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Show 245. thinking can be seen as a challenge and response to the Darwinian view of Nature and Man. Muir was meeting the challenge of two jungles when he walked through the t r o p i c s . His journal was a response to h i s education, and a response to a wild and seemingly violent b i o l o g i c a l community. The meditations on these internal and external i n t e l l e c t u a l forces continued when he reached the S i e r r a , but became more s p e c i f i c . By 1873, Muir was sometimes thinking in e x p l i c i t l y Darwinian terms. More important than measuring Muir's adherence to or rejection of Darwinian theory i s seeing how he threaded the jungle of implications he perceived in evolution. One must recognize that he r e s i s t e d the language of Darwinism, but did not reject evolutionary theory. It is possible for a man to accept an unpleasant t h e s i s when i t is r e s t a t e d in more congenial terms. And Muir was not alone in r e s i s t i n g some of the implications of evolution. Certainly the r e s t of the scientific world had been t r y i n g for over f i f t y years to avoid the revolution which Darwin would c a t a l y z e . That i s why The Origin p r e c i p i t a t e d a c r i s i s in the s c i e n t i f i c world; because i t offered a r a d i c a l and complex s c i e n t i f i c theory which questioned the assumptions of science i t s e l f. The main issues raised by Darwin pertained f i r s t of a ll to the processes of Nature. Was b i o l o g i c a l change the result of a cold law of chance and necessity? If so, t h i s was not far from the analysis of g l a c i a l evolution Muir had written. Did one see "survival of the f i t t e s t " as a struggle between individual organisms, or between species? This question had |