, who is said to have answered that question with the following statement: "I didn't know we had quarreled" (Huston Smith, 1958, The Religions of Man, page 328).